Hundreds of cyclists filled the streets of Center City to call for concrete-protected bike lanes and other traffic safety improvements

Hundreds of cyclists filled the streets of Center City on Friday night to push local leaders to protect bike riders and pedestrians by upgrading traffic infrastructure.

The protesters, led by Philly Bike Action, spent more than an hour chanting “Paint will not protect us, concrete now!” as they shut down traffic and wove their way through a seven-mile route from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to City Hall. There, they called on Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and City Council President Kenyatta Johnson to put up concrete barriers to protect every bike lane in the city, starting with Spruce and Pine Streets and Allegheny Avenue.

They also demanded city leaders replace all “No Parking” signs on bike lanes with “No Stopping” signs and prohibit parking in bike lanes on the weekends.

“We want to design roads that make it impossible to drive recklessly and make it impossible for cars to drive, to stop, and to park in bike lanes,” Jessie Amadio, an organizer with Philly Bike Action, said at the rally. “The preservation of human life is more important than this city’s obsession with unrestricted parking.”

The demonstration came just more than a week after Barbara Friedes, a 30-year-old pediatric resident at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, was struck and killed, police said, by a vehicle being operated by a man accused of driving under the influence while she was biking in the bike lane on Spruce Street. On the same day, 38-year-old Christopher Cabrera was killed while standing on the corner of Frankford and East Allegheny Avenues in Kensington, after a driver veered onto the curb and hit him, police said.

Three days later, in the city’s Feltonville section, a 31-year-old woman with her 13-year-old daughter and a 22-month-old girl in a stroller were crossing westbound on East Wyoming Avenue at North Front Street in a marked crosswalk with a green light when a Dodge Ram 1500 Classic struck all three of them, killing the toddler.

The driver who police say struck Friedes, 68-year-old Michael Vahey, has been charged with several crimes, including homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence. Police said they expect to charge 41-year-old Christopher Sorensen, the driver who hit Cabrera, once they receive the results of a toxicology report. Charges were also pending further investigation in the Feltonville crash.

Organizers and attendees at Friday’s rally expressed their condolences for the families of the victims and also voiced frustration with what they said is a lack of investment by the city in street safety. Several bikers referenced a funding cut from $2.5 million to $1 million in the mayor’s first budget for Vision Zero, a traffic safety program.

“I don’t think we’re buying that [Vision Zero] hasn’t been de-prioritized,” Jacob Pritchett, another Philly Bike Action organizer, told The Inquirer. “If you look at the state of the bike lanes, it’s obvious that when it comes to bikes, they’re not really doing anything that makes anybody safer.”

Parker has repeatedly disputed the claim that she cut Vision Zero funding, pointing to $1.25 million the budget allocated to other traffic safety initiatives, as well as additional federal funding the city is using to improve traffic safety.

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“There are multiple traffic calming measures needed across the city,” she told WHYY on Thursday. “Protected bike lanes are a part of that. It’s just not one aspect that I want to take out and say ‘This is the one thing.’”

Johnson declined to comment beyond referring The Inquirer to his July 18 statement on Friedes’ death, in which he said he had asked the city’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems to recommend safety measures on Spruce Street, part of which he represents, to prevent similar crashes.

Cyclists in attendance also took aim at what they saw as a culture of reckless driving and endangerment of bicyclists and pedestrians that transcended infrastructure issues across Philadelphia.

Mishael Scott, who came to the protest from Fishtown, said that as a real estate agent, he bikes across Philadelphia every day to show listings to clients. He recounted how once, when he asked a driver who was stopped and on his phone at a green light at the corner of South and Third Streets, to go, the driver pulled into an adjacent parking lot, got out of the car and threatened to run him over.

Scott observed how during Friday’s protest ride, some drivers had gotten out of their cars to curse at cyclists or attempted to edge past police barricades into the road.

For partners Meesh Zhang and Frankie Ahlers, Philadelphia is primed to be a great city for cyclists because of its density and flat landscape. But that potential has been squandered by what Zhang described as “wild drivers” in “the most dangerous city I’ve ever biked in.”

Ahlers shared a nearly identical story to Scott of an irate driver swerving into a bike lane on Pine Street, and when Zhang yelled that they were there, she parked her car, jumped out, and said she was going to kill them. For the two Fishtown residents, the call for better infrastructure is in response to the recklessness of drivers.

“When you have drivers that are doing crazy [things], like getting crazy drunk and just veering into bike lanes, then it is the role of the city to step in and be like, people are clearly not driving safely and the way to alter behavior on a societal level is to have the infrastructure to make safety unavoidable,” Zhang said.