Philly traffic citations have plunged since the 1990s. Police say they want to issue many more.

Brenda Thomas, 72, has lived in Philadelphia her whole life and still doesn’t feel safe crossing North Broad.

“I know there’s not enough time to get across the street,” she said one recent weekday morning after speed-walking the six-lane boulevard, near Temple University Hospital. “I have to push it.”

Not only is the road too wide for her comfort; it also has some of the city’s wildest motorists.

“I don’t trust the drivers at all,” she said as she waited for a bus. “They’re not thinking about us.”

A grim toll backs her worries — there were 577 driving-related deaths in the city between 2020 and 2023, 188 more than in the four years before. Pedestrians killed by moving vehicles make up one-third of that spike.

City leaders say they have gotten earfuls from many residents like Thomas about a surge in reckless driving across the city — as well as on North Broad, which since 2019 has accounted for nearly one in 10 Philadelphia traffic deaths.

Deputy Police Commissioner Michael Cram says the department has already rolled out special enforcement on North Broad and issued 10,000 more traffic tickets than it did by this time last year. That pilot, he said, is just the start.

“People,” Cram said, “are just tired of the crazy driving.”

But police have a long road ahead of them.

An Inquirer analysis of court data found that over the last 25 years, city police almost stopped issuing traffic tickets altogether — dropping from about a half million citations in 1998 to just 45,000 last year, a 91% decline. The average officer is writing far fewer tickets: In 2015, almost 450 officers were responsible for 50 citations each, or about one a week. Last year, only 126 officers wrote that many.

Despite its reputation for walkability, Philadelphia still records auto-related fatalities at more than double the rate of Boston, and triple the rate of New York City, according to a 2023 city traffic safety report. In the last three days just on North Broad, two cars collided — killing both drivers — and a police officer was injured during an ATV pursuit after another vehicle struck him. Including the most recent Broad Street collision, 45 people have died in Philadelphia traffic crashes this year.

The department’s long decline in ticket writing raises questions about whether it can reverse this trend without disrupting other police operations. And some experts say the ramp-up risks stepping on civil liberties — reigniting controversies over racial profiling.

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, linked the drop to the broader national pullback in policing as a response to public and political pressure over racial biases in police stops.

“We’ve also seen arrests drop dramatically across the country,” he said. “The same politicians that complained about the cops are now complaining that the cops aren’t doing anything. If they want to identify the problem, they can look in the mirror.”

Car stops can be dangerous for police: Last week, an officer was shot in the head after pulling over a driver for using a fake license plate. Giacalone said the odds of a traffic stop going wrong also led many officers to avoid them altogether.

Cram disputed that criminal justice reforms or political pressures were behind the long-term drop, saying the department had simply shifted its focus over the years because it had more urgent matters.

“We could always enforce, but traffic enforcement became a secondary priority to violent crime,” he said. “… We put all our resources into that.”

Michael Mellon, head of the Police Accountability Unit for the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said that the backlash over aggressive and sometimes unconstitutional car stops was warranted, and that the vast majority of pull-overs in decades past had little to do with curbing dangerous drivers.

“They use traffic stops as a pretext, not to enforce traffic safety, but as an excuse to police communities of color,” he said. “An overwhelming majority of traffic stops were not for safety violations like speeding but for equipment and paperwork violations.”

Lamar Dandy, 70, who on a recent morning was waiting in line at a fruit cart on North Broad, agrees that something needs to change. Reckless drivers, he said, have turned the city’s northern gateway into a speedway.

“It can be three, four seconds that the light’s totally red, and the car runs the light as if it’s a green light,” he said, watching traffic race by. “It’s reckless, irresponsible driving.”

The North Philly resident was skeptical about plans to step up police stops, saying cops’ time was better spent on violent crime.

The city recently announced that it will also add a number of speed cameras to Broad Street. Dandy said he preferred that approach to more invasive enforcement methods.

“The deterrent is speed cameras, red light cameras,” he said. “That’s going to help.”

The notion that lawless driving increased during the pandemic — in Philly and elsewhere — is more than just perception.

Even though reports of crashes generally declined in past decades, fatal accidents skyrocketed across the United States during 2020 and have remained elevated ever since. In Philadelphia, fatalities from crashes leaped from 91 people in 2019 to 166 in 2020, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Stay-at-home orders largely cleared streets and sidewalks, said Erick Guerra, an associate professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, and the remaining drivers accelerated on once-congested roadways.

Some of that aggressive behavior stuck, he said, even as more traffic — and pedestrians and cyclists — trickled back onto city streets.

“If you’ve been in Philly over the last five years, you’ve noticed that driving culture has gotten worse, not better,” he said. “Today, I’ll see drivers passing multiple cars to run a red light in the middle of the day. I didn’t used to see that. That kind of behavior is strongly associated with injuries and fatalities.”

By that point, citations had already declined by more than 60% from 2009 to 2019, tumbling from 228,000 to 87,000. But from 2019 to the end of 2020 — as the city went into lockdown, then erupted into protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd — traffic citations fell by nearly half. As the city saw a historic increase in violent crime, police staffing cratered amid a recruitment crisis, leaving fewer cops with even less time to write tickets.

» READ MORE: A leaked memo suggests Philly police use vehicle stops to get around stop-and-frisk reform

In 2021, an Inquirer report found evidence that some police commanders were considering increasing car stops to get around federal monitoring provisions imposed after the city settled an earlier civil rights lawsuit over allegedly unconstitutional pedestrian stops.

Not long afterward, City Council passed Philadelphia’s Driving Equality Law. That legislation, which went into effect in March 2022, aims to reduce traffic stops for certain violations that its authors say disproportionately targeted Black drivers, including driving with a single headlight or taillight out, a dented bumper, or an expired registration.

Contrary to popular belief, even after the new rules took effect, the number of police citations remained flat.

The law did have some measurable effects. Citations for broken headlights or taillights fell by about 90% from 6,549 in 2019 to 643 last year. But over the same period, a few types of violations soared as police seemingly shifted their stated reason for car stops to other types of offenses: Police issued 2,601 citations for not wearing a seat belt last year, a 75% spike over 2022 and 50% higher than before the pandemic.

Now, four years after the pandemic’s arrival and two years after the enactment of Driving Equality, the tickets police write are more about reckless driving.

Overall, citations are half of what they were in 2019. Yet red light violations fell by only 15% and reckless driving went down just 8%. Citations for ignoring other traffic markers were also off by only 20%.

While overall citations are up this year, Giacalone scoffed at the notion that the department was making a major dent in the problem. He said that most cops would still be reluctant to issue more citations, for fear they might face disciplinary actions if a stop turned violent.

“If their numbers are near zero, anything they do is an improvement,” he said. “But if you’re a patrolman, you’re going to ask yourself, ‘Why am I going to put my career on the line?’ … It’s going to take a generation of cops to get past this type of thinking.”

Drivers in Philadelphia have disproportionately killed people on foot or bicycle. Forty-nine pedestrians died in 2020, up 70% from the year before. Two years later, the number was 64, the most since at least 2004, according to PennDot statistics.

Guerra said that targeting police resources on problem areas, like North Broad, could yield results as regular drivers became more aware they were being watched.

“Traffic enforcement can be extremely effective,” he said. “It can play a role in shifting driving culture.”

Other methods could help, too, he said.

Guerra said the extreme drop off in police citations was an opportunity to experiment with using unarmed civilian ticket writers as an alternative that, in theory, could carry fewer risks of violent confrontations.

And Philadelphia has attempted for years to deploy civilian ticket writers — but has little to show for it.

An effort in 2019, passed by City Council, was opposed by the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, which took the city to court to block its implementation. But while the city prevailed, the 125 staffers were rebranded as “Public Safety Enforcement Officers” and appeared to be deployed by the Streets Department to close streets for public events or roadwork.

In budget hearings this year, some top officials seemed confused about the role of these civilian officers.

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said he was unfamiliar with the program, saying staff had told him the officers had been assigned to help the department tow abandoned cars. Mike Carroll, the city’s deputy managing director for transportation and infrastructure, said the city was trying to move these officers through a workforce development program with an unclear timeline for actual deployment.

Guerra said a more long-lasting strategy would be to reengineer dangerous roadways through traffic-calming techniques, like speed cushions or lane narrowing. Arterial streets, like North Broad, that send commuters off highways like the Roosevelt Expressway and into densely populated sections of the city were dangerous, he said, because of their design.

“High speeds intersecting with lots of shops and residences means a lot of potential for crashes,” he said. “But there are going to be conflicts around reengineering streets for safety.” For example, the city’s plans to take out a lane on Washington Avenue and add a bike lane were opposed by some businesses and residents.

The Parker administration recently moved to cut $1.5 million from similar traffic-calming plans. Instead, the city will rely more on police enforcement and red light and speeding cameras, which have reduced crashes on the notoriously dangerous Roosevelt Boulevard.

Cram said he did not view different approaches as inherently in conflict.

“The traffic-calming devices, speed cushions, red light cameras, things of that nature, I think they’re all really good,” he said. “This is just another piece of that — getting people back to behavior where they understand that you gotta drive properly.”