Debate over Washington Avenue safety changes delivers harsh lessons in equity, civic influence | Opinion

When officials in Hoboken, N.J., decided in 2019 to build more bike lanes, improve visibility at crosswalks, and take other measures designed to reduce traffic fatalities, few could have predicted how successful their efforts would be: there have been zero pedestrian deaths over the past three years.

This initiative in New Jersey may be one of the most successful attempts by municipal officials across the nation, who — spurred by a recent spike in pedestrian deaths — have rolled out ambitious plans designed to improve traffic safety.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and advocacy groups in cities and towns around the country are calling for “road diets” — a way of making crashes less likely by eliminating and narrowing driving lanes, building more bike lanes, and enacting other strategies aimed at making roadways safer to use.

And, for a moment, it seemed like Philadelphia might be next in line with its own progressive safety plan. Months of dialogue between city transportation officials and South Philadelphia residents had seemed to yield an agreement on a proposal to overhaul Washington Avenue, one of the most perilous roadways in the city; it has long held an ignominious place on the city’s high injury network, a list of the 12% of streets where 80% of traffic deaths and severe injuries occur.

» READ MORE: Philly scraps three-lane Washington Avenue safety plan, bowing to pressure

Then last week, the city — citing a lack of community support — announced that it was abandoning its plan to improve traffic flow on the avenue and would not shrink the roadway from five lanes to three.

The discussions over the future of Washington Avenue called to mind the city’s plan in 2019 to build a new, protected bike lane along a stretch of 11th Street in South Philadelphia. A faction of angry neighbors went to war against the changes, although some of the concerns were of questionable merit.

Opponents of the bike lane warned that creating a protected path for cyclists would lead to the loss of more than 100 parking spaces; in reality, the project consumed no more than a couple of dozen spots, depending on the size of the vehicle.

Even after the project was completed, one resident took it upon himself to wake up before dawn to move the barriers meant to protect pedestrians from vehicle traffic. Despite that kind of intense local opposition, city officials stood firm. The new road design on 11th Street remains today, now with barriers bolted to the ground.

Given the recent news about a similar redesign on Washington Avenue, one might wonder: Why did city officials stand firm on the 11th Street bike lanes while backtracking on Washington Avenue? The answer, according to the city’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability, is equity. According to a city spokesperson, there is a “high degree of mistrust of the City and city planning efforts by certain stakeholders of Washington, who represent established communities of color.”

Given our country’s — and our city’s — history of prioritizing white comfort over Black lives, this sounds reasonable ... if you don’t think about it for too long.

The city’s initial outreach for the Washington Avenue redesign was generally considered to be exemplary. Transportation officials met with 23 community groups, and their online survey received nearly 5,500 responses and 11,000 views. While opponents of the plan have dismissed the online survey as being unrepresentative, we do not know who took the survey, beyond that they live in Philadelphia and care about the future of Washington Avenue.

» READ MORE: The city’s Washington Avenue head-fake reveals the sham of ‘community engagement’ | Editorial

In addition, the process chosen to ensure inclusion left a lot to be desired. If city officials wanted to ensure adequate access for those who are mostly offline, why did they invite attendees to the working group they established to find a compromise via email? If the intention was to ensure that people regularly ignored by the political process made their voices heard, the city did not succeed.

While 30% of Philadelphia households and nearly 40% of Black Philadelphia households do not have access to a car, their perspective was not addressed by the working group. Instead, the working group was dominated by what transportation officials have referred to as stakeholders, which may be a euphemistic way to refer to people who already have the ear of city officials. If, by establishing these meetings, transportation officials hoped to generate a master class in equity and inclusion, they failed.

What did materialize was a series of half-truths and misrepresentations. Opponents of the safety improvements along Washington Avenue claimed that no one had died or been injured on Washington Avenue in the last 30 years — there were 254 crashes with four deaths and six serious injuries between 2012 and 2018 alone. Some insisted that the road diet was only to the benefit of affluent, white cyclists, but it is low-income people of color who suffer the most because of unsafe road designs (and the protected bike lanes remain a part of the plan anyway).

Most troubling, however, is that transportation officials have committed themselves to a way of doing business that will further entrench racial disparities in street safety. No matter where you redesign streets for increased safety, some people will always be opposed.

When it came to 11th Street, transportation officials were willing to stick up for their plan and combat clear misrepresentations from opponents. When it came to Washington Avenue, they were not.

If this pattern continues across the city, Philadelphia will be looking at a future where more vulnerable road users, who are disproportionately children and older Philadelphians, die of preventable crashes in Black neighborhoods, even as crashes and fatalities decline in white neighborhoods where safer designs get fully implemented.

Is that an equitable outcome for our neighborhoods?