Too many die on boulevard
Samara Banks and her three young sons were killed last summer while trying to walk across 300-foot-wide Roosevelt Boulevard. They were hit by an allegedly drag-racing driver.
Samara Banks and her three young sons were killed last summer while trying to walk across 300-foot-wide Roosevelt Boulevard. They were hit by an allegedly drag-racing driver.
Just as much to blame for the tragedy was the obsolete highway that serves as a local thoroughfare in populous neighborhoods. Drivers speed with abandon along Roosevelt Boulevard, and pedestrians risk their lives at every crossing.
Trying to cross the busy road can be as dangerous as crossing a turbulent river during flood season. The Banks family was among the 150 pedestrians killed on the boulevard since 2001. Many more have been seriously injured.
The city has won a $2.5 million federal grant to figure out how to make the 14-mile-long road safer and more efficient for pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists. That welcome news should lead to meaningful reconstruction by 2023.
The city and state are chipping in $2.5 million as well for planning that will include a series of public meetings. Planners must lay the groundwork to separate high-speed lanes from slow lanes and provide a rapid bus corridor.
In their grant application, city planners said, "Anything less than the physical separation of modes will fail to achieve a comprehensive long-term solution." That's long overdue recognition that the road designed a century ago has become a hazard to all those who travel.
The boulevard is too wide and too confusing. The city has tried red-light cameras, easier-to-read speed limit signs, pedestrian crossing signals, and larger traffic fines. That has dropped traffic fatalities on the road from 14 to nine a year, but that's still too high.
With reconstruction at least a decade away, the city must concentrate on other means to control traffic on the boulevard. Harrisburg could help by passing a bill allowing the use of cameras to catch speeders.
It seems like now that the Banks family deaths are old news, legislative support for the bill has faded. That's a disgrace to their memories, and an affront to public safety.