Calculating Route

The top leader at the PPA knows that the agency has a difficult task when it comes to keeping bike lanes clear.

"I've lived in South Philly my whole life," the executive director of the PPA, Rich Lazer, told me. "I know the craziness on those streets. And I know more enforcement is number one on a lot of people’s lists.”

The PPA rolled out its dedicated eight-person bike patrol in May with a focus on Center City, South Philly, and University City, the parts of the city with heaviest rates of cycle commuting.

Six months later, I used PPA data and my own shoe-leather, bike-tire reporting to take a look at just how blocked bike lanes are, and how effective the PPA’s efforts have been in unblocking them.

Here’s what I found.

How blocked are Philly’s bike lanes?

“What you saw is the same story we see,” said Caleb Holtmeyer, a cofounder of Philly Bike Action!, an advocacy group dedicated to promoting safer streets for bicycling. “It’s not a surprise to us that the worst spots were on Spruce and Pine.”

The issue goes beyond inconvenience; ten cyclists have been struck and killed in the city this year, a record since at least 2019, while countless others have been hit and injured but survived.

Has PPA’s bike patrol helped?

To understand whether the PPA’s increased enforcement efforts are paying off, I asked for and got data from the agency on every ticket issued this year, through to the middle of November.

Those data showed that tickets for bike lane infractions have quadrupled since May, when the bike patrol was founded, going from roughly five tickets given out daily to 20, most of which have been issued by the bike patrol.

The geographic pattern of the tickets suggests that wherever unprotected bike lanes exist, motorists are obstructing them.

What’s less clear is whether those 20 daily tickets capture the majority of vehicles parked in bike lanes.

How much can the PPA really do?

A few hours of pavement-pounding on a fall Wednesday does not, of course, tell us exactly how many vehicles overstay their welcome, or exactly how efficient PPA officers are at citing violators. I didn’t embed with PPA’s officers, nor could I put eyes on every street.

But it does suggest that the problem is widespread, and that the PPA doesn’t — or can’t — catch all of them.

When presented with the data above, Lazer didn’t dispute that the vehicles that stopped longer than 20 minutes should have been ticketed, or offer any explanation for why one vehicle was ticketed while others weren’t.

“I think our capacity is an issue,” he said. “We’d love to have more officers specifically doing this, because there’s definitely a need for it.”

Lazer told me that in recent months, the bike patrol has shrunk to six officers, but that he has funding to hire up to 20. Until he’s able to fill those positions, though, the existing officers can’t always be thorough.

“They get pulled in to deal with issues in different neighborhoods, because of complaints from constituents,” said Lazer, who explained that each officer has a designated patrol area of about 25 miles, but can’t necessarily cover all of it comprehensively each day. “They can’t always be present in one place.”

Despite these inconsistencies, longtime cyclists say that things have improved since the bike patrol was created.

“I look at East Moyamensing, and I see that bike lane’s mostly clear. That wasn’t always like that,” said Boyle at the Bike Coalition. “And I am surprised at how well Washington Avenue has been, or people back-end parking on Oregon rather than just pulling into the lane.”

What could the future look like?

“Philadelphia has great bones for cycling,” said Erick Guerra, who directs the Cm2 University Transportation Center at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design. “It’s flat, trips are short in the dense areas between the rivers and in University City, and the weather is pretty good.”

And yet, Philadelphia has lower rates of cycling — just over 2% of commuters cycled before the pandemic — than San Francisco, Seattle, or Minneapolis, which are much hillier, rainier, and colder than Philadelphia.

Guerra says the reason people shun cycling here is not just safety, but the perception of safety. “When you survey people about commuting by bike, many will say they’re ‘interested, but concerned.’”

“Ultimately, you want a city where an 80-year-old in heels and an 8-year old feel comfortable cycling,” said Guerra. “We have a long way to go until we get there.”

Getting there does not require sweeping, expensive changes, nor does everything hinge on better staffing for the parking authority. “It’s not the PPA’s fault,” said Holtmeyer. “It’s the policies around parking on the street that have to change.”

Along with others, Philly Bike Action! advocates for the conversion of the “no parking” areas along streets like Spruce and Pine to “no stopping” or “no standing,” which would abolish the 20-minute grace period. In this case, the needs of vehicles that have to be there longer, like delivery trucks or taxis, could be met by dedicated loading zones, which cyclists could plan their routes around.

They also advocate for a repeal of the city law that requires councilmember approval to remove parking to add a bike lane, which would speed up adding bike lanes. Other activists want better ways to add protected lanes and to use cameras on buses to help identify and ticket violators.

Though City Council has the power to make these changes, a larger obstacle is sometimes local residents, many of whom want to maintain their 20-minute parking for bringing in groceries or hailing ride-shares. For that reason, some activists try to influence neighborhood groups directly.

Still other changes require legislation at the state level.

One common strategy is parking-protected bike lanes, which involve separating vehicular traffic from a bike lane with parking for cars. It’s a cheap way to create new bike lanes without removing any parking; Philly already has this in places like Washington Avenue and the Chestnut Street Bridge as part of a pilot program.

But state law requires that cars be parked adjacent to a curb, with exceptions like Washington Avenue requiring explicit permission from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. Changing that is a top priority for the Bicycle Coalition.

For its part, PPA is reimagining its own role in this process.

“Our folks are out there, we have the knowledge. The question is, how do we take the knowledge we have and turn it into policy,” said Lazer. “We’re the enforcement agency, but we should be trying to create good transportation policy as a partner with the city.”

Lazer agrees with many of the changes proposed by activists, such as the conversion of Spruce and Pine away from a “no parking” area, and the addition of loading zones on those corridors.

Until those changes happen, activists will keep pushing to improve safety and minimize cyclist and motorist interactions.

“We don’t know how to make people better,” said Holtmeyer. “But we can design streets so that conflicts don’t arise.”