Mayor Parker’s budget slashes funding for Vision Zero, a program designed to end traffic deaths

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said the things safety advocates wanted to hear as she signed a late March executive order recommitting Philadelphia to Vision Zero, the push to end injuries and deaths from traffic crashes.

“I will ensure that my administration invests in the strategies that make our roads safer for everyone,” she said.

But Parker’s first proposed budget includes a sharp drop in city spending on projects to better protect pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.

The administration wants to spend $9 million on safer streets over the next six years — a sharp drop from Mayor Jim Kenney’s budgeted $15 million over six years. Last year, Kenney spent $2.5 million, compared to Parker’s proposed $1 million for 2025.

Safety advocates have raised concerns, chiefly that there will be fewer transformative street redesigns such as “road diets,” the narrowing of traffic lanes; improving sight lines at intersections by removing parking around intersections; and bicycle lanes.

“What makes me nervous is it runs the risk of limiting what Vision Zero projects can get done,” said Nicole Brunet, policy director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

The Vision Zero program has become popular in a city where dangerous driving and crashes have risen since the COVID-19 pandemic, as they also have elsewhere. Some Council offices say that traffic-calming is the most common constituent request they get.

As lawmakers consider the city budget, there was progress on Thursday in expanding automated speed enforcement. Councilmember Mark Squilla introduced a bill to place the first new cameras along the Broad Street corridor, from League Island Boulevard in the south to Cheltenham Avenue in the north.

“I honestly think the best possible place to start is Broad Street, in terms of sending a message,” said Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, who cosponsored the bill.

He noted Broad Street has a high rate of injury crashes, with pedestrians particularly vulnerable, according to the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS), which recommended the corridor as the first site in an expansion of automated speed enforcement.

A state law enacted last December authorizes the city to set up speed-enforcement cameras on five dangerous traffic corridors, adding to those already stationed along Roosevelt Boulevard. Crashes, injuries and average traffic speeds have dropped there.

The Better Mobility platform, drafted by a range of advocacy groups, calls for increasing the Vision Zero budget every year, with a goal of reaching $5 million annually. In addition to the bicycle coalition, the groups behind the platform include AARP, the Clean Air Council and the Fairmount Park Conservancy.

Philadelphia has also won at least $71 million in federal infrastructure grants over the past three years for Vision Zero projects in various stages of design or construction.

Meanwhile, advocates have been showing up to budget hearings around the city and pushing Council to increase the program’s line item to $3 million for 2025.

“If we’re serious about reaching the goal of zero roadway deaths, we need more road diets so cars have less room to speed. We need more daylighting at intersections so that drivers can see pedestrians, and we need a full network of protected bike lanes,” Will Tung, a member of the urbanist group 5th Square, testified at a recent Council hearing.

He said that he, his wife and daughter were struck by a careless driver while walking in their neighborhood in 2020. “We could have easily been killed, and too many Philadelphians are killed in our streets every year,” said Tung, of Kingsessing.

Last year 123 people were killed in vehicle crashes in Philadelphia.

“Vision Zero isn’t about educating drivers or cyclists or pedestrians,” testified Louis Bartholomew, a bicycle commuter, executive director of the Queen Village Neighbors Association, and policy manager for the PA Safe Roads PAC.

“It’s about rebuilding our streets so that all people naturally engage in safe and commonsense behavior,” he said. “Everyone knows it’s wrong to speed and to drive through stop signs.”