On April 17 2024, 17 year-old Damien Hocker was walking home when he was fatally struck by a car at the intersection of MacDade Boulevard and Fairview Road, a boulevard that was notorious for speeding and crashes. After Damien’s tragic death, his mother, Liz Hocker, and his family started a campaign to improve its safety. “I really kind of ended up advocating very naturally from Damien passing away,” Liz reflects. In the months following his death, she started a petition pushing for safety improvements on the road where he was killed. It was her first effort to do something, born not from a background in policy or transportation planning, but from a parent’s love and the unshakable sense that things needed to change. “It was my first effort to do something because we didn’t really have anything to go off of.”
Liz’s early advocacy taught her something that many grassroots organizers eventually discover: knowing that something is wrong and knowing how to fix it are two very different things. She began reaching out to municipal and state politicians in Delaware County, only to find that responsibility for a single road could be scattered across multiple agencies and jurisdictions. Calls to one office sent her to another.
Connecting with Families for Safe Streets of Greater Philadelphia gave her a foundation to build from. “I had a lot of questions,” she says. “Maybe they didn’t have answers to those questions, but they had background information about efforts that had been made to make similar improvements and I could use that knowledge to build out what I was asking for.”
Equipped with context, a semi-concrete plan, and now a handful of legislative contacts she did something that proved to be a turning point: she got everyone in the same room. A meeting in Ridley Township, bringing together the various stakeholders who had each held a piece of the puzzle, was a breakthrough moment. “Getting everyone together at a meeting really, really helped,” she says.
Hocker’s persistence is now showing up in concrete ways on MacDade Boulevard. The corridor where Damien was killed, MacDade Boulevard and Fairview Road, now has “no turn on red” signs and repainted crosswalks. A new pedestrian signal is also planned that will give walkers a head start before vehicles receive a green light, similar to one already installed at MacDade Boulevard and Morton Avenue, where crews have also added “no turn on red” and yield signs following the family’s advocacy.
Looking ahead, Ridley Township has received a grant to fund additional improvements along the corridor, including pedestrian islands and flashing beacons. For Liz, each of these changes represents something larger than infrastructure. “It feels good to know that something is being done that could potentially save the lives of other children or other pedestrians,” she said (6abc).
Beyond the physical changes, Liz has expanded her advocacy to the legislative level. She serves on the board of PA Safe Roads PAC and supports measures like Intelligent Speed Assistance systems, technology that can be installed in vehicles to limit speed, as well as the JayAlert Hit-and-Run System, which would notify auto body shops about fatal hit-and-run incidents. Damien’s family also speaks at schools and community events and distributes reflective gear to promote pedestrian safety.
Safe streets advocacy, Liz has learned, is not a sprint. Progress on MacDade Boulevard has come incrementally, one improvement at a time, and she’s made peace with that pace. “Every little change that we can make is important,” she says. “You’re not going to get everything you want done tomorrow, three months, maybe not even in a year or two. But if you are persistent and insistent, you will make changes that will help people.”
When asked how she sustains her energy for the work alongside everything else life demands, Liz gives an answer that is, as she puts it, a little sad. Damien was her only child. The advocacy keeps her connected to him. “The work keeps me connected to his memory,” she says. And so she keeps going, with her foot in many doors at once, patient and persistent, driven by love.
Hear from Liz at the 2026 Vision Zero PHL Conference
Liz will be a panelist at “Power to the People: Learning from Successful Grassroots-Led Safe Streets Efforts,” one of six breakout sessions at the 2026 Vision Zero PHL Conference. The panel brings together advocates who have turned personal experience and community frustration into real, measurable change — because residents know their neighborhoods and streets better than anyone, and when they find ways to navigate the systems that hold the power to act, remarkable things can happen.
The 2026 Vision Zero PHL Conference takes place on March 12th at Temple University’s Student Center South. Learn more and register at https://bicyclecoalition.org/vzc-phl-2026/