This blog is part of our year-end “Why We’re Thankful” series, highlighting the Bicycle Coalition’s—and your—accomplishments of 2014.
You’ve seen that green paint in Philadelphia lanes this year. You saw some bicycle boxes in Philadelphia streets. Green paint in lanes send a clear message to drivers in urban areas: Streets are not merely for car traffic. They’re multimodal public spaces. And, as such, they make streets safer by telling cars to watch out for us.
New green conflict zone at Logan’s Circle (photo credit: Mayor’s Office of Transportation & Utilities)
The Bicycle Encourage and Enhancement Project was begun in 2014 specifically for projects like putting green paint at 34 conflict zones where bike lanes cross over right-turn lanes. The first one went in at 6th and Market—and for anyone commuting south on 6th Street in the mornings, you know how important that green paint can be.
The project is funded using cashflow from safety cameras installed at red lights all over the city. So, when a car or truck does something illegal and there’s no police officer around to enforce the law, that driver will get a ticket regardless.
Other Philly projects part of Bicycle Encourage and Enhancement include:
- Spring Garden Street West Gateway: new and improved bike lane markings and bike boxes connecting Spring Garden St to Eakins Oval. (This project is being funded by the William Penn Foundation and was coordinated by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.)
- Columbus Blvd: new bike lane lines between Race St and Spring Garden, replacing the City’s first shared-lane markings (installed before the adoption of the modern sharrow).
- Torresdale Avenue: refreshing bike lanes along Torresdale from Linden Ave in the far Northeast to O Street adjacent to the Erie-Torresdale Station.
The Bicycle Coalition and the people of Philadelphia couldn’t have made this accomplishment happen—or any of our accomplishments, for that matter—without your help. We need your participation to continue our work in 2015 and beyond. So, if you’re not yet, consider becoming a member of the Bicycle Coalition.
It is sad you are advocating for MORE crashes and safe drivers ticketed.
This is ALL about money. All you need to do is have 85th percentile free-flowing traffic speed limits, use longer yellow times, have a decent length all-red interval, and sensors to keep an all-red for late arrivals. No crashes! You can also sync lights and use sensors to keep smooth flow and know where the cars are.
What is the point of using poor engineering with predatory enforcement, if not 100% revenue?
You can easily find data showing cameras lead to more crashes and safe drivers ticketed. The way it is setup, you have split-second violations, tickets for stops past the stop line, AND violations for a non-complete stop for a right-on-red turn.
Speed cameras have been shown NOT to work correctly, as we’ve seen tickets to stopped cars! Same there, unrealistic limits and cushions.
Then you have the stop-arm cameras for school buses, despite the fact that most deaths involve the bus running the students over.
Check out the National Motorists Association for unbiased info.