BILLY PENN • Making Philly streets safer shouldn’t be such an enormous chore, planners say

Originally published by Billy Penn

‘Right-of-way’ advocates call for quick permitting of street-narrowing and public benches

by Meir RindeMay 13, 2024

Because of dangerous traffic conditions, the intersection of 43rd and Spruce streets in West Philadelphia is part of the city's High Injury Network. (Google Maps)

A community group in West Philly’s Spruce Hill neighborhood came to Nate Hommel last fall with a deceptively simple request: Could he help them make it safer for schoolchildren and families to cross the street?

Hommel, the University City District’s director of planning and design, knew from experience that getting even minor changes to a street layout in Philadelphia could be a lengthy, expensive, and bureaucratically complex process. 

But the spot they were focused on, 43rd and Spruce, is close to a public school and is “one of the most dangerous intersections” in the area, he said. So he decided he’d give it a go. 

“I promised the neighborhood group, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it done in a couple of weeks,’” he said during a recent presentation on the project, drawing laughs from his audience. “And six months later, we think we’re there.”

Plans for a proposed traffic safety project at 43rd and Spruce streets in West Philadelphia. (University City District)

Hommel said he’s expecting to get final city approval any day now to install large planters, flexible posts, and paint markings on the asphalt along the intersection’s four corners, effectively narrowing the crossing distance and reducing the likelihood of cars hitting students.

Importantly, the design his team came up with doesn’t eliminate any legal parking spaces, he said. That means it should be possible to install it at many other intersections, without needing to go through the lengthy series of studies and reviews by different city departments that is usually required of such projects.

“What I would like to see is something like this: a non-permanent sidewalk extension [would] be a ‘by-right’ situation,” Hommel said, meaning it would be automatically allowed if it meets a basic set of requirements. “If there’s not a hydrant there, and there’s not issues that are obvious things — sort of similar to how you install a street tree or a bike rack — the sidewalk extensions should be there.”

“This is common in New York and Hoboken, in lots of other places where they’re just trying to make it safer for the folks crossing the street, and not make it terribly difficult for the people driving,” he said.

A few people lounged under the trees at Triangle Plaza, a pedestrian plaza on South Street at 23rd Street/Grays Ferry Avenue on a recent sunny afternoon. (Meir Rinde/Billy Penn)

Hommel and other speakers at a recent Design Advocacy Group event say they’d like to see procedural reforms to encourage various kinds of “placemaking” activities on streets and sidewalks, from narrowing roads and building pedestrian plazas to installing benches in parks and at bus stops.

With the city having practically outlawed once-ubiquitous restaurant streeteries, and the movement to convert asphalt into parklets largely stymied by the arduous permitting process, they called for changes that would make it easier for community groups to make those kinds of projects happen. 

“We can’t create or nurture meaningful public spaces on neighborhood streets until we make it easier for these people to do their jobs,” said Ariel Ben-Amos, who organized the event. He’s a planner with the Water Department and heads StreetBoxPHL, a nonprofit placemaking advocacy group. “It is, in fact, possible to radically reform the right-of-way and how we manage it. And now’s the time to do it.”

A focus on pedestrian and traffic safety 

Hommel and the others say one of the main reasons to accelerate the project approval process is pedestrian and traffic safety. 

The intersection of 43rd and Spruce, for example, is listed on the city’s High Injury Network, the 12% of streets that see 80% of fatal and serious injury crashes. Philly had a traffic death rate of 7.4 per 100,000 residents last year, more than double that of cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco, according to the most recent Vision Zero Philadelphia report.

The crashes “disproportionately impact our poorest community members, and that’s just not acceptable,” Ben-Ramos said.

Over the past decade the city has installed many “Road Diet” projects, like bike lanes and speed bumps, to slow down cars. Those streets see 18% fewer crashes compared to High Injury Network trends, but there’s far more demand for projects than the city can satisfy.

Spruce Hill applied to have the city make 43rd and Spruce an official Slow Zone with traffic calming measures, but was denied, Hommel said.

To make it easier for special services districts like the University City District and other organizations to step in and fill the gap, Hommel proposed the city create a “daylighting” or curb clearance permit that would allow the installation of a standard street-narrowing design without extensive reviews. 

Right-of-way project permits have to be renewed annually, which gives the city an opportunity to remove any that end up causing problems or drawing significant complaints, he noted.

Creating a new permit would require City Council hearings and legislation, along the lines of Councilmember Rue Landau’s current push to ease the creation of streeteries and sidewalk cafes, Hommel said. She’s proposed allowing restaurants to use spaces in front of adjacent properties, with the property owners’ permission.

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, an urban planner and former UCD board member who represents the Spruce Hill area, said she’s supportive of the 43rd and Spruce project, “as well as empowering other communities to deploy this type of traffic intervention.” She said she was looking forward to discussing the idea of a new type of permit in the near future.

‘In theory, it seems simple’

Speakers at the Design Advocacy Group event on May 2 also called for another modification of the current permitting process that would let groups quickly launch very short-term pilot projects.

“The city of Philadelphia, and actually most cities across this entire country, direly need prototyping policies, three- to six-month policies that allow citizens to actually take action with minimal approval, to actually start experimenting and exploring what’s possible in the public sphere and the right-of-way,” said Alex Gilliam, director of design at West Philly nonprofit Tiny WPA.

That’s needed because the current approval process is “absolutely insane,” he said. Installing anything on a sidewalk requires a City Council vote, and often community meetings, engineering studies, and approval from SEPTA. 

Tiny WPA designed and installed an age-friendly senior bench outside the Mantua Presbyterian Apartments several years ago. (Tiny WPA)

Gilliam’s organization trains young people to design street furniture, play equipment, and other outdoor projects. They’ve built benches with special features to make them easy for older people to use, fun for kids to play on, or in some cases both, and they’d like to work with community members to put them at bus stops and other public spaces.

But the arduous approval processes makes it a tremendous chore for Tiny WPA to get a single bench installed, and makes it virtually impossible for community groups and individuals, Gilliam said. A pilot or proto-typing policy could overcome those obstacles, he argued.

“Let’s put something up. Let’s see how it goes,” he said. “If it’s a problem, great, it goes away. If not, we figure out how to make it permanent.”

That kind of policy could also be a boon to public space advocates like Jesse Blitzstein, a planner who works for the nonprofit Community Design Collaborative, or CDC. 

Volunteer designers recruited by the CDC are working with three organizations to design potential projects: The “daylighting” of an intersection outside a West Philly public school, similar to Hommel’s project; a “front porch” with sidewalk seating for a homeless shelter; and a pedestrian plaza in an intersection near Fairmount Park.

Often such projects initially seem straightforward, Blitzstein said, but they can get mired in a variety of obstacles, such as dealing with state-controlled roads or building around existing bike lanes. Allowing communities to test out non-permanent changes to their streets could help pry open some exciting possibilities, he said.

“With this type of work, in theory, it seems simple. Let’s put some paint out. Let’s put some planters out. Let’s put some benches out and make a space warm and inviting,” he said. “In practice, it’s much, much harder. How do we make that easier?”