PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Volunteers will be spending the next few weekends painting street murals designed to improve safety around two South Philadelphia elementary schools.
It’s an effort to create better sightlines for drivers approaching intersections near the Edwin M. Stanton School at 17th and Montrose streets, and the Chester A. Arthur School at 21st and Catharine streets.
"They were having daily issues where – like, close calls, where children were having a hard time making it into the school building," said Kristen Albee, a volunteer with the South of South Neighborhood Association's Vision Zero Committee.
"It can be difficult and dangerous, sometimes, to cross the street. Usually because cars are often parked too close or right in the intersections."
"No Parking" signs at intersections near the schools proved ineffective. "There's a lot of worker trucks and delivery trucks and they're parked in these areas. It's kind of a constant blocking of those intersections," Albee told KYW Newsradio.
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SOSNA worked with the Philadelphia Streets Department and Mural Arts Philadelphia to develop murals under a planning concept called "daylighting." "It opens up the sight lines so that everybody can see oncoming vehicles and then pedestrians that are crossing," she explained.
The murals would decorate the pavement 20 feet from the street corners. Vertical "delineators," similar to those that protect bike lanes, are also being installed to make crosswalks more visible.
Mural Arts commissioned artist Calo Rosa, who created a colorful mural scheme of letters and numbers. Over the next several weekends, SOSNA volunteers will paint the streets according to Rosa's design.
"Hopefully people start to notice a little bit more and slow down at these intersections, and they're a little bit more careful," Albee said.