PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Do you daydream and drive? If so, then Fishtown residents want you to snap out of it and pay attention to the road. That's the idea behind a new mural recently installed to reduce crashes and increase pedestrian safety.
Hit and runs are on the rise in Philadelphia and pedestrian traffic deaths more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. Those numbers have forced some neighborhoods to get creative with their solutions.
"What we're starting with at the intersection that we painted wasn't even a regular crosswalk, it was no crosswalk. There was a crosswalk that used to be there," said Sarah McAnulty, president of the Fishtown Neighbors Association. "This is the case of many of our crosswalks in Fishtown. If that's the case in Fishtown, it's gonna be even worse in other parts of the city."
After failing to get city funding for safety improvements, her neighborhood's solution was the attention-grabbing crosswalk mural that now spans Columbia Avenue at its intersection with Frankford Avenue.
"It's a bright teal background, really bright colors, a blue eel, and then a pink fish, green fish and then an orange fish," she described. "We are sticking to the theme of fish for Fishtown."
The mural was designed by Philly artist Marian Bailey and painted with the help of about 20 neighborhood volunteers over two days in November. "We wanted to try something that we could execute ourselves," McAnulty explained, "that was both a beautification project and ideally, a pedestrian safety project."
The intersection itself was identified via a community survey as the least safe. While that was partly because of the lack of a visible crosswalk, it also falls on the drivers.
"If you can kind of snap them out of the tunnel vision and have something really interesting to really get them to focus on their surroundings," she said, "[you can] make people pay attention to where they're going and looking at the road, instead of getting distracted."
McAnulty says Fishtown residents wanted to use the mural to start a conversation about distracted driving. Now they want that conversation to grow.
"One crosswalk is not going to make Fishtown significantly safer," she said, "but we want to get people talking about what we can do and how we can better advocate to the city to improve pedestrian safety."
