PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The death of a bicyclist near the Philadelphia Museum of Art Saturday has renewed calls for greater safety measures in that area.
According to police, a woman was thrown from her bike and into the windshield of a black BMW, which hit her back tire as she attempted to leave the bike lane at Eakins Oval. The driver remained on the scene.
The cyclist was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
"We are just heartbroken that this woman was killed in broad daylight," said Sarah Clark Stuart, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. She said the area has long been a problem for cyclists.
"It is a very congested and complicated roadway with a lot of conflicts," she said. "There needs to be better design of bike lanes, and signals and demarcation of space for all these different users."
Clark Stuart added they've long asked for those safety changes. "We don't think we've been heard," she said.
She mentioned the city's Vision Zero program, which aims to better bike safety across Philadelphia, took a hit in the forthcoming budget. The Bicycle Coalition has called for Mayor Jim Kenney to reverse that move.
"We are going to be calling on Mayor Kenney to restore funding for Vision Zero projects, and accelerate all efforts to make Eakins Oval safe for everybody," she declared.
KYW Newsradio reached out to the city about the requests to them for road safety changes in that area. A spokesperson shared the city's response, which we have posted in full below with photos provided by the city:.
Traffic violence is a serious public safety threat to Philadelphians and any life lost on our streets is completely unacceptable. Although this fatal crash is still an open investigation and the cause of the crash has not been determined, we know we can save lives by continuing to make common-sense changes to our street system that prioritize the safety of people in our roadways regardless of how they travel.
With that being said, requests for safety measures at Eakins Oval have not been ignored. Since 2013, The City of Philadelphia led the implementation of a number of new traffic calming measures on the Ben Franklin Parkway, specifically at Eakins Oval and Logan Circle. They include:
- Improved pavement markings to create more buffered areas that people should not drive, ride, or walk within;
-More directional indications like arrows and messaging painted directly onto the road surface;
-More conflict pavement markings indicating where one can expect cars and bikes crossing paths; and
-More pedestrian crosswalks indicating the best locations for pedestrians to navigate around and over the Oval and Circle.
-Flexible delineator posts at key locations which help keep users in their lanes and help to slow excessive speeding and erratic lane changes, and
-The addition of soft rumbles, which are raised rumble strips that discourage speeding.
-The addition of flexible delineator posts as traffic calming elements.
The City has coordinated with PennDOT, District 6-0 on these improvements over the years. (Eakins Oval and the Parkway are state routes and PennDOT installed recent city-designed pavement marking improvements after resurfacing in 2020).
Logan Circle.City of Philadelphia
Bike lanes on Ben Franklin Parkway.City of Philadelphia
And most recently, on March 5, 2021, Philadelphia Parks & Recreation and the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability (OTIS) issued a request for proposals from renowned design teams to create a world-class public realm plan for pedestrian-centric, permanent changes to improve the appeal, use, safety, functionality, and beauty of the Parkway. The RFP is now closed. In the next 6-8 weeks, the City will announce a select number of qualified design teams to take part in the next phase of the design process: An Ideas Workshop.
The project represents the next phase of work following the 2013 More Park, Less Way plan, and is funded by the William Penn Foundation, in partnership with the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University and in collaboration with the Parkway Council.
