Enforce bike safety rules
It was with great sympathy that I read Mark Zimmaro’s report on the recent protest to make bike riding safer in the city (“Cyclists demand protected bike lanes,” July 31). All this was motivated by the recent deaths of two cyclists, Dr. Barbara Friedes, 30, and Christopher Cabrera, 18, who were struck while riding on Philadelphia streets.
As Zimmaro reported, hundreds of cyclists at the direction of the organization, Philly Bike Action, shut down streets in Center City to demand action from the city. They want, for example, bike lanes throughout the city made safer by concrete barriers.
It seems that too many drivers think it is fine to stop or park on bike lanes anytime. They ignore painted lines and most signs. The protesters want the city to stop allowing weekend parking on bike lanes. The use of concrete barriers would also discourage such practices.
I am always in awe of people who ride their bikes in traffic. When I see a small child sitting in a front or rear bike seat, I am almost stunned. Combine that with the way some people drive, and it is definitely scary.
I truly wish Philly Bike Action and all their followers the best of luck getting the city to make and enforce new changes to bike safety rules and physical protections.
Gloria C. Endres
Vision Zero doesn’t work
Vision Zero has been a failure all over the country as well as Philadelphia. The greatest irony of Vision Zero is that in many locations road diets and other re-configurations have not improved safety for cyclists and pedestrians, as activists and politicians like New York’s mayor and Los Angeles’ mayor claim. Pedestrian fatalities spiked in L.A. from an average of 84 per year for the 13 years between 2003 and 2015, to 135 in 2017 and 128 last year. The spike coincides with the launch of Vision Zero in 2016.
Vision Zero puts everyone in jeopardy by delaying EMT and fire response to the extent that people die from heart attacks and strokes, and houses burn to the ground.
Philadelphia and many cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Vision Zero, rebuilding streets to calm traffic and reduce driving, lobbying for speed limit reductions, launching public awareness campaigns and retraining police departments. Yet Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, among others, have seen sharp increases in pedestrian and/or bicycle fatalities after adopting Vision Zero policies.
For safer streets, Philadelphia should consult traffic engineers. For decades, traffic engineers have followed a tried-and-true formula for reducing auto fatalities: improve roadway designs in ways that reduce the number and impact of accidents. Vision Zero has diverted cities from that formula in an overt anti-auto strategy that sometimes actually makes streets more dangerous. So it is no surprise that Vision Zero isn’t working.
Tom McCarey
