OUR HIGHWAY OF DEATH BUREAUCRACY, LIABILITY LIMIT KEEP BOULEVARD LETHAL By MYUNG OAK KIM [EMAIL PROTECTED]
JENNIFER MIDBERRY / DAILY NEWS Traffic on the Roosevelt Boulevard zooms past a flowery memorial marking the site where Patrice Jackson, 18 was killed in a crash last August First in a series ROOSEVELT BOULEVARD was heralded by highway planners a century ago as a textbook picture of roadway beauty, with wide grassy medians and tall, stately trees. But today, with a schizophrenic mix of speeding commuters, doddering shoppers and neighborhood errand-runners, the Boulevard has matured into 12 lanes of skidding tires, crunching metal and ambulance sirens. About six crashes occur each day on the Boulevard, according to police figures, and at least 10 people are injured in those crashes each week. The 2001 death toll was 23. The injured were paralyzed, brain- damaged and stripped of limbs. "I wish it was a dream," whispered Poly Khanom, a 19-year-old student who lost half her leg in December when a minivan pinned her against a guardrail on the Boulevard at Cottman Avenue. The carnage has pushed the Boulevard's infamy from Philadelphia's most dangerous road to one of America's worst highways. So why not fix it? ABOUT THE SERIES TODAY: Roosevelt Boulevard ranks as one of America's worst highways. Even that distinction hasn't driven government bureaucracy to provide the Boulevard what it needs - a $2 billion fix. Here's why. TOMORROW: It's a boulevard of tears, haunted by ghosts of drivers who died young. And it's especially frightening for pedestrians, who risk their lives every time they set foot on the roadway. AT A GLANCE Graphic: How to fix it Graphic: History of the Boulevard The answer is one of the road's most maddening features. Responsibility for the Boulevard lies snarled in a thicket of highway bureaucracy: the state controls the roadway; the city manages the signs and signals. Until four years ago, the Fairmount Park Commission controlled the medians. Nobody shoulders blame for the highway's flaws. Nobody takes leadership to fix them. Worse, because of a legal cap on lawsuit verdicts that could force defenders of the Boulevard to fix it, the price placed on human life is less than the cost of making the highway safe. The knot of bureaucratic inaction is so tangled that the city and state recently refused to apply for grants that could have helped fix two of the Boulevard's worst intersections. A design nightmare At the root of the Boulevard's problems is the road's bizarre design. With traffic volume rivalling those on the Schuylkill Expressway and Interstate 95, it's an expressway for many commuters from Bucks County and Northeast Philadelphia who are trying to avoid I-95 backups. And it's a local parkway for shoppers, students, senior citizens and neighborhood residents. Imagine I-95 or the Schuylkill Expressway with stoplights, shopping strips, medians and pedestrian crosswalks. That's the Boulevard. "It was great 30 years ago," said Frank Nero, whose mother, Ida Negro, was killed trying to walk across the Boulevard in October. "But to put a superhighway in the middle of a residential area makes no sense anymore." Ciani Jackson was 18 months old when she lost her mother in a two-car smashup last August. Her mom, Patrice Jackson, 18, of West Oak Lane, had just graduated from Northeast High School and was about to begin cooking school when she and 16-year-old Brandon Ruff, a West Philly High sophomore, died near Mascher Street. Little Ciani recently began asking for her mommy. "I told her that her mom was in heaven," said Patrice's mother, Charmaine Jackson, who now is raising the toddler. "Now, whenever she hears you say 'sky,' she says 'Mommy.' " On Sunday, when Boulevard traffic is quiet, Charmaine Jackson plans to revisit the scene of her daughter's death to put up a white fence and flowers. "Some days I cry all day. Some nights I cry all night," she said. Fortunato Perri, administrative judge of Philadelphia Traffic Court, said driving on the Boulevard makes him fear for his life. "It's a scary feeling when everybody's doing 70 or 80 miles an hour," he said. City Councilman Brian J. O'Neill, who represents Northeast Philadelphia, said he avoids the highway. "It's not a road I take and relish being on," he said. No road like it No other road in America looks like the 14-mile stretch of Boulevard linking the expressway and the Bucks County line. With 12 lanes of traffic separated by three medians, the roadway spans 240 to 250 feet. Narrow cuts in the medians allow drivers to zip between the outer and inner lanes. The speed limit is 40 or 45 mph, but traffic consistently throbs at a pace exceeding 60 mph. Stoplights mark nearly every major intersection, but vehicles can be seen speeding through those lights almost every time they turn red. Walking near the highway can be as dangerous as driving on it. Stand on the curb anywhere along the Boulevard and the dizzying blur of cars whips your hair. The other side of the highway is nearly a football field away. To get across, you might not even have the aid of a stoplight. Some crosswalks are just narrow cement paths across the medians and white stripes on the roadway without warning signs for drivers. Even at many of the intersections with stoplights, the highway is so wide that pedestrians can't make it all the way across before the light turns green. City and state traffic engineers defend the highway, saying it's as safe as it can be without a complete redesign. They point to $26 million in work in the 1990s that added signs, updated traffic lights, moved trees, added turn lanes and changed the timing of traffic signals. "There's only so much we can do with that roadway in the present configuration," said Philadelphia's chief traffic engineer, Charles Trainor. "We expect because of the volume of traffic that we're going to have crashes out there and because of the way people drive." Since January police have been writing almost 100 tickets a day for speeding, red-light-running and registration violations. But they can't catch every lawbreaker. And they can't flood the highway with patrols forever. "It's a design nightmare," said Stewart Cohen, a Center City lawyer who has been suing on behalf of those injured by highway designs for 25 years. "It's got problems with drivers driving too fast. It's got people dashing across the middle of this urban expressway to get from one part of their neighborhood to another part. It has those crossovers that are thrown right in the middle of this mix of high-speed drivers and pedestrians trying to cross. It's got difficult sight lines at places which don't give either drivers or pedestrians time to react. "It doesn't have built into it any room for error by either a driver or a pedestrian." One of Cohen's major cases involved two young sisters hit by a car as they walked across the Boulevard. He orchestrated a $4.3 million settlement, most of it paid by a private engineering company that the state had hired to make the highway safer. But even that changed little, except for the neon pedestrian- crossing signs. Trainor, the city's chief traffic engineer, estimates it would cost $2 billion to restructure the Boulevard to make it safer. Money, though, might not be the biggest problem. It's politics, turf issues and the legal liability cap that conspire to keep the Boulevard a killer. Because the state and city share responsibility for the Boulevard, they sometimes tie each other in knots. In 1989, for example, after the state and city received $2 million in federal money to improve pedestrian safety, the city recommended barriers that would block pedestrians from crossing at some intersections. But the Fairmount Park Commission, responsible for the medians at the time, opposed pedestrian barriers. The state hired a central Pennsylvania design firm to make safety improvements, including removing some mid-block crosswalks and improving signs. But the firm drew plans without a detailed visit to the highway. Only two midblock crosswalks, near Knorr Street and Longshore Street, were removed. There's little incentive for the city and state to make improvements. The most the city can lose in a liability lawsuit for injury or death in an accident is $500,000, no matter how many people are injured. The state's limit is $250,000 per person and $1 million per accident. Lawyers say the cost of proving negligence based on roadway design is expensive and complex. That cuts down on lawsuits that could force Boulevard fixes. "You are encouraging irresponsible action when you immunize [the government] from the duty to act responsibly," said Jim Mundy, a Center City lawyer and former president of the state Bar Association and Trial Lawyers Association. Mundy unsuccessfully tried to convince the state Supreme Court to re-examine the government liability cap. So nobody has the incentive to tame the Boulevard. So nobody does. "At the moment, there's no real leadership or great plan on the table to do more with it," said Don Shanis, deputy director for transportation planning at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. Engineers repave intersections and change the timing of stoplights. But no one is plotting a redesign of the highway. "We're trying to make that a pseudo-expressway and at the same time have it be a local street," said Serge Borichevsky, a private forensic civil engineer who used to work for PennDOT. "You can't have both." Some think it's time to rethink the Boulevard. "Right now we're putting Band-Aids on," said City Councilman O'Neill. "Maybe there's some surgery needed." Horrible drivers Philly roadways are filled with careless, aggressive lawbreakers driving unsafe cars. Drivers routinely run red lights and stop signs. They make illegal turns. Many don't have a valid drivers license, registration or insurance. If they get caught, they often ignore the tickets. On the Boulevard, scofflaws and dangerous drivers have another deadly weapon - speed. "Too many people want to treat it as if it were an expressway," said Ted Sidaris, former commander of the Philadelphia Police Accident Investigation Division. The Boulevard "provides more of an opportunity for people who are prone to drive faster than they should" to speed. "You have speed and you have room and you have volume," Sidaris said. More than half of the fatalities on the Boulevard last year involved drivers who were speeding or who ran red lights, Sidaris said. Alarmed by last year's sharp increase in fatalities, the Police Department intensified Boulevard enforcement. Results have been encouraging. From Jan. 1 through March 24, police issued 7,400 tickets - one-third of them for speeding, running red lights or making dangerous turns, police said. Police have seized and impounded more than 800 cars from drivers without valid licenses or registration. Accidents dropped 42 percent in the first two months of this year compared to the same period last year, police said. Accidents involving injuries dropped 61 percent over the same period. The car-seizure program, known as Live Stop, has at least temporarily taken hundreds of scofflaw and reckless drivers off the Boulevard. Typical is Richard Cook, 23, of Olney. He was stopped by police Feb. 6 on the Boulevard near Whitaker Avenue and cited for driving with a suspended license, and with no insurance or registration. Police seized the car, and hauled Cook into Traffic Court for $21,000 in unpaid tickets dating back to 1996, including three arrests on charges of driving while intoxicated and numerous red-lights violations. He posted $10,000 bail and now awaits trial, scheduled for June. Traffic Court revenues from Boulevard drivers cited since the beginning of last year will top $2 million, according to traffic court records. Judge Perri said the money could be earmarked for highway improvements. "You better put [the money] on the Boulevard. You're going to save lives," Perri said. The crackdown has helped, but no one expects it to last forever. Sooner or later, bad drivers will again rule the Boulevard. "Philadelphia police enforcement has been poor at best," said engineer Borichevsky, commenting on law enforcement before the recent crackdown. "Overall, enforcement has gotten worse and worse, and I think that the traffic responds by being more and more aggressive. "When I'm out on the Boulevard, I own the Boulevard. God forbid if you're a pedestrian. I'm not going to stop for you. That's the way the Boulevard is now." America's worst John Nepomuceno, a traffic engineer for State Farm Insurance who studied America's most dangerous intersections, came to Philadelphia to see the infamous Boulevard for himself. He was astounded. Released last summer, the State Farm study of crash data from insurance claims showed that the Boulevard's intersections with Red Lion Road and with Grant Avenue ranked second and third in the nation last year for most crashes. "I have not seen any other intersection quite like those," Nepomuceno said. "They've inherited a design that . . .is a headache. "It's a tough nut to solve." State Farm offered grant money to Philadelphia and other municipalities with intersections on the nation's top-10 list for engineering studies and improvements. The insurer was prepared to hand over up to $240,000 to study and repair the Boulevard's two nationally ranked intersections. But the city and state refused to apply for the grants. Nor did they apply for a grant in 2000, when State Farm ranked the Boulevard intersection with Grant Avenue the state's third most-dangerous. City and state officials discount the study. Besides, said traffic engineer Trainor, the grant is too small to make a difference. Solutions Engineers propose a variety of improvements - mostly tweaking the existing roadway. But the only thing likely to dramatically cut wrecks would be to implement an idea talked about for decades. That would mean depressing the inner lanes, creating a limited-access highway like the Vine Expressway. The ultimate solution would get vehicles out of the intersections, reduce driver confusion and make pedestrian crossings safer, said Trainor, who dreams of a $2 billion underground highway from Oxford Circle to the Bucks County line. Werner "Dutch" Eichorn, a PennDOT traffic-control specialist, shares the vision. But he's been around long enough to know that, when it comes to the Boulevard, nothing is simple. Said Eichorn: "To take everybody's concerns into account, if it was funded today, it would take another 10 years in the designing and five years to build." * ---- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the Bicycle Coalition of the Delaware Valley list named "bike." To subscribe or unsubscribe or for archive information, see <http://www.purple.com/list.html>.
