Posted on Thu, Apr. 04, 2002 CROSSING BOULEVARD'S A RISKY TRIP MANY PEDESTRIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED OR MAIMED ON 12-LANE HIGHWAY By MYUNG OAK KIM [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FAMILY PHOTO Ida Negro, 78, was killed by a car on the Boulevard IDA NEGRO, a 78-year-old grandmother from Bustleton, stopped driving on Roosevelt Boulevard years ago. The road is too dangerous, too rife with speeding drivers, the retired seamstress told her family. But the spry Italian immigrant believed she was safe walking across the 12-lane highway. She was wrong. On a sunny, clear morning last October, Negro stepped off a SEPTA bus at the Boulevard near St. Vincent Street. She started across the Boulevard in a crosswalk toward the Kmart, carrying a bag containing a tablecloth she planned to return. Just before she reached the center median, an SUV driven by a 53-year-old woman from the Northeast struck her. Negro died four hours later at the hospital - one of Roosevelt Boulevard's 23 fatalities in 2001 and another exclamation mark on the highway's distinction as one of America's worst. Roosevelt Boulevard is well-established as a magnet for vehicle crashes. It's also a pedestrian killer. Every day, hundreds of people make the harrowing, 250-foot journey across the Boulevard on foot. Last year, five people, including Negro, died trying to get to the other side. A 9-year-old boy was another of the victims. Scores more were maimed. Sisters hit at same spot Six years before Ida Negro died, two young sisters were struck by a car and seriously hurt crossing the same stretch of highway. Their family sued the city, the state Transportation Department, and a private engineering firm that had been hired by PennDOT in 1990 to improve pedestrian safety. Lawyer Stewart Cohen, who represented the sisters, alleged that the Boulevard was unsafe. The sisters settled the lawsuit for $4.3 million, a Boulevard record. Because of caps on the state and city legal liability, most of the money came from the engineering firm. But not even that huge legal settlement forced much change. The only monument to the two maimed little girls are large neon-green crosswalk signs where they were struck. That angers Frank Nero, Ida Negro's son. "It's more economical just to put people in jeopardy than to fix what needs to be fixed," Nero said. "They just leave it the way it is. They put some signs up and they take their chances." The way Nero sees it, the Boulevard killed his mom. "The policeman . . .said the driver didn't do anything wrong. She wasn't intoxicated. They believe she wasn't speeding. That leads me to believe that the intersection is defective." That may also be the case with the Boulevard's intersection at Cottman Avenue. On the afternoon of Dec. 19, a student from Bangladesh named Poly Khanom, 19, was standing on the center median of the Cottman Avenue overpass, waiting for the light to change. The SEPTA bus she had just ridden from an office management class in Center City had dropped her three blocks from home. A 36-year-old Mayfair man at the wheel of a southbound minivan ran a red light at Cottman, hit a car, jumped the curb and pinned Khanom into a guardrail. The impact ripped off her left leg below the knee and shattered the bones in her lower right leg. The driver was unhurt. Khanom spent nearly two months in the hospital. Her mother cries every day, fearing for her daughter's future. She had planned to take Poly to Bangladesh this summer to get married. Now she wonders if Poly will ever find a husband. Khanom looks at pictures of herself before the crash, like they were from some distant time. "I can't believe I was like that before," she said. "I wish I could go back to that. "I don't like it when people say I'm lucky." * ---- 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>.
