Washington Avenue will be reconfigured from its current five-lane layout to a mixed lane layout between 4th Street and Grays Ferry Avenue. The proposed design has been modified with additional pedestrian safety elements in select locations, including:

• Pedestrian head start signal timing (or leading pedestrian interval)
• Speed cushions and speed slots
• Soft rumble strips
• Corner wedges
• Hardened centerlines at select locations
• Automated red light cameras
  • Installation of automated red light enforcement cameras will take place next year on the corridor in partnership with the program administrator, the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA).
• Bus boarding islands
  • Bus boarding islands installed at street level with the paving project will be upgraded to concrete islands next year in partnership with SEPTA.

The mixed option will incorporate the following cross sections and protected bike lanes:

• Four blocks with existing five-lane cross sections from 16th Street to 12th Street
• Eight blocks with four-lane cross sections from Grays Ferry Avenue to 25th Street, 20th Street to 16th Street, 12th Street to 10th Street, and 5th Street to 4th Street
• Ten blocks that have three-lane cross sections from 25th Street to 20th Street and 10th Street to 5th Street
• Eighteen blocks with protected bike lanes from Grays Ferry Avenue to 16th Street and 12th Street to 4th Street

Construction is scheduled to take place in late summer 2022. You can learn more about the finalized plans.

Six blocks that were proposed to be three lanes will be four lanes. Two blocks that were proposed to be four lanes will be the existing condition.

The segment from 25th Street to Grays Ferry Avenue was originally proposed as three-lane, but this is not feasible due to the physical configuration of the 25th Street Viaduct.

The City has been in conversation with the community since 2013. The announced mixed lane design responds to what we’ve heard from the community.

Washington Avenue is on the City’s Vision Zero High Injury Network and has more crashes than the average Philadelphia street. This is an opportunity to improve the safety and function of Washington Avenue, fulfilling one of the project’s main goals to improve mobility for all users who travel along the road.

The actual distance from curb to curb is the same in all the alternatives. The “effective” narrowing is achieved by reducing the exposure of pedestrians to vehicles in active vehicle travel lanes.

All intersections between Grays Ferry Avenue and 16th Street, and between 12th Street and 4th Street, will be effectively narrowed to either three or four lanes. The pedestrian experience crossing Washington Avenue on those blocks will be an effective crossing distance of either 33 feet or 40 feet on these blocks, compared to over 70 feet today.

The blocks between 16th Street and 12th Street will not have any effective narrowing, due to the volume of vehicles that concentrate near Broad Street.

Resurfacing will cost about $6.2 million. Eighty percent of this cost is federally funded with a twenty percent City match, so the City’s budget impact is $1.24 million.

We estimate the additional improvements, such as bus boarding islands, speed cushions, and speed slots, will cost around $2 million, but this is only an estimate. This work needs to be fully designed and bid.

The City is fully committed to the safety of those who travel along and across Washington Avenue. The project will be repaved with protected bike lanes on a majority of blocks.

In revising the proposal, the City will implement additional traffic calming measures to reduce the likelihood of crashes on Washington Avenue while balancing other considerations raised in dialogue with businesses and neighbors who use Washington Avenue whose views were not obtained through the online survey.

The finalized plans take into account the cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets and congestion on Washington Avenue. This is important considering diversion would be expected regularly due to blockage from management of goods delivery activity, and occasional surges in cut-through traffic would result from incidents and traffic events on the regional scale. The kinds of crashes that have resulted in deaths and serious injuries on Washington Avenue can be reduced while taking these other factors into consideration.

Since 2013, the City has been doing public engagement and has heard from multiple stakeholders on the various perspectives and needs of Washington Avenue. Members of the public had the opportunity to provide feedback on this at the March 1, 2022 open house.

The City Council process for the proposed parking and loading regulations offers an additional opportunity for members of the public to provide input.

In 2020, the City transitioned to community engagement methods that complied with COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. This included primarily online input methods to the layout options proposed.

While these methods proved effective at reaching a large number of people, and in fact more people responded than typical for in-person engagement, an overwhelming majority of people provided input by filling out an online survey. The dial-in phone hotline that the City provided for input was used by only a handful of people (fewer than 10). It is reasonable to assume these online methods did not effectively capture the input of people without access to the internet, computers, or smartphones.

The events of the spring and summer of 2020 also affected residents in different ways. For some, this period offered more free time and ability to engage in virtual community engagement. For others, it was a time of increased work, caretaking, and financial hardship.

The survey didn’t ask respondents to self-report information such as race, ethnicity, age, or income, so it’s difficult to gauge whether it reached a diverse body of stakeholders. However, it’s likely that the switch to primarily virtual engagement methods would have favored responses from stakeholders who were more comfortable with online engagement.

What we use for crash data analysis

The City uses crash data from PennDOT. A crash is considered reportable in Pennsylvania either when a person is injured or killed, or if a vehicle requires towing from the scene.

PennDOT crash data is:

• Considered to be official crash data for traffic safety by transportation professionals in the state.
• Mapped to a pinpointed location using geospatial coordinates like longitude and latitude. By contrast, PPD crash data is labeled using a street name.
• Published online and available for download by the public.
• Produced on an annual basis and submitted to standard “data cleaning.” This includes assigning consistent codes and flags for crashes so that data can be compared between different regions of the state.

PennDOT crash data includes crashes that are reported by PPD and other enforcement agencies, including State police and SEPTA police.

What we don’t use for crash data analysis

The Bicycle Coalition has created a website with traffic fatalities. For incidents prior to 2019, it’s based on news reports. For incidents after 2019, it’s based on data from the Philadelphia Police Department Accident Investigation Division (AID), which publishes material on Open Data Philly. The Bicycle Coalition map is created by an advocacy organization and is not used by the City for any decision making, as it is not complete or accurate data.

City staff from the Department of Streets and the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability (OTIS) meet with AID monthly to review all fatal crashes. This information is useful on a short-term monthly basis, but it’s not used for crash data analysis. The City has found inconsistencies between the crash data that is reported by the PPD and the crash data reported by PennDOT.

When the City analyzes crash data, we look at all crashes that are involved on a particular street, including all intersections. We do this with geographic information systems (GIS), a mapping and analysis tool, to ensure that we include crashes at an intersection even when the crash is labeled as on the other street in that intersection.

This ensures that we include crashes that occur at intersections even when the crash occurs on the cross street.

In all, if the City only looked at PPD data:

• We wouldn’t capture all crashes involved on a particular street.
• We wouldn’t know precise geospatial locations of the crashes.
• We wouldn’t capture crashes reported by other enforcement bodies like the State police or SEPTA police.
• We wouldn’t be able to compare those crashes to the standard database of crashes across the region.

As an example, if a crash takes place at the intersection of 22nd Street and Washington Avenue, it may be labeled “22nd” Street in the PPD crash data. A right to know query for “Washington Avenue” would miss this incident. It might not capture crashes with misspelled labels, either.

It is likely that the community right-to know query of PPD crash data would exclude crashes that are part of the Washington Avenue corridor, which are important to understanding what needs to be addressed to make it safer.

The City’s traffic safety efforts are data-driven. Analyzing crash data helps the City prioritize where limited resources can make the most impact for safety. The High Injury Network (HIN) identifies streets with the highest rates of fatalities and serious injuries per mile. The HIN captures 80% of all serious injury or fatal crashes on just 12% of streets. It is important to note that it is not based on total crashes, but those involving serious injuries and fatalities. The HIN is updated every three to five years.

Washington Avenue is one of many streets on the HIN in this top 12%. The HIN does not rank streets within the top 12%. It is important to distinguish that even though Washington Avenue is in the top 12%, it does not mean Washington Avenue is 12th most dangerous on the list. Because the HIN includes dozens of streets and intersections, the top 12% represents a large number. For reference, see the 2016–2020 PennDOT crash report for Washington Avenue.