"And because everyone is a pedestrian sometimes, it's so ubiquitous, it tends to get overlooked a lot."
Drivers still block the crosswalks when they stop at red lights -- if they stop at all -- and bully their way through groups of pedestrians crossing at intersections. Bicyclists still careen down the sidewalks like they own them, shooting dirty looks at walkers who don't get out of their way.
Walking around Philadelphia, especially Center City, is still a dangerous game.
So what happened to PhillyWalks, the pedestrian-advocacy organization launched last July amid much fanfare? Wasn't PhillyWalks supposed to take back the streets for all of us beleaguered and forgotten bipeds?
Actually, it has, or at least has begun to, say officers and supporters. The all-volunteer, shoestring-budget group has spent the last 11 months working primarily behind the scenes, persuading and cajoling the sometimes apathetic decision-makers and slowly laying the groundwork for the revolution.
Now don't expect to see Center City closed to motor vehicles anytime soon, or roving, Town Watch-style gangs forcing bikers back into the streets where they belong; PhillyWalks isn't likely to become some Pedestrian Liberation Organization. But the members of its core group say they've made progress, and expect to gain more clout and achieve real goals in the coming year.
"It's a long road," says co-chairman Peter Hecht, an environmental psychologist. "But I think in a year we've done an awful lot... Just getting recognized as a legitimate perspective [has been] one of the most difficult things, especially within the transportation profession."
"The public has 40 to 60 years of an automobile focus," he explains. "And because everyone is a pedestrian sometimes, it's so ubiquitous, it tends to get overlooked a lot."
But that's already begun to change, he adds. Councilwoman Happy Fernandez, one of PhillyWalks' strongest supporters, has made sure the group has a prominent seat at the table whenever traffic matters are discussed. Operation Crosswalk, which led to the much-ballyhooed -- and, to some extent, ridiculed -- crackdown on jaywalking earlier this year, actually has targeted motorists more than pedestrians.
Traffic Court data released by the Police Department this week reveal that jaywalking citations have more than doubled -- but that means the total's gone from two in 1996 to five between January and April 1997; hardly the police state some had predicted.
And citations for some traffic violations are being written more frequently as well. For example, in 1996, 60 tickets were written for failing to signal when turning among pedestrians; this year, 43 were served before the end of April. Failing to yield when turning on red generated 169 tickets in 1996, and 59 by April this year -- a slight increase in average per day, but even small victories on the enforcement front have been hard to come by, according to Hecht.
"I don't get the sense that the Police Department has put their whole heart into [enforcement], and I can't explain why," he says. Some officers, he adds, not only ignore routine traffic violations, they make some themselves. (The Police Public Affairs Unit did not respond to City Paper's request for an interview with a department official familiar with Operation Crosswalk.)
PhillyWalks' progress also has been slowed by unfamiliarity with pedestrian issues among government officials and the general public, and by the lack of what Hecht calls a "basis of fact." There is precious little solid research available for transportation professionals and urban planners to draw from; like geneticists, they are advancing a relatively new science and learning as they go.
"There's a lot of groundwork that needs to be done," says Hecht, who researched people's interaction with public spaces in New York. "People assume that someone, somewhere, kept these statistics," but that hasn't been the case.
PhillyWalks' greatest success has been in networking, says executive committee member Steve Spindler.
"The [public] forums we've had have been outstanding," he says. "These kinds of meetings are bringing everyone together and it opens doors for further discussion... The non-automobile constituencies are really communicating much more." Spindler, incidentally, is also a bicycle activist.
Fernandez remains a staunch supporter.
"They have gotten off to a much faster start than I ever dreamed," she says.
The focus of the Operation Crosswalk Coalition right now, she says, is a new public awareness campaign -- which will include some "dramatic" television spots -- slated to kick off in the fall. The hope is that education, combined with continued enforcement, will lead to a steady decline in pedestrian injuries and deaths. (Over the last five years, Philadelphia has averaged 2,400 injuries and 50 deaths annually.)
PhillyWalks' focus has been, and will continue to be, on safety, says Hecht -- "and not just in terms of 'pedestrians better watch out.'"