2 years later, city says Washington Avenue redo is working

Have a question about Philly’s neighborhoods or the systems that shape them? PlanPhilly reporters want to hear from you! Ask us a question or send us a story idea you think we should cover.

Two years after a controversial project to calm traffic along Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia was completed, city officials say the changes appear to be working.

An analysis prepared for the city found increases in people walking and biking along the corridor.

“We have achieved the goals that we set out to [achieve] for this project,” said Jackie Weidman, district manager for South Philly in the city’s Office of Multimodal Planning.

Travel times along the roadway have increased slightly, which officials attribute to other causes. It’s too soon to say whether the project has decreased crashes along the route, officials said.

The project included repaving and implementing traffic calming measures along Washington Avenue and narrowing part of the roadway east of Broad Street. It was intended to reduce crashes on the road, which is part of the city’s “high injury network,” where a disproportionate share of traffic deaths and serious injuries occur. But the project sparked intense debate that highlighted tensions over gentrification in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The city initially proposed implementing a road diet along the entire avenue. But the five-lane road was only narrowed to three and four lanes east of Broad Street, after then-district Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson declined to introduce legislation to facilitate the road diet in his district west of Broad Street. The city had already scaled back its initial road narrowing plan after realizing that longer-term, Black residents of the surrounding neighborhoods were underrepresented in an online survey about the project and subsequently meeting with Registered Community Organizations, businesses and advocacy groups. Opponents of the road diet worried it would cause traffic congestion on the road and push large trucks onto nearby residential streets.

The entire roadway was repaved, and hardened centerlines, a traffic calming measure, were installed west of Broad Street.

In the two-year evaluation report, the city found bike volumes increased along most of the roadway during peak morning travel times, especially on blocks east of Broad Street with separated bike lanes. Pedestrian volumes along the roadway increased slightly during most peak times except on Saturdays.

“In terms of speeding and in terms of increased multimodal transportation, we’re definitely seeing those improvements on the east side of Broad,” Weidman said.

At the same time, fewer vehicles travelled on Washington Avenue during peak times compared to before the project was implemented. The city’s analysis says the decrease in vehicle volumes, which started in the first year after implementation, “appears to follow the citywide post-COVID trend.”

“We’re comparing pre-pandemic data with post-pandemic data,” Weidman said. “So a lot of trends have changed. Less people are commuting into work every day. The times where there’s more traffic have shifted.”

On Christian and Ellsworth streets, two streets parallel to Washington Avenue, traffic volumes remained similar to before the project was implemented, increasing at Christian Street and Grays Ferry Avenue during the morning and decreasing at Ellsworth and Broad. Traffic volumes both increased and decreased slightly at different intersections on Carpenter and Federal streets, two other parallel routes.

The analysis found traffic is moving slightly slower along Washington Avenue compared to before the project was implemented. Travel times measured along the entire roadway increased by roughly two minutes during all peak times in the westboard direction and in the eastbound direction on Saturday.

City officials attribute the slow down not to the road diet, but to a backup at the intersection of Washington Avenue and Broad Street, where unrelated signal changes and an increase in commercial and residential activity nearby have led to congestion, Weidman said.

“That intersection has grown and changed so much,” she said. “It is backing people up a little bit.”

It’s challenging to isolate the impact of the roadway changes alone on bike, traffic and pedestrian patterns. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, other factors, such as changes in businesses and an increase in residential buildings along the route, could have changed travel behaviors, Weidman said.

“There was a substantial redesign east of Broad [Street],” Weidman said. “It was a road diet — that’s a big change in the roadway. So that’s definitely the contributing factor. But there are also other things that have changed along the corridor.”

A true test of the project’s success may come next year, when the city is able to evaluate its impact on crashes. Officials need three years of crash data in order to perform a “meaningful” analysis, Weidman said.

“You need enough of that data to really definitively say what’s happening,” Weidman said.