What’s Up with Philly?

By Shelia Dunn, NMA Communications Director

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared as the cover story in the Winter 2022 Edition of the National Motorists Association’s quarterly magazine Driving Freedoms. If you would like to receive our magazine, please become a member of the NMA today!

The City of Brotherly Love seems anything but when it comes to motorists. In the last couple of months, so much news has come out of Philadelphia that it’s hard to keep track.

For example, Richard Diamond at The Newspaper reported in mid-December that the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals cited technical grounds when it threw out the evidence of corruption with the city’s photo ticketing program. Two former employees of the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming the red-light camera company Conduent (Xerox) defrauded the PPA of at least $9 million in securing the $100 million contract. The whistleblowers, Andrew Dankanich, former PPA red-light camera program director, and Nicholas Marrandino, former PPA quality assurance officer, brought the charges under Philly’s false claims ordinance. A lower court ruled in 2020 that their case failed because there is no legal requirement for the city to sanction fraudulent conduct. The three judges on the Third Circuit agreed.

In the past, Philadelphia has been notorious for its heinous civil asset forfeiture program. The Institute for Justice (IJ) recently completed a survey that showed how the city’s CAF program preyed on poor minority residents. It surveyed 407 residents and found the following:

“The demographic characteristics of Philadelphia forfeiture victims look quite different from those of Philadelphians overall. Philadelphia forfeiture victims are more likely to be Black than the general population. They are also more likely to earn lower incomes and be unemployed and less likely to have a college degree or own their homes. These results suggest Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture machine disproportionately entangled members of disadvantaged communities.”

In 2018, the IJ managed to stop most of Philly’s CAF abuse. For years, the police department had allowed officers to take cash off anyone arrested in a catch-and-release program. Officers were also caught buying seized houses and cars and then flipping them at auctions. Litigation resulted in a consent decree banning police from taking cash amounts less than $250. Any less than $1000 was also forbidden entirely unless criminal charges were filed or if the seizure was used as evidence in a trial.

Targeting low-income residents ensured that the Philly PD would likely retain ownership of seized property with the median value of around $600. More than half of respondents surveyed by the IJ said they never received a receipt for their property taken by police, which means there was no record of police taking it. Most walked away if they did have a receipt, with legal fees approaching $3,500 trying to get the property back in civil court. More than half of respondents were never charged with a crime, and three-quarters charged were never found guilty of any wrongdoing.

Philadelphia became the first major US city to ban police from stopping drivers for low-level traffic violations in October. The Driver Equality Bill passed 14 to 2 by the city council and reclassified traffic stops into primary and secondary violations. Officers will no longer stop motorists for driving an unregistered vehicle, driving with a hidden license plate, driving without a general inspection, and an emissions inspection. A broken taillight or loud muffler also count as secondary violations. Officers can only pull over drivers for speeding and other moving violations.

The bill’s sponsor, Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, said that he intended to reduce the number of interactions and searches between police and minority Philadelphians. However, in an opinion piece for The Philadelphia Citizen, a concerned motorist wrote a dissenting opinion:

“While the intent is understandable, the consequences of such a law might be shocking. On a practical level: what motivation will any Philadelphian have to register a car if they don’t travel out of the city? I can’t imagine any. And on that note: an unregistered car is, by default, an uninsured car. Philadelphia is, in so many words, codifying a policy that says drivers in the city don’t need to be insured.

“The practical consequences are all pretty easy to predict. Less adherence to traffic laws, less care is given to how safe cars are operated, more danger in traffic. Regardless of intent, Philadelphia has legalized unregistered, uninsured, and unsafe driving and ensured that a city struggling with street safety would only get worse. But my issue lies more on the philosophical end of things and the future of this place.”

As many American cities have recently learned, adopting a street safety program is easy, but the return on investment is challenging. In 2017, Philadelphia adopted Vision Zero to curb all traffic deaths by 2030. In 2020, traffic fatalities doubled from 2019. Also, the city trimmed funding for street safety improvements from $2.5 million down to $1 million in its last budget. A recent Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed declared that the city has failed to make much headway with its VZ program and that Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration has done little to make a change in the direction of traffic fatalities.

However, the city has put in 32-speed cameras along Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia for purported traffic safety concerns. Roosevelt Boulevard is a 12-lane highway known as US Route 1 that runs through Philly from the Schuylkill River to Bucks County’s border. The PPA reported that in the first nine months of operation (June 2020 to February 2021), 700,000 warnings or tickets for speeding were issued. This source of revenue will likely continue to bring in much-needed income.

In December 2021, the city council’s Committee on Streets and Services debated the merits of the next ticket cam program—this time for noise. Under the bill, a person cannot create, cause, or permit the creation of sound emanating from a motor vehicle at a level of five decibels above the background level measured from a distance of 25 feet or more. Basically, if you hear a car, it’s too loud, and the owner could get caught by one of the roving camera/mic devices the committee wants to put on the streets. Perhaps, another cash cow in the making.

One last thing—Philadelphia’s Transit system is running out of money by the summer of 2022, and transit advocates are pushing for a congestion pricing system to replace the state funds. The reason Philly is running out of transit funds has to do with a decade-old method of using PA Turnpike toll revenue, now set to expire, to pay half of the $1 billion annually for the city’s mass transit. In October 2021, city transportation spokesperson Michael Carroll said in an interview that there are no current plans for a congestion pricing initiative because the same political issues that made it challenging in the past are still there. If NYC has found a way to bring congestion pricing to Manhattan, Philly is likely not too far behind despite the political obstacles.

Lack of infrastructure and transportation funding (not always the same) seems to be a recurring theme for large urban cores like Philly. Will the leadership rise to the challenge? In Philadelphia, we have our doubts.

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