One man died and two others were hurt when police say a car ran a red light, struck another vehicle and wound up wrapped around a pole on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia.
The 34-year-old driver of an Infiniti sedan was traveling on the inner lanes of the boulevard when he ran the red and struck a pickup truck being driven by a 70-year-old man near the intersection of the boulevard and C street around 4 a.m., Philadelphia Police Department Chief Inspector Scott small said.
The impact caused the Infinity to jump the curb and strike a pole, killing the driver, whom police initially said was 23, and causing his 22-year-old passenger to be ejected, Small said.
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The pickup truck sustained front-end damage, but the 70-year-old man was conscious and talking when he was taken to Albert Einstein Medical Center, where he was listed in stable condition, Small said. The 22-year-old was taken to the same hospital and listed in critical condition.
The stretch of Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia, which runs through residential neighborhoods, is considered one of the most dangerous roads in America, both for drivers and pedestrians.
A recent report by Philadelphia’s Roosevelt Boulevard Route for Change Program, which studied crashes from 2013 to 2017, characterized the road as messy, confusing and tailor-made for crashes.
“The analysis shows that crashes are not confined to just a few intersections or hotspots. Rather, crashes across all modes occur consistently, block after block, intersection after intersection, for the length of the corridor,” the report concluded.
The city has taken steps to try and make the area safer, like installing speed cameras. Between June 2020 and February of this year, a whopping 700,000 warnings or tickets for speeding were issued to drivers along the boulevard.
The Roosevelt Boulevard Route for Change Program’s report called for more safety measures by 2025 but also suggested radically transforming the boulevard by 2040.
One option is a $1.9 billion “neighborhood boulevard” which would reduce lanes from 12 to 10 and make the road more akin to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City. The second, more ambitious option, is a $10.8 billion “partially capped expressway” that would send four lanes underground and leave six lanes at ground level.
