A 65-year-old man died Sunday after he lost control of his vehicle on Cresheim Valley Drive in Chestnut Hill, striking a downed guardrail and flipping the car upside down into a creek. Just weeks before, another driver veered off the same road but survived.
Compounding this latest traffic death is the fact that the guardrail meant to prevent cars from careening off the road was broken and nearly flattened from previous crashes, leaving a gap in the guardrails for months, said Josephine Winter, a Mount Airy resident and executive director of West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN). “The guardrail was down, and it was previously crumbled so it’s a frequent site of crashes,” she said. Images from Google Maps show the guardrail down as far back as July.
The Street’s Department is aware of the recent crash and is conducting an assessment of the guardrail on Cresheim Valley Road. “The Streets Department’s top priority is public safety,” a spokesperson said.
Neighbors say accidents, sometimes fatal, have plagued the winding roadways in Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy for decades. These traffic safety concerns came to a head with Sunday’s deadly crash.
“It’s a curvy, tricky road, especially when it’s wet, and people tend to speed on that road,” Winter said of roads like Lincoln and Cresheim Valley Drives, which are lined with trees, have swooping dips and hills, and are prone to flooding..
Since 2019, at least five people have died while driving on the dark, winding sections of Lincoln Drive, which intersects with Cresheim Valley Drive, according to city crash data, prompting many neighbors to fear walking down their street or leading them to invest thousands into giant boulders to protect their home and lawn.
Winter, who leads WMAN’s traffic calming committee, and other neighborhood organizations have petitioned for city support, urging the Philadelphia Streets Department to slow the speed of traffic on Cresheim Valley Drive, Lincoln Drive, and Wissahickon Avenue. The group’s efforts are so ingrained in the fabric of the neighborhood that when digging through Temple University’s Urban Archives, Winter even found an advertisement from 1968 stressing the need for cars in Mount Airy to “slow down to keep kids safe.”
The Streets Department installed “speed slots,” a traffic calming structure similar to speed bumps, along Lincoln Drive, between West Allens Lane and Wayne Avenue, earlier this year. Along the same stretch of road, PennDot installed rumble strips and speed tables to slow drivers down in 2023, in addition to traffic lane separators to keep drivers from using center lanes to pass other vehicles.
In addition to the recently completed speed slots and traffic calming measures on sections of Emlen Street, which becomes Cresheim Valley Road, future signal upgrades are planned for Lincoln Drive as well.
However, the work to improve these streets is not over, Winter said. Additionally, Streets Department plans don’t include changes to Cresheim Valley Drive, where Sunday’s crash happened.
“We’ll need a collaborative approach as soon as possible to temporarily address the downed guardrail, and then see what the options are moving forward,” Winter said.
Throughout the last decade, locals have suggested better-timed signals, more speed tables, and reducing the number of driving lanes from two in either direction down to one. They also want to see more roundabouts and curb bump-outs in the neighborhood to keep traffic flowing, but at a reasonable speed.
A mere 50 to 100 feet from Cresheim Valley Drive is a parallel bike trail, where trail organizers like Brad Maule are accustomed to the crashes on the road nearby. Before Sunday’s fatal crash, he remembers two other cars that drove off the side of the road in recent months, not counting the other crashes on the roadway itself. The city recently installed pedestrian crossing signs and repainted the crosswalk on nearby Cresheim Road, but Maule hopes speed bumps will follow.
While Winter said the city’s Streets engineers were one of the first calls she received Monday morning in response to the crash, which the community appreciates, she, Maule, and other neighbors hope that more safety improvements will be considered to save more lives.
“I’m just looking forward to the new measures of safety that come here,” Maule said. “Hopefully, people will abide by them.”
Staff writers Max Marin and Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.