If OTIS follows the data, it’ll be neighborhoods like Kensington, Fairhill, Logan, and Cobbs Creek that will receive new crosswalks, brighter streetlights, and protected bike lanes—the kinds of design interventions recommended to support Vision Zero.

Those are the same kind of neighborhoods that has Hetznecker nervous about how Philadelphia implements Vision Zero. The plan calls for streetscape improvements and public education, but it also calls for stepped-up traffic enforcement. While Hetznecker supports the first two, the latter feature has him concerned: more contact with cops comes with higher risks for communities of color.

“I think that community outreach becomes critical to this,” said Hetznecker. “Raising the specter of punishment or punitive measures to deter reckless driving is a serious mistake. That would be the one component of this Vision Zero program that should be jettisoned.”

Outreach and investment will come first, said Yemen. The plan doesn’t call for increased enforcement until 2019, “to give us time to hopefully ramp up on education and engineering solutions before we would ever engage in enforcement.”

Moreover, the police will focus on egregious behavior, not just the run-of-the-mill bad driving we’re all guilty of from time to time. “It’s really enforcing the outliers rather than… poor driving behavior [or] poor walking behavior,” said Yemen. “It’s setting people up for success rather than coming down with harsh punishment where investments have not been previously made.”

Whether the poorer neighborhoods will be targeted for the streetscape improvements in the final plan remains to be seen. In addition to in-person community outreach over this summer, OTIS has launched a website to begin soliciting resident feedback. But according to Pew research, lower income households and minorities still lag behind in Internet access.

Moreover, Center City and University City both have very high crash rates, by-products of the sheer volume of people and cars there every day. One can reasonably argue that pedestrian and bicycle improvements there will help the most people.

Hetznecker worried that Vision Zero might simply accelerate a broader trend in the city: the affluent downtown gets showered in investment green while the poorer neighborhoods get smothered in police blue.

Currently, the city has plans for protected bike lanes along Pine and Spruce Streets in Center City, and another along Chestnut Street in University City—two well-off city neighborhoods. It’s first protected bike lane was built on Ryan Avenue in middle-class Mayfair. The first two schools to see concentrated safety improvements under the city’s Safe Routes to School program were located in rapidly gentrifying Point Breeze and East Passyunk neighborhoods, even though schools in poorer North and West Philly neighborhoods also met the criteria of 15 child pedestrian crashes within a few block radius of the school over a 2010-2014 time period.

Not all of the city’s investments are happening in wealthier neighborhoods. North American Street in Kensington is also being redesigned (although the blocks surrounding the southern half of the road have begun to gentrify). Roosevelt Boulevard is also in the middle of a multiyear planning process aimed at making the wide thoroughfare through most of Northeast Philadelphia safer.

According to Hetznecker, the worst thing that could happen would be if the City “put the resources in Center City for all the lighting, and crosswalks and speed bumps on Walnut Street or on Broad and you don’t do anything but enforcement in the neighborhoods.”

When he said that, Hetznecker didn’t yet know that the city’s most recently announced new traffic improvement for Center City are raised crosswalks on Broad Street at Walnut and Chestnut streets.

Those two crosswalks will satisfy one of items on the draft plan’s list of near-term engineering projects: “Install two raised intersections.” Other items on the list, like installing new LED lights and pedestrian countdown timers, have been ongoing.

What Yemen described as “realistic” and “tactical”, 5th Square’s Liefer called “frustrating.”

“We’re looking at two raised pedestrian intersections in two years,” said Liefer. “That’s one raised intersection per year. With over 2,000 miles of roadway that the City of Philadelphia maintains, at one intersection per year, that seems like we’re pretty far off from getting to [the] goal [of zero vehicular deaths by 2030].”

On the page, the Vision Zero Action Plan’s lists of engineered improvements, educational initiatives, and enforcement goals read as scattershot and unfocused— would the goal of building “two curbless streets” be satisfied if one was a tiny alley and another the work of private developers? Yemen said the final plan would have more specifics, noting again that crash data would drive location choices.

Still, Liefer’s group wants to see the city take a more ambitious tact to street safety. To 5th Square, the problems and solutions are clear at this point. It’s time to stop talking safety and to start walking safely.

“We’ve researched the problem multiple times over,” said Liefer. “We need to get to implementation at this point.”

Liefer sees the problem as one of political will, namely allowing the loudest neighborhood complaints about specific safety proposals trump systemic safety improvements, pointing to Washington Avenue’s stalled overhaul.