Society Hill civic association wants to pay $25,000 to prevent new bike protections on Pine and Spruce Streets
A proposal calls for donating money to pay lawyers helping the Friends of Pine & Spruce, which is opposed to added bike lane protections.
The board of the Society Hill Civic Association plans a vote on whether to donate $25,000 to pay lawyers helping a group of residents sink the city’s proposed safety improvements to bike lanes on Pine and Spruce Streets.
Friends of Pine & Spruce (FOPS) is not representative, say opponents in the neighborhood who support more protections for the designated bicycle lanes.
“I am a dues-paying member and it’s not right,” said John Masi, a retired traffic engineer who was on the civic association board for several months last year.
“I spent my career trying to make roads safe,” Masi said, adding that intense opposition from neighbors who’d lose parking space “reeked of entitlement.”
He supported a 2024 city ordinance that bans stopping in bike lanes and the city’s plan for concrete barriers that separate cyclists from motor vehicles.
In August, acting on a suit from the FOPS group, a Court of Common Pleas judge ordered the city to stop work on bike-friendly loading zones being set up for residents whose homes front the bike lanes.
Lawyer George Bochetto filed the suit, which argues the city did not have the authority to make changes absent an ordinance to change parking rules.
The no-stopping bill applies to designated bike lanes across the city but the order by Judge Sierra Thomas Street applies to Pine and Spruce, the longest east-west cycling routes.
“It’s a bad idea to exempt neighborhoods in cities that are adopting bike-friendly policies,” said David Wolfsohn, who lives on Pine Street between Second and Front Streets.
He cited Paris, cities across the Netherlands and others that have extensive protected bike lane networks. Friends of Pine and Spruce is an “opaque” and closed organization, Wolfsohn said.
“It’s misleading for them to call themselves by that name because it sounds as if they have official standing,” Wolfsohn said. “I don’t understand the vitriol.”
The civic association does have a broader constituency that includes cyclists and others in favor of protections, but supporters and members of FOPS have won power in elections that turned on bike-lane issues.
Five officials of Friends of Pine & Spruce sit on the Society Hill Civic Association board.
The latter is a Registered Community Organization (RCO), one of dozens of neighborhood groups that the city has granted a formal role in zoning decisions.
The board is scheduled to consider the proposal to support the legal challenges to additional bike lane protections.
A former Society Hill Civic Association president, Susan Burt Collins says that smacks of elitism that has earned the neighborhood criticism in the past.
“My goal is that we not be the ‘Republic of Society Hill,’” she said. Collins left her post because of a term limit.
“We need to be part of a community,” Collins said.
This story has been updated to correct details of Collins’ tenure as president of SHCA.