City crews made fast work of clearing major roads and many smaller ones after last week’s snow storms. By Friday night officials estimated that 75% of streets had been plowed, and drivers faced few major obstacles over the weekend or during the Monday morning commute.
People who get to work or school by bike didn’t fare as well, however.
Many bike lanes and paths never saw a plow between the two snowfalls last week, cyclists said, making it difficult or impossible for them to commute without risking a dangerous fall. Those included heavily used lanes on Market and Spruce streets in Center City.
Some bike routes were gradually cleared over the weekend, but a number remained covered with snow and ice and remained impassable, even into this week. That was particularly the case with protected lanes, which require a smaller plow.
Even when lanes were cleared, the owners of buildings or cars illegally shoveled snow back into them in some places.
Riders ended up braving the main car lanes on busy thoroughfares, trying to navigate slippery bike lanes when possible, illegally riding on the sidewalk, or figuring out other forms of transportation.
Fairmount resident Bryan Littel’s commute to Old City wasn’t too bad on Tuesday until he reached Logan Square, he said. The traffic circle there can be dangerous even in good conditions, and was made even worse by icy bike lanes that forced cyclists into car traffic.
“That bike lane hadn’t been touched,” he said. “If your cycling commute included Logan Square, you were in a travel lane.”
It was frustrating, Littel said, because in recent years the city has installed flexible posts to partially protect the bike lane, but doesn’t follow up by keeping it usable after storms.
The protection “was a welcome change, but then we get snow and all of a sudden you’re in the street,” he said. The protected bike lane on Race Street east of 8th Street was also unplowed, forcing Littel and other riders into the “nightmare” traffic heading toward the Ben Franklin Bridge, he said.
Brewerytown resident Kari Kling said part of the bike lane on 22nd Street was cleared by Sunday, but on Monday the lanes she takes on Pennsylvania Avenue, Spring Garden Street, and Fairmount Avenue were still either iced over or full of “snirt” — a mass of combined snow and dirt.
“When I used the bidirectional lane on Spring Garden Street, I had to go out into the oncoming traffic lane to get around the piles of snirt, and go back onto the snirt when I needed to wait for traffic to clear,” said Kling, who is a member of the Philly Bike Action advocacy group.
A stretch of the protected bike lane on Chestnut Street in West Philly that debuted in October 2022 was still unplowed as of Sunday, so she and a friend decided to clean it from 45th to 53rd on their own. “We cleared a good portion of it, but the snirt had frozen solid and was too hard to shovel,” Kling said. “We reported it to 311.”
“It’s illegal to shovel snow into the street, so why is it legal to leave the bike lanes unplowed? They are part of the street,” said Nicole Brunet, policy director at the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. “For some people, riding a bike is their only option for transportation, and the city should respect that form of transportation in their snow removal policy.”
The Bike Coalition has previously asked the city to publish a snow plan laying out its priorities after a storm and when it will clear bike lanes, Brunet said. “I would have appreciated them doing it before the start of this winter, because we had all winter last year with no snow,” she said.
All the city’s bike lanes were salted or cleared with small Bobcat plows, according to Streets Department spokesperson Keisha McCarty-Skelton. But she said cleanup crews “are challenged” with getting equipment down bike lanes that are narrower than five feet, and they saw people dumping snow into some lanes after they were cleared.
“During the most recent storms, the Bobcats were used to service bike lanes and small/narrow residential streets that under the Parker administration are being serviced earlier than in storms past, and have been made a priority to be serviced along with major roads,” she said.
For bike lanes that are next to curbs, the crews try to push the snow as close to the curb as possible, McCarty-Skelton said.
Brunet noted that on at least one stretch of road, the city officially does not even try to plow the bike lanes. In the four-year-old barrier-protected lane on 22nd Street between Snyder Avenue and Race Street, the city skips clearing a section below South Street because it’s too narrow to fit even a small plow, she said.
The city’s handling of bike lanes over the past week drew a range of responses from cyclists. Some unhappily posted photos of unplowed lanes on social media, while others said it wasn’t worth trying to cycle through the snow or the Streets Department to make them a higher priority.
Some longtime riders said that, given the city’s lackluster history of plowing bike lanes, cyclists would have to make do until Wednesday’s expected rain and higher temperatures finished the job.
“My experience,” wrote one Philly Bike Action member, “Mouse,” on the organization’s Discord channel, “is that clearing snow and ice from bike lanes is usually delegated to Mother Nature.”
The section on the 22nd Street bike lane has been corrected to remove a reference to a neighborhood association that lobbied for the lane’s creation.
