Hey City Hall — When Are You Going to Clear the Bike Lanes?

A bicyclist and an impassable bike lane at 11th and Washington, more than two weeks after a major storm brought mounds of snow and ice to Philadelphia / Photograph by Bradford Pearson

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Lo and behold, Philadelphia: The polar vortex is gone. The Arctic blast is no more. Two-and-a-half weeks after a major storm brought a bounty of snow and ice to Philadelphia, we are finally basking in the melty glow of highs that don’t start with the numeral one or two. We’ve heard no shortage of complaints over the last two weeks from car owners frustrated — nay, downright angry — with the condition of the roads, and it remains to be seen if voters will seek vengeance come the mayoral primary in May 2027. But if you think that car drivers had it bad, what about all those Philly bicyclists?

“For the first two weeks after the storm, I felt completely unsafe riding my bike,” says Newbold’s Zach Strassburger, who relies on their e-cargo bike to get to and from work in Center City and to transport their four-year-old and 10-year-old to school and Hebrew school. And because Strassburger relies on that bike, it means they also rely on the many miles of bike lanes in Philadelphia to keep them and their kids safe.

The problem? There have essentially been no bike lanes, because they’ve been covered with caked-in ice. After hearing a complaint on Tuesday morning from South Philly about the bike lane problem, I decided to pilot my 2004 Kia Optima from 23rd and Race to South Philadelphia to West Philadelphia to Fairmount Park and then through Wynnefield and home to my saved spot in Overbrook, and, sure enough, I saw very few useful bike lanes. What I did see were numerous delivery people on e-bikes swerving in and out of traffic because they couldn’t use the bike lanes.

“There’s nothing we can do,” says one such driver, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who asked to be identified only as Chas. I stopped Chas outside of a restaurant in West Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon to ask what his experience had been like. “I came out the Tuesday after it snowed and have been out every day since. It’s very unsafe but if I don’t work, I don’t make any money … I can’t ‘work from home.'”

Realizing that the bike lanes weren’t an option in the two weeks after the storm, Strassburger did their best to use unreliable and overcrowded SEPTA, but SEPTA doesn’t go everywhere, including that Hebrew school. They also had to ask their ex to step in at times for rides, which was far from ideal. The chaos and confusion of the storm’s aftermath and the logistical nightmares it wrought resulted in Strassburger’s 10-year-old walking home after dark from a school band practice and getting lost. “He ended up walking to the wrong house,” recounts Strassburger. “I didn’t have any idea where he was, and that was really scary.”

This week, Strassburger decided enough was enough. It was time to break out the bike.

“I almost crashed,” Strassburger says of their Monday ride. Then, they wound up on a street that didn’t have a cleared bike lane, so Strassburger had no option but to ride in the single lane of traffic, which, of course “the cars don’t like.” On Tuesday, Strassburger had to take their 10-year-old to middle school and read online that the bike lanes on 11th Street were bad, so they thought they would try the ones on 13th Street. “Those were utterly inaccessible,” Strassburger says.

South Philadelphia resident James Bold, a nurse at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, has biked almost daily for the last 30 years. But given the state of the city after the storm, he made the less convenient switch to SEPTA. “I actually did ride to work one morning after waiting for the 45 bus that never came,” says Bold. “I scrambled back home and grabbed the bike and made it in. But not ideal.”

Bold says that while the frigid temperatures and uncleared lanes did affect his decision to steer clear of the bike for a couple of weeks, the main reason he stayed off the bike was all those angry car drivers.

“For the life of me, I will never understand the hostility toward bicycles,” Bold laments. “More than the snow and ice and cold, I think what kept me off my bike since the storm is knowing how aggressive everybody is driving and parking. And if they were to encounter a bicyclist on the already compromised tight roads, it’s just something I didn’t want to have to deal with.”

Lana Harshaw, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, echoes Bold’s observations, saying that while obstructed bike lanes — whether those obstructions are cars parking in them or ice covering them — are a problem, the real problem is the people behind the wheel of their cars.

“The cyclists have to merge in with high-speed traffic, and a lot of the drivers are aggressive or just folks who aren’t used to sharing the road with cyclists,” Harshaw says. “I would just ask all the drivers out there to be considerate of bike riders and pay attention so everyone can be safe.”