Road Block

Posting was off this week. The daughter had her wisdom teeth removed mid-week & suffered various (minor) complications -- along with a sore throat, much swelling and pain. This, of course, required repeat visits to the dentist and oral surgeon, along with constant ministrations.

Looking around at what has been happening, I thought that I'd start with a few catch up items.

A few months back, I wrote about an SUV that propelled into a home on Lincoln Drive in the Mount Airy section of Philly, which is near my home. See, Lift-off on Lincoln Drive and Home/Car Invasion. The Philadelphia Weekly had a story about the aftermath and the ordeal which the innocent homeowners have had to deal with. In Unsafe at Any Speed, Kia Gregory describes the driver, who was uninsured, was charged with criminal mischief and DUI:

Robin Anderson, 24, and two friends were cruising down Lincoln Drive in a black Chevy Blazer. From the near-empty bottle of E&J in the backseat, it seems the girls were celebrating. Earlier in the day charges against Anderson were withdrawn. She’d been arrested months before for carrying an illegal gun, making terroristic threats and simple assault. She’d been arrested twice before that, when she was 23, for burglary, and when she was 18, for receiving stolen property.

On Lincoln Drive the speed limit is 25 miles an hour. Anderson was rumored to be doing 90 when she took out Ms. Dior’s shrub on one corner, hit the traffic light on another (sending it like a missile through the Boyds’ next-door neighbor’s front door), gutted the embankment around the Boyds’ house, launched the SUV some 10 feet in the air, and crash landed inside the Boyds’ enclosed porch.

Gregory then proceeds to detail the hassles the Boyds had to endure since they were so unceremoniously intruded upon, starting with the City's Licenses and Inspections response:

L&I had the car moved, and the city billed the Boyds $10,000 for the crane rental.

Two months later the Boyds are still haggling with their insurance company. Anderson was uninsured. The damage to their home—including damage to concrete and stone, as well as a cracked basement wall—is estimated at about $200,000.

Their daughter’s friends aren’t allowed to play at their house anymore. The Boyds sometimes feel unsafe as well, waking in the middle of the night at the slightest noise. And the porch, which they use as a living room­—where they raised their kids, celebrated birthdays, graduations and anniversaries; and where they sometimes slept to catch a breeze on warm, sticky nights—is still boarded up.

Let's see if we can understand this. Lincoln Drive is notorious for being a dangerous road, with reckless, speeding vehicles involved in accidents (as the article cites, according to police reports, from January 2004 to May 2007 there have been 470 car accidents on Lincoln Drive—about three a week). I can vouch for this -- I refuse to drive on Lincoln Drive most of the time. The road is windy and narrow, yet drivers insist on driving like it's a speedway. Despite this knowledge, the City Streets Department and PENNDOT refuse to enforce speeding laws or use any other means to regulate traffic on this roadway. Such inaction by the City allows speeding to become commonplace, and accidents like this one are the result. Yet the City has the nerve to expect innocent individuals (whose home happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) to pay for the removal of a vehicle that partially destroyed their property?

And then of course there's the issue of insurance. What is insurance for if not an unexpected accident that damages your property through no fault of yours? However, like their brethren in the health insurance industry, the property & casualty industry has evolved into a bunch of scam artists who deny legitimate claims as a matter of course. It seems most policies contain an unwritten condition of coverage --the requirement that you must first have your claim denied, regardless of merit, and have to fight the insurer before any claim is paid.

The neighbors have put together a Committee to try to come up with ways to resolve this issue. See PhillyBlog. I've noticed that Warden Drive (the street that our Governor lives on) in East Falls recently had rumble strips added as a traffic calming method. I guess we need someone who is important enough who lives on Lincoln Drive to get something done.

Tags: Philadelphia, Philly, Lincoln Drive