One quarter of all city land is devoted to transportation, the airport takes up 2.5 square miles, and streets account for 11 square miles of Philadelphia. For the last 15 years community groups and restaurateurs have been taking back these streets from cars, and transforming parking spaces into parks (parklets), restaurant seating (streeteries), and extra street space into pedestrian plazas. These improve the public realm and support small businesses, but take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to bring to the street.
But it’s not the cost of materials or time that’s the greatest burden to community groups looking to build public spaces in city streets. It’s the cost of dealing with the City. No, the City isn’t charging community groups exorbitant fees to permit new public, or semi-public spaces along corridors (permit application fees are $125). Rather, it is the cost of complying with regulations. For instance, Philadelphia’s Streetery Design Regulations require the use of crash barriers to protect diners: Crash barriers cost $700 each, and $2,000 in delivery fees.
However, the biggest cost, the one that will stop a project dead in its tracks, are the insurance costs. Whether its streeteries, parklets, or pedestrian plazas, the City requires permit holders to hold insurance: More importantly, it requires stewards of public spaces in city streets to indemnify the City in case there are lawsuits. And that’s where it hurts.
In 2025, Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM) was to debut a long awaited public space in front of a supermarket in the heart of North Philly, when their insurance broker refused to insure the space if it had to indemnify the City. In West Philly, the University City District, which stewards multiple public spaces, has seen its insurance costs skyrocket for these very same reasons.
Ostensibly this makes sense. The City is self-insured, which means that Philadelphia is forced to pay any damages it is found liable for. Between 2020 and 2024, the City spent over $160 million in tort claims, and close to 40 percent of that money involved the Streets Department.
What does this mean? It means that the City is requiring community groups and nonprofits to pay the price, both figuratively as well as literally, for a problem that doesn’t exist.
As transportation researchers, we wanted to test the effectiveness of the City’s use of partner indemnification to minimize tort risk. We looked at 30 years of PennDOT automobile crash data and of civil action data from the City, (i.e. the results of lawsuit settlements paid out by the City). We explored the data to see if there was any relationship between traffic safety, the presence of parklets, streeteries and pedestrian plazas, and how often the City was sued, as well as how much the City had to pay out in damages. What we found surprised us.
We found no statistical evidence to suggest that there is a relationship between what the City pays out in lawsuits, the frequency of such lawsuits, traffic safety, or the presence of street furniture on Philadelphia’s streets.
For the last two decades Philadelphia has seen a reduction in automobile crashes, dropping from a peak of 55,286 in 2006 to a low of 31,320 in 2024, despite occasional upward spikes along this downward trend. While there was much press regarding the uptick in aggressive driving and fatal car accidents in the city during the pandemic, it appears that over time crashes have declined substantially. In tandem with this trend, there is no clear pattern in the number of lawsuits, and the amount the City pays as a result of these lawsuits — over the same period both measures fluctuate seemingly at random, and have no clear relationship to the presence of Street Furniture, or how safe Philly streets are.
What does this mean? It means that the City is requiring community groups and nonprofits to pay the price, both figuratively as well as literally, for a problem that doesn’t exist. More community driven street furniture does not mean more lawsuits, or higher costs.
This isn’t the first time the City has forced communities to pay for policy decisions. By making Registered Community Organizations an official part of the zoning process, the City opened these community groups to lawsuits from developers. The City found a way to make it right, reimbursing these communities for these added insurance costs. The City has an even more low cost way to make it easier for community groups to steward public spaces in the street, simply by removing the indemnification requirements.
Ariel Ben-Amos is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching in the Urban Studies Program. Joshua Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Data Science and Computer Science at Oberlin College & Conservatory.
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