Pennsylvania—and its drivers—will be in the spotlight with events like the FIFA World Cup, America250 events and the NFL Draft.
On April 16, 2024, 17-year-old Damien Hocker was walking home from the gym when a car hit and killed him just three blocks from his home outside of Philadelphia. He was one of 1,127 people who died in a car crash in the commonwealth that year.
“The pain of living without him is relentless, and it has affected not just our family, but his classmates and our larger community. All of our lives are profoundly altered,” said his mother, Elizabeth Hocker, who spoke before a committee of Republican senators on Tuesday.
Since his death, Hocker has turned her attention to road design, championing safer streets and policies designed to protect “all road users,” in the greater Philadelphia area.
“These tragedies are not inevitable. There are well-proven, accessible solutions that, when layered in a safe systems approach, will prevent or reduce the severity of these crashes,” said Hocker.
Pennsylvania — and its drivers — will be in the spotlight with several, high-profile events in 2026, including the FIFA World Cup in Philadelphia, America250 events across the state and the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh. Ahead of a busy year, Senate Republicans evaluated the tools at their disposal to crack down on aggressive driving and pushed for stronger enforcement and targeted efforts.
“Aggressive driving is far too common. Speeding, street racing and reckless driving behavior have become an endemic threat to public safety. It endangers drivers, cyclists and pedestrians alike. It puts entire neighborhoods at risk,” said Sen. Joe Picozzi (R-Philadelphia).
As the commonwealth’s largest city, Philadelphia predictably has the highest number of traffic fatalities. But its per capita rate is nearly double the state’s next most populous city, Pittsburgh, and dwarfs peer cities like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, according to testimony.
“Those are not minor issues. They create dangerous conditions on our roadways, disrupt our neighborhoods and have a direct impact on public safety and quality of life,” said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel.
What can be done to reduce aggressive driving?
A key intervention identified by committee stakeholders were traffic cameras that can ticket speeding drivers, first approved in a 2017 pilot authored by committee chair Sen. Dave Argall (R-Schuylkill).
Though geared toward construction areas throughout the state, Philadelphia enforcement placed one camera on high-traffic Roosevelt Boulevard. Data from the multi-year pilot was eventually used to craft Act 38 of 2023, expanding automated enforcement to all roads in the city.
Bethel shared that crashes fell from 567 in 2019 along Roosevelt Boulevard to 282 by 2025. The city also added speed cameras in November to Broad Street, which he said was “long known for high crash rates associated with reckless driving,” reporting that incidents had already dropped.
“Those results speak for themselves,” said Bethel.
That legislation has saved lives, said Christopher Puchalsky, the director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives with the city’s Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems.
“You don’t need to be a traffic safety expert to see that Philadelphia has an aggressive driving problem, but digging into the data shows a clear picture of its devastating impacts,” said Puchalsky. “These numbers aren’t just statistics: they’re mothers, they’re fathers, they’re daughters, they’re sons whose lives are either lost or permanently altered.”
Puchalsky defined aggressive driving as speeding, running red lights and excessive changing of lanes — noting that the first two maneuvers are particularly deadly for pedestrians. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration identifies speeding, specifically, as the key difference between killing or injuring a pedestrian in a car crash.
Road design can act as a calming measure, encouraging reckless drivers to slow down while better protecting pedestrians and cyclists, stakeholders said. The Federal Highway Administration’s Safe System Roadway Design Hierarchy has four tiers, each aiming to remove or manage conflict points, reduce speed and increase attentiveness.
Cities like Philadelphia have installed road medians and “pedestrian islands” in roadways, or safe areas buffered from car traffic, along with extending sidewalks into crosswalks, shortening the distance to cross the street.
“These safety improvements help drivers avoid potential crashes and reinforce that responsibility is shared among all road users,” said Puchalsky.
But enforcement and infrastructure also need to come with messaging targeting the riskiest drivers: men between the ages of 16 and 30. They cause the most crashes that involve a fatality or serious injury, said Puchalsky.
Improving streets with safety in mind
Hocker, Damien’s mother, emphasized the need to better analyze problematic drivers, noting that some people aren’t deterred by tickets or suspended licenses.
“There are people in New York (City) who have tens of thousands of dollars in tickets from speeding cameras or automated enforcement. So for those people, it’s not an effective tool and we have to have something in place for when that doesn’t work,” said Hocker.
Hocker highlighted statewide efforts by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which distributes grants to improve infrastructure, but wondered if the funding was insufficient to meet the need.
“I don’t really know how our streets got to the point that they’re at today where they’re not functional for everybody and they’re not safe for everybody,” said Hocker. “Children and older people and disabled people, in particular, may not be able to drive to and from wherever they need to go, and so they are going to be walking or taking the bus.
“We need to make sure that those people are safe, not just the people … who can make the choice to get behind the wheel of their car and drive.”
Picozzi, who requested the hearing, highlighted other forms of transportation, calling for “reimagining regional rail (and) improving service times” alongside better support for cyclists.
“We have to look at the whole thing in totality. We can’t just be biting off this little piece or that little piece and expect to have a big macro result, right?” Picozzi said. “There has to be really comprehensive planning.”
Argall said the General Assembly would need to take “an all of the above approach” with its legislation, saying the body needed to study transportation and safety statewide.
“The goal is to make sure that families don’t experience what you went through,” Argall said to Hocker. “I think what’s really important about this panel is centralizing the human impact of all this. We can sit here and talk about policies and numbers and PennDOT statistics … but the real thing is the people. The son or the mother or the spouse who never came home. That’s what this is all about.”
