PCVB, Philadelphia, SpringPhiladelphia, SpringMore often than not, instances of verbal or physical harassment or near-misses with automobiles involving Philly runners go unreported. And if they are, police records don’t differentiate between runners and regular pedestrians.

Alon Abramson, the creator of the Philadelphia-based running website Run Philly, is determined to fix that problem.

Launched just last week, Abramson added an “Incident Report” page where Philly runners can submit information like the type of crime (i.e. verbally harassed/threatened by a pedestrian, physically assaulted or mugged), location, and time of day that will be entered into a database.

“These incidents must happen every single day, multiple times per day,” Abramson told Runner’s World Newswire. “I want to provide a mechanism to capture that. In doing so, we would actually have material to give to decision-makers and people with actual power to makes some changes like fixing bad intersections or putting out more patrols. It’s a bit of a civic experiment.”

After crowdsourcing data through this fall, Abramson will create a heatmap, which will ideally reveal hotspots of trouble for Philly runners.

“I think runners are a really important group in this city,” Abramson said, “and I think representing their voice is a good way to interact with politicians to help improve parks and intersections and other things like that.”

To report an incident, visit http://www.runphil.ly/incident-report.html.

 

Original article by Megan Hetzel with Runner’s World.

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