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Traffic. I am sure the word alone will raise tensions and frustrations within residents and travelers who journey through Lansdale daily; the most common of which tends to be the speed at which people are traveling down residential (defined as not Main or Broad) streets.
Rightfully so, residents should be concerned and involved in decreasing the speed people are traveling down their streets. We are a community of families walking their dogs, kids playing together in yards and narrowly parked cars along densely populated streets. With cars traveling in excess of the posted speed limit, there is a real threat that someone might get hurt or property will get damaged.
But how did we get here? Why does it seem like this is such a prevalent problem across the borough, and what can be done to alleviate it?
It helps to think of our roadways like veins and arteries in the body. Our bodies maintain a certain blood pressure to ensure our bodies function properly from top to bottom. The same is true for our road systems. They are designed as a whole system that purposefully impact one another based on the traffic volume and patterns for when they were built. That last part is key: our roadways were not designed to handle the amount of traffic we currently see. They were designed for the volume of the past.
What has happened is congestion at Main and Broad, Main and North Wales, and other high frequency intersections, while common even in the past, have become significantly more voluminous in the last 10 years due to more people moving out of Philadelphia and into the suburbs (per usual, we are not the only ones experiencing this). This added traffic volume, and drivers looking to get around/out of traffic, has resulted in more vehicles taking side streets as cut throughs to try and avoid lights and traffic.
Naturally, when people are looking to save time they begin driving faster on whatever cut-through they have found. Before we get into solutions to this very real concern, let’s discuss what it takes to add stop signs and other traffic impacting devices.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (DOT) mandates that before the deployment of stop signs and other traffic impacting devices, we generate a historical record of accidents and speed studies (both of which have been done on many streets across the community). For the record, I agree, it doesn’t make sense to wait for a laundry list of accidents to fix something if you know it is occurring. However, we must live within the rules DOT creates. As for speed studies, typically, when a speed study is deployed, it almost always comes back between 30 miles per hour and 35 miles per hour. Very rarely has a study come back over 10 miles per hour, allowing for action to be taken.
Between these two high requirements, it makes decreasing traffic speed using traffic control devices difficult. Additionally, our police department has a limited number of officers operating at any given time. They cannot be everywhere at once, or only doing traffic control, and even if they could, municipal police cannot issue traffic tickets for speeds under 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit because radar cannot be utilized by local police, per state law.
The solution lies in understanding how to keep traffic on the main roads and off our side streets as much as possible. In order to do that, we need to comprehensively review all the traffic flow devices in the borough and identify where the best place for new deployment will be to mitigate cut-through traffic. With a full review of the borough, we will be able to show DOT exactly how these changes will improve traffic flow and decrease speed on multiple roadways. In order to generate this level of data, we need to invest in traffic monitoring cameras and technology, including allowing radar use at the local level, to help synthesize the very best way to manage traffic.
This is 2020, and we do not need to rely on hunches anymore. I am pleased to say that Lansdale Police will be undertaking such a program to help determine the very best way to decrease overall speed and improve traffic conditions over the next several months.
If we continue to try and “spot-fix” each side street, DOT will continue to deny solutions to a problem that needs to be fixed. I am hopeful that we will have a better understanding of how best to attack this problem from a holistic standpoint soon (January 2021), and be able to improve life in Lansdale for everyone now and into the future.
(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert.)
See also:
Mayoral Musings: Looking Back At Lansdale’s Inaugural ‘Inclusion Day’
Mayoral Musings: Establishing A Foundation For Future Generations
Mayoral Musings: Remembering Doctor King
Mayoral Musings: A Decade Of Infrastructure Upgrades To Come
Mayoral Musings: 5G And The Technological Future Of Lansdale
