Mayoral Musings: Susquehanna and Courtland Two-Way Conversion Update

Mayor Garry Herbert•

In August of last year, Lansdale Borough Council approved the conversion of Susquehanna Avenue and Courtland Street from one way traffic to bi-directional roadways. As shared back in 2023, the reason for the conversion of these roadways was two-fold: the first was to improve general traffic flow in and around Main Street where congestion can create other challenges in and around the area, and the second was to improve access to both the Susquehanna and Vine parking lots.

Based on positive feedback, it has been recommended that this change become permanent going forward.

Over the last several months, Lansdale Police have been monitoring both streets to see if the conversion caused any unforeseen traffic issues and to see if the conversion delivered the positive impacts we were looking for. Anecdotally, both parking lots have been busier than they had been in the past. In particular, the Susquehanna lot has benefitted from the ability to turn right onto Susquehanna and immediately pull into that lot in the center of our downtown area. Creating greater access to existing parking is helpful to all the businesses on Main Street and will hopefully help attract more commerce to the area.

While there have not been any substantive traffic issues related to this change, there has been one persistent challenge to this conversion: people turning left onto Susquehanna from Main Street. This challenge was expected at the outset of the experiment and is something that can be addressed through stricter enforcement going forward. As you can imagine, people turning left onto Susquehanna can create a bottleneck in traffic flow on Main Street, causing traffic to back up — potentially over the SEPTA tracks.

As this change in traffic flow becomes permanent, police will be enforcing the no left turn rule more persistently to ensure compliance going forward.

While this is a small change to our traffic flow, it supports the larger narrative that, as a community, we are ready and willing to adjust and change to improve our community as we evolve over time. As noted last week, there is a pending traffic study to help us address some known traffic flow challenges that are occurring across Lansdale. It is my hope that we can use similar conversions, perhaps from two way to one way, to help address some of those issues going forward as well.

(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert. The views expressed are his own and are not representative of North Penn Now or Lansdale Borough.)