Lansdale residents warn of close calls on speed study street

Residents continue to sound off about safety on a borough street, as a borough traffic study continues.

Council members heard an update on both in early June, including seeing video of a close call that neighbors say was just one of several lately.

“We’ve been having issues a lot lately with speeding. Our daughter almost got hit by a speeding car, and then just recently, a really bad accident happened in front of our house from a woman who was driving recklessly,” said resident Nick Amato.

“Our friend was pulling back into the driveway with two kids in the car, our daughter’s age, and if they had waited another three seconds to pull out of the driveway, it could’ve been a really bad situation,” he said.

For several years, council and its public safety committee have heard complaints about traffic throughout town, and about drivers speeding and ignoring stop signs on the town’s side streets, along with gripes about congestion on Main and Broad streets related to the rail crossing at the center of town. In early February police Chief Mike Trail showed a formal route his department had identified with the town’s traffic engineer, consisting of Norway, Sycamore and Lombardy Drives, Laurel Lane, Hancock Street and Delaware, Derstine and Columbia avenues, all of which drivers have been observed using to get as a shortcut to get around backups on Main Street. In mid-February council authorized the town’s traffic engineer to perform the study, in April the chief said data collection had started, and in May he said one section had been counted, with several phases looking at different areas of the borough at a time.

    Map showing several streets in Lansdale, highlighted in green, commonly used to bypass traffic on Main Street and set for study by the borough’s traffic engineer.
 Lansdale Police Department   

In the June 5 public safety committee meeting, Trail reported back that the study itself was well underway, before the residents of Oakland and the surrounding streets sounded off about the safety concerns they’d seen.

“Data collection is in, for the three phases of the traffic study. Most of the study results have been pretty consistent with expectations,” Trail said.

“We are going to redo Hancock Street: we got what I think is an anomalous number. For a one-week period, we got 85,000 cars on Hancock,” he said, prompting an extrapolation from Mayor Garry Herbert: “That would be four million cars in a year.”

Once a fresh count is done on Hancock, police and the town’s traffic engineer will study those counts, the topography of the roads studied, and the costs of any possible fixes or changes that could help cut down on speeding, the chief said.

“They’re going to start their evaluation looking at the impacts, what the data is saying to them, and weigh that against best practices in the traffic engineering world,” he said.

“Is there an issue here? If there is an issue, what is the issue? If they determine what the issue is, what’s the remedy? Then, what’s the cost? We’re still on track to get a draft report by the fall,” Trail said.

After the update, came the concerns, with about a dozen residents of Oakland saying they’d like to see safety upgrades sooner than during budget talks this fall, followed by any new construction or roadwork in 2025.

“The whole block is young kids, and it only takes one second for one of those to dart out” into traffic, Amato said.

He then showed the chief and committee members a pair of surveillance videos from that street, one showing two young children trying to cross the street as an oncoming driver slams on their brakes and narrowly misses them, and another nighttime video showing a resident backing out of their driveway to drive down the street, and seconds later a car speeds past and slams into a parked car.

    A speeding car, center left, hits a parked car on Oakland Avenue in Lansdale in May 2024.
 Mike Amato   

“It’s terrifying to see how close it was, to two kids and a mom, getting T-boned in the side of their car. It’s literally three or four seconds difference,” Amato said.

A couple said they had photos of a truck parked in their driveway that was hit by a driver speeding down the street, and others said they’d had cars hit multiple times and had repair bills in the thousands of dollars, had Halloween decorations damaged by drivers running them over, and were worried about a daycare that operates on that block.

Herbert asked if they knew whether the drivers were local to that street or from elsewhere, and Amato said one of the close calls came from a driver who “lives in the neighborhood, up the street somewhere,” and others said they’d seen close calls involving drivers they didn’t recognize.

“It’s a bona fide cut through,” said one, and another added that “all of us have been watching the street like a hawk” since the traffic study was announced.

Trail told the group that he would check the data collected from Oakland Avenue to see if it came from their block or elsewhere on the street, and Amato said he’d seen drivers disregard both stop signs and speed limits on that stretch.

“They don’t even stop at the stop sign, they go right through and come flying around the corner,” he said.

Trail and public safety committee chairwoman Meg Currie Teoh said they’d welcome more concerns and any more photos or videos of close calls, before the chief warned that the traffic study may not find solutions for every problem.

“The issue becomes: if we can reduce the amount of traffic that goes there, we’re going to reduce by default the amount of speeding vehicles,” Trail said.

“You’ve all seen the number of crashes in the area: fatal crashes, significant crashes. And in almost all of those cases, it’s not the environment, it’s not vehicle factors. It’s driver error, driver inattention, driver impatience,” he said.

Amato asked if the study could consider adding speed humps on that block, and councilman Andrew Carroll said that could be a recommendation, but might cause additional safety problems: “They crash too – you hit (a speed hump) too fast, and then you hit the cars on the side, next to you,” he said.

And Herbert said the residents should not be surprised if their photos or videos end up in the report itself.

“Part of what the traffic study is designed to do, is come up with solutions for these problems. But we can’t install those things without having the reason, and the data, to do it,” he said.

The chief added that their block of Oakland had seen neighbors be more engaged than anywhere else along the study route since it was announced, and Herbert said he recalled hearing speeding and safety concerns as far back as pre-pandemic, but the formal traffic study was delayed due to inaccurate counts during the work-from-home years.

“We’re doing it now, we’re getting it done. It will take time, and I’m sorry for that, but we are trying to do it right,” Herbert said. “We’re going as fast as we can.”

Trail added another way the neighbors could make their voices heard regarding safety concerns: by pushing state legislators to back bills allowing local police departments to use radar for traffic and speed enforcement.

“We cannot use radar today. We can use lines (marked on the street), but the problem with that is, under the law you can’t even start enforcement until 10 miles per hour over the posted speed limit. So if you’re 25 (miles per hour), no one can be stopped until 36 or 36 miles per hour, Trail said.

“If the state legislature allowed us to use radar at a local level, that comes down to five miles per hour. So we get a little help,” he said.

Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on June 20 with various committees starting at 6:30 p.m. on July 3, all at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.

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