Information that we collect from the air quality assessment and noise assessment will be incorporated into the environmental assessment document including the environmental clearance process. That information is a summary of some of the technical analysis we do. That information will be made public during the draft EA assessment, and the project technical documents will be made available as well. We will be looking for comments primarily on the summary information that will come out as part of the EA document.
The information will be made available in a variety of ways. It will be in person at the PennDOT District 6 offices. It will be made available at various public locations throughout the multiple boroughs and townships at their offices. It will be made available online on the website and often times at a public library. We work to make sure that it is accessible to all individuals in as easy a way as possible.
We did include that as part of our traffic study with the updated data that we collected, we assessed more intersections along Gilliam and as part of that we also do safety analysis to attempt to predict crash information. That isn’t specific to pedestrians that’s for vehicular traffic but we do assess that.
This is being discussed with the municipalities and the public officials. The potential loop we have looked at provides various connections whether it’s in areas where service roads are removed and it is a standalone shared use path. If it’s in conjunction with a stretch of service road that needs to be maintained and those would be accommodated on the shoulder. The stretches up at the north end where it would be able to use existing sidewalk that’s currently out there.
So not that it’s going to be a continuous shared-use path for the entire stretch but multiple forms of connections that create the full 4-mile loop that runs down from Highland Avenue at the south end and loop up along those existing service roads up to the 413 Pine Street connections with the proposed sidewalk that we have up there.
We are still in the initial stages as far as gathering feedback and was just an idea, bikes and pedestrians and multimodal is a hot topic these days and trying to provide some of those additional connections to the local communities is something we were putting out there as an option to discuss with the municipalities. Not that it is set in stone, and it could happen for the entirety or could be one or none of the municipalities.
Further studies have not been put out to date to get any sort of commitments from the municipalities affected by it. We have referenced the Bucks County Bicycle and Pedestrian master plan that was previously created just to look at some concepts where previous surveys had indicated potentials for bike paths. We are using other references and studies as a basis for the concept.
We have had direct coordination with Neshaminy High School, it’s been a few years since contact, but we will reengage with them soon. We have made adjustments to some of the design per the request due to those large gatherings.
Regarding the Fairhill Avenue, Highland Avenue and Old Lincoln Highway intersection, leaving it signalized so that it can control the traffic signal itself. The roundabout itself is not an impediment to traffic flow especially if it’s heavy in one direction, so that should not have any negative effect on the traffic flow of a large event coming out of the school.
The video of this meeting will be posted on the PennDOT website. Along with PDFs of the slides.
At the end of the day, the intention was to look at bike and pedestrian mobility within the service roads and look at opportunities where we could remove the service roads because the service roads themselves are maintained by the local municipalities and not PennDOT.
Obviously as long as the frontage or the service roads are detached from US 1 they can be retained, but they will not have access to US 1. At that point they would just be local one-way connector roads between say Bellevue and the Southern Limit of the project on either side.
At this stage of the project we have not looked at right-of-way impacts in detail.
Native American tribal consultation will be conducted as part of the project. It is going to be completed by a combination of PennDOT and the Federal Highway Administration. This is an ongoing process as part of the environmental clearance.
From a safety standpoint, there have been multiple fatalities along the corridor for mainline Route 1 traffic. There are no shoulders, so there is no recovery for errant vehicles if somebody has an issue. There is nowhere to pull off if you have a breakdown. The raised concrete traffic islands do not prevent vehicles from leaving the highway and there have been incidents of vehicles leaving the highway, crossing the raised concrete traffic islands, and ending up either in somebody’s front yard or in another accident along the service roads themselves.
The reality is to improve it we need to provide more room for maneuverability along the mainline travel lanes so that requires an inside shoulder and a more substantial outside shoulder for vehicles refuge and concrete barriers to prevent errant vehicles from leaving the highway. Also, the West Interchange Road overpass has concrete piers in the traffic island that are a hazard and are of concern.
The study for this project started back in 2011, and the initial project design was to eliminate the raised concrete traffic islands, to eliminate the intermediate crossovers because those were where the high rates of crashes occur or have a tendency to occur and still leave the access/service roads open at the northern and southern limits.
We presented this to the public and got extensive push back on that option. We had a public plans display and then Senator Ferry led a town hall back in 2014 regarding this. So, at that point PennDOT made the decision to advance the southern two projects RC1 and RC2 and reconsider the RC3 corridor and look at alternatives. The primary alternative being looking at interchanges and closing the frontage road because of the concerns from the initial public involvement.
