Morning Call – January 19, 2005

Widen 309, Elevated Highways

 

Dear Friends,

            Good morning. When I read about the possibility of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) building left-turn lanes on Rt. 309 through Coopersburg, I thought of my friend John Detweiler’s facetious solution for congested highways. “The highway carries about 25,000 to 35,000 vehicles daily,” the Call’s report claimed about car traffic in Coopersburg (Jan. 12). In Quakertown it’s worse. During rush hours, the highway becomes a three-mile long parking lot.

            Coopersburg doesn’t need widening 309…it needs a bypass. Quakertown needs two (Rt. 309, plus Routes 313 and 663); so does Dublin, Cross Keys, Buckingham, Newtown, and Langhorne.  Bucks needs a cross county highway. As the crow flies, it’s probably no further than 30 miles from Quakertown to Bristol but it takes 90 minutes to get there. Anyone working in Doylestown experiences the snail’s pace caused by too many vehicles for a road constructed 100 years ago.

            The last bypasses were built around Sellersville, Doylestown (two of them around the county seat, of which one remains unfinished) and Newtown were 1970 projects. The late State Senator Marvin Keller from Newtown was the key legislator behind those improvements. At the time, merchants in these towns worried that their businesses would suffer if bypasses were built. “Our businesses will dry up,” Sellersville merchants moaned. But those fears failed to materialize. I’d bet that business would improve in Coopersburg if a bypass came to fruition.

Unfortunately, the cost to acquire the land and build bypasses has become excessive. State Senator Rob Wonderling (R-24th) believes that the solution to overcrowded highways lies in restoring the commuter rail road along the existing right of way from Bethlehem to Lansdale. Wonderling told me that if left to various governments, it would take until 2020 to have commuter trains running. “I’d short cut that,” he said. “If we use a Design-Build-Operate-Maintain (DBOM) program like the Hudson River-Bergen County line in New Jersey, we could cut the time to get up and running in half. And I’d start the commuter line from Lansdale to Shelly.”

“I think, first of all, it’s long overdue,” Skip Link, owner of Link’s Beverage in Coopersbug was quoted in the Call about widening 309. “Obviously, it will impact my business. The whole thing is how do we get out with the least scars.”

Detweiler, the man who quarterbacked Link’s Quakertown High School football team in 1956, has another view. “We should build elevated highways,” Detweiler laughed. Elevated highways, like the Pulaski Highway near New York City, I wondered?

“What do you think about Detweiler’s funny idea,” I asked Link?

“I think it’s funny,” Link quipped in reply.

Detweiler reasoned that building a raised highway over congested towns would solve the problem. The highway’s right of way already exists so additional land acquisition would be unnecessary. The elevated road would be expensive to be sure. But tolls could compensate for construction costs. I wonder how residents along Broad Street would react to a Pulaski Highway in dead center Quakertown? Detweiler was joking of course. So am I.

Still, his facetious suggestion may not seem so far-fetched if you could cut the driving time from Quakertown to Doylestown by 15 minutes…Bristol by 45 minutes and Quakertown to Allentown and Bethlehem by 10 minutes.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be better to build a commuter line from Bethlehem to Lansdale? Wouldn’t it take tremendous pressure away from Rt. 309? And if Wonderling is correct…especially if it could be ready in five years…that, friends, is no joke.

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith