LehighValleyNews.com asked readers for input for The Road Ahead, our latest project examining local traffic and road safety. They rose to the challenge and shared their takes on road design, traffic patterns, driving trends, public transit and more. The Road Scholar will review some of the concerns driving Lehigh Valley motorists. Comments from readers have been edited for grammar, space and clarity.
ROADSIDE IN THE LEHIGH VALLEY - With the arrival of lovely summer weather, I figured it was a good time to break out my LIDAR gun and keep an eye out for speeding drivers.
And while speeding is something of a venial sin — nobody goes exactly the speed limit all the time — excessive speeding is demonstrably dangerous.
It's a pretty straightforward — if grim — physics puzzle.
Drivers traveling at greater speeds have less time to react should something like a deer or student driver pull out in front of them. And greater speeds mean there's a greater force exerted should a collision occur.
"I've been doing exercises like this in the Lehigh Valley for years, but (95 mph is) the highest speed I've recorded by a wide margin."The Road Scholar, armed with a speed gun
PennDOT data indicates that speeding was a factor in about 13.5% of all fatal crashes in the Lehigh Valley over the last decade.
Speeding is particularly concerning in areas where drivers are likely to encounter pedestrians. There are very real limits on how much force the human body can withstand, and it's not a coincidence that roads with high pedestrian volumes usually have posted speed limits between 25 mph and 35 mph.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety finds that people struck by cars traveling at 25 mph have a 3% chance of dying. The odds of dying jump to 19% at 35 mph and 63% at 45 mph.
So, I asked readers where they believe speeding is a problem.
I headed out to some of these locations last week and took readings with my LIDAR gun. If a vehicle was going 10 mph or more over the speed limit, I made a note. The 10 mph trigger was chosen deliberately to eliminate any chances of inaccuracy with my device and to roughly emulate what local police can enforce.
Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that bars local police from using radar or lidar. The most common alternative requires police to use a stop watch to time how fast drivers pass between two known points. To compensate for any potential slow reflexes on the cops' parts, drivers generally have to be traveling about 10 mph above the posted speed limit to get a speeding ticket.
1200 block of Pennsylvania Ave., Bethlehem
OK, technically, nobody asked me to scope out Pennsylvania Avenue. But several neighbors went to Bethlehem City Council recently and begged city officials to address the speeding there.
Public pleading counts in my book, so I took readings from 1:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. on the 35 mph road.
In my 15-minute stay, I encountered 10 cars going at least 45 mph, including one clocking in at 59 mph.
It didn't take long to get a sense of the problem here. Studies have found that people are more likely to speed when they feel safe, and the road design here is likely giving motorists the impression they can travel faster than the speed limit.
My suspicion is shared by Maritza Figueroa, whose home I happened to be standing in front of during this exercise.
The road here has unusually wide lanes, which she believes persuades drivers to travel faster than the speed limit. Many will also try to pass slower moving vehicles (i.e., ones adhering to the speed limit) given the wider lanes. That's when they find out too late they didn't account for street parking. Figueroa said her family has had two parked cars totaled this way.
"As soon as they hit Union Boulevard and wind up here, they rev up their engines," she said.
Schaefer Run Road at Waterbury Road, Upper Macungie Township
Reader Daniel J. asked me to take a look into this residential neighborhood just around the corner from the Route 100/Route 222 merger.
"People speed along the road with limited and short lines of sight. There have been two accidents there in 3 years. Pedestrians crossing the road are always in extreme danger," he wrote.
While that frequency doesn't jump off the page to me, any crashes on your doorstep can be too close for comfort. I staked out the corner between 2:50 p.m. and 3:20 p.m., just as many school buses were dropping off their students.
Daniel's description of the roadway is accurate. Schaefer Run has a 30 mph speed limit, and the sight lines aren't great due to curves in the road. But I didn't see the speeding levels he described.
During my 30-minute stay, I saw three vehicles going 40 mph or faster; the fastest clocked in at 41 mph. Nearly every car I saw was obeying the 25 mph speed limit.
Some of the school buses were pushing their luck, but none approached our 40 mph mark. I'm not saying Daniel is wrong, but I just didn't see signs of a significant problem during my stop here.
A neighbor who was very suspicious of the stranger hanging around with a speed gun backed up Daniel's account. While he wouldn't agree to an interview, the neighbor said it's common to see sports cars and motorcyclists whizzing through.
Center Valley Parkway at Saucon Creek Road, Upper Saucon Township
Unlike our other stops, Center Valley Parkway is an arterial road designed for significant traffic. I set up camp by Penn State Lehigh Valley a few hundred feet away from the entrance to Promenade Saucon Valley at the suggestion of Diane K.
People flaunt the speed limit and weave in and out of traffic, she said, particularly between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m.
I encountered some technical difficulties during my stay between 4:04 p.m. and 4:34 p.m. Given the higher speeds, I needed to be further away from the road to safely observe traffic.
But that extra distance also made it difficult to get accurate readings, particularly when cars were bunched up on the four-lane road. I definitively recorded 22 vehicles going over the speed limit, but I'm confident I would have recorded at least double that amount under more ideal circumstances.
What really stood out was how fast the worst offenders were going. I clocked a blue muscle car going 95 mph in the right lane, racing past some cars that were almost certainly speeding themselves.
I've been doing exercises like this in the Lehigh Valley for years, but that's the highest speed I've recorded by a wide margin. (I haven't done Interstate 78 or Route 22 for safety reasons.) I also recorded two cars going 75 mph or more, one of whom was a motorcyclist dressed in a motorsports uniform.
Center Valley Parkway doesn't get many pedestrians — there's no sidewalk and you can't legally park on the shoulder. Many of my concerns about pedestrian safety don't apply here. But there's no world where speeds of 65 mph are appropriate. It's particularly concerning given the proximity to the Route 309/Center Valley Parkway intersection.
PennDOT data shows that intersection is among the deadliest in the region. It's so bad that PennDOT is rebuilding the road to improve conditions. Seeing someone going more than double the speed limit on Center Valley Parkway reinforced that reputation.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Want to be plugged in to all things traffic and transit in the Lehigh Valley? Sign up for Tom Shortell's weekly Road Scholar newsletter and get it delivered to your in-box on Tuesday mornings. Better yet, tell him what you're thinking — or what you want to know — at toms@lehighvalleynews.com.
