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I read the Times Leader’s Feb. 20 article about Don Casterline’s 10-year campaign to get a stop sign placed on Middle Road in Hanover Township with considerable anger. There is a great deal wrong with the picture presented by this article.
While Mr. Casterline is convinced the road is dangerous and there is one anecdote about an out-of-control driver, no evidence is presented in the article for an actually hazardous set of conditions. What this situation seemingly represents is another situation in which the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, charged with balancing the rights of motorists with those of local residents and with using engineering standards to determine proper solutions, merely bends, quite improperly, to local political pressure. It’s too bad PennDOT engineers have abandoned the principles of traffic engineering and now act like local politicians, forgetting who pays their salaries. We motorists do.
There is a reason both PennDOT and the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices recommend against the use of stop signs to slow traffic or control traffic speeds: Doing this simply makes no sense to motorists. Why ask someone to stop in order to merely slow them? It’s mere harassment. The tragedy is that improperly placed, all-way stops do little but squander a valuable form of capital – the faith motorists would otherwise have in the relevance of traffic regulations to safety. Such improper signage also increases local air pollution.
In examining the installation of a four-way in Radnor Township some years ago, I discovered that PennDOT “traffic engineers,” who often do not deserve the title, are happy to disregard the science to silence local activists. Those activists obviously forget what it is like to come to an unwarranted stop sign many times a day while driving when they request an improper solution to a problem that might not even be critical.
If there were fender-benders at this intersection, inadequate visibility or heavy traffic in both directions that caused difficulty in safely negotiating the intersection – factors that are clearly presented in the official PennDOT warrants – the stop sign might well be justified. No such factors are mentioned in the article.
I can understand local residents’ consternation at seeing their once quiet street becoming a busy thoroughfare with that inevitable minority of overly aggressive drivers looking like a potentially serious problem. But, there are always better ways to deal with such situations than stop signs.
The most basic solution is for us to keep up with infrastructure and build necessary roads – such as the soon-to-be-completed South Valley Parkway – more quickly.
John Baxter
Downingtown