Route 28 plan eases congestion at Highland Park Bridge

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation wants to add through lanes on Route 28, plus wider lanes and traffic lights on ramps around the approaches and exits to the Highland Park Bridge, to reduce traffic jams and improve safety at the interchange.

Penn DOT and the Federal Highway Administration unveiled the plans Tuesday evening at Fox Chapel Area High School. The meeting was to get public input before final design and construction, set for late 2019.

The plans call for using the existing median between the north and south lanes to widen the highway to two through lanes in each direction, plus an extended exit lane onto the bridge. The interchange now creates a bottleneck because it narrows to one through lane and one exit lane in each direction.

“It’s a wide median there, so we have some room,” said Greg Cerminara, vice president of road designer Michael Baker International.

For traffic coming off the bridge, there will be extended merge lanes in each direction.

Plans also call for changing dangerous traffic patterns around the bridge itself. For example, northbound traffic exiting onto the bridge would have its own lane and would no longer have to merge on a curve.

The project also calls for traffic lights to be added on Freeport Road — in Aspinwall on one side and in Sharpsburg on the other — to reduce merges and control traffic to and from the highway.

An additional light would be placed at the end of the bridge at Freeport Road. That would allow one lane from Freeport Road to merge onto the highway in each direction, eliminating a merge point with traffic already on the bridge.

Traffic crossing the bridge would have a light for the first time, but the expectation is that traffic would flow better with the merges from Freeport Road eliminated.

“We believe the light there will be very efficient,” said Cheryl Moon-Sirianni, Penn DOT’s executive for District 11.

A main concern from the crowd of more than 150 was the plan to continue using the ramp from Virginia Avenue Extension onto southbound Route 28.

They said motorists enter from the right and immediately try to merge left to exit onto the bridge. That merge is across one lane now but would be across two under the proposal.

Ms. Moon-Sirianni said the department considered eliminating or modifying the ramp to prevent exiting onto the bridge but that was too expensive.