Route 222 widening in Berks, including roundabouts, nears end
After three years of work zones, including construction of two roundabouts in Maidencreek Township, the Route 222 widening and improvement project that erased a notorious bottleneck near the Route 73 intersection is quickly approaching the finish line.
Over the next three weeks, PennDOT district spokesman Ronald J. Young Jr. said, a highway contractor will lay the top layer of asphalt, and the orange traffic cones will finally be removed from the two-mile section between the Route 222 expressway ramps in Ontelaunee Township and Berks Memorial Gardens cemetery in Maidencreek.
Fortunately for most people, the paving will be done at nighttime.
Other than some off-road work, the project will be completed, Young said.
“It’s a little ahead of the scheduled contract completion date for the end of November,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, we’ll be done with major work by the end of the month.”
Motorists have been riding through the two newest roundabouts for a couple of months. One is at Tamarack Boulevard/ Genesis Drive just north of Route 73, and the other is at Schaeffer Road, near Berks Memorial Gardens.
The roundabouts are not the only reason traffic is flowing better than it has in years, even before the jersey barriers went up.
The widening of the road between the expressway ramps and the Route 73 intersection has eliminated the road-rage-provoking bottleneck that caused vehicles coming off the expressway to stack at peak travel times where two lanes of Allentown Pike reduced to a single lane approaching the traffic light.
There are now two lanes in each direction in that stretch, plus additional turn lanes at Route 73.
“I’ve been traveling this section since 2010 and it’s the best I’ve seen,” said Blandon resident Ryan Postal, who had stopped at Redner’s Quick Shoppe along the highway.
The New Jersey native is familiar with traffic circles; he only wishes one had been built at Route 73, which is the only intersection controlled by traffic signals between the Route 222 expressway in Ontelaunee and the Kutztown Bypass.
Besides improving traffic flow, he said, the road is much safer, Postal said.
The roundabout at Schaffer Road slows traffic, giving motorists waiting to enter Route 222 from Schaeffer Road the opportunity to do it without risking a crash.
Another Blandon resident, Zack Higo, who also stopped at the convenience store, gave a similar assessment.
“Since they put in two lanes, it’s much smoother,” he said.
Higo added that he’s slightly disappointed that the two travel lanes reduce to a single lane in each direction at the roundabout at Genesis Drive/Tamarack Boulevard. He’s waiting to see what the lane striping looks like once the top coat is laid.
For much of the last two years, however, smooth is not a word that anyone would use to describe the section of Route 222 that has seen numerous serious crashes over the years, several of them fatal. Most of the serious crashes have involved rear-end collisions.
The cattle chutes shifted from one half of the road to the other while the road was rebuilt and widened.
It was an arduous task to pull onto the road from businesses, not to mention access their parking lots. Ground-level, orange direction signs with names of businesses guided motorists across temporary ramps to access entrances.
At times during construction, businesses could not open their doors for a day because paving or pipe installation blocked their access. They had little choice but to smile through clenched teeth, and look forward to brighter days ahead.
Those days have arrived.
The businesses
“We are past the place where we’re forced to repeatedly close our driveway off to put in piping, past the point where we have to close to do paving,” said Paula Taylor, who with her husband, Mike Andrews, owns and operates Meadowood Music, a stringed instrument store at 8521 Allentown Pike. “We do occasionally have an outbreak of orange cones, but they are moving farther and farther away and it’s rather easy to pull out from our driveway.”
Meadowood Music’s owners weren’t fond of the concept of roundabouts when the project was unveiled, but now that they’ve been open for several week, they see the advantage of slowing traffic but maintaining flow as opposed to traffic lights.
“Maybe we were wrong,” Taylor said. “It seems traffic is flowing, not backing up as it had been. The only thing is once they get past the traffic circle they’re building up speed. There may be issues that merge with people going a little too fast after leaving the traffic circle.”
The elimination of the kink where Route 222 narrowed to a single lane going north, she said, seems to have improved driver behavior; there’s less of a need to compete to get to the front of the line.
The new challenge for Meadowood Music is to persuade customers who have steered away from Allentown Pike in the Blandon area for at least a couple of years to return for in-person music lessons or shop for a guitar, violin or mandolin. Other businesses are in a similar situation.
“Now what we have to do is desensitize people: ‘Hey, the highway isn’t so bad anymore, so come over,’ “Taylor said.
What happens next?
The completion of the two-mile section is by no means the end of construction on Route 222 in northern Berks for the foreseeable future.
PennDOT recently hosted an in-person public meeting on plans for the next project, which is to widen and improve the fivemile section from Berks Memorial Gardens to the Kutztown Bypass in Richmond Township.
That project, which is still in the engineering phase, would add two roundabouts between the existing circles at Schaeffer Road and Moselem Springs Road (Route 662). One of the roundabouts would be at the intersection with Pleasant Hill Road and the other at Richmond Road.
“We’re looking at putting it out to contract in 2025 if all goes well with engineering,” Young said.
The PennDOT spokesman added public comment is still being accepted for that project. Project details and maps and a link for public comment are available at: https:// bit.ly/3xzThUJ.