Talks regarding traffic at SAHS
District and township officials discuss congestion along high school
FRANCONIA >> Souderton Area School District and Franconia officials were scheduled to meet later in the week to talk about ways to improve traffic at Souderton Area High School, Franconia’s Township Manager Jon Hammer said at the Franconia Township Board of Supervisors April 17 work session meeting.
The move comes after Lower Road resident Marianne VargoWright brought a request to the March 20 Franconia meeting and the March 23 school board meeting that the Halteman Road entrance to the high school be opened to relieve the congestion from most of the drivers having to use the Lower Road entrance.
Currently, the Halteman Road entrance is only allowed to be used by school staff and parents dropping off students or for some special events, school Superintendent Frank Gallagher said at the school board meeting.
The Halteman Road entrance was not designed to be a main entrance and making it into that would have required additional costly road improvements that the school district chose not to do
“The noise, the idling, the fumes — it’s just become a public nuisance.” — Lower Road resident Marianne Vargo-Wright
when the school was built, Franconia officials said.
Traffic coming to the school is backed up every school day on Lower and Allentown roads, VargoWright said.
“The noise, the idling, the fumes — it’s just become a public nuisance,” she said.
“I can’t even get out of my driveway in the morning unless someone lets me out,” Vargo-Wright said. “If it’s not the cars going in, it’s the buses coming out. It’s impossible.”
The continued growth of the community will bring even more traffic, she said, citing projections for the additional traffic on roads near the school.
An elderly neighbor has almost been hit by drivers as he walks to his mailbox, Vargo-Wright said.
She said she has driven a school bus for other school districts, but “I’ve never experienced anything like I do in front of my house.”
“I feel your pain. I get stuck in the same traffic and I know that that must be a real pain in the neck for you that live there,” Gallagher said.
The congestion seems to have increased in the past year, he said.
School board President Scott Jelinski said he also knows about the problem.
“We’ve all seen it,” Jelinski said. “We’ve lived it.”
The meeting with the school district isn’t only to discuss the Halteman Road entrance but to also explore other possible remedies,
Franconia board Chairman Grey Godshall said.
The purpose, Godshall said, is to say, “We obviously have a traffic problem in the morning and in the afternoon — what are you doing and is there anything else you can do and is there anything we can do to help you do that?”
Vargo-Wright said a 7:30 a.m. fire alarm at the school in late March demonstrated the problem, with fire trucks delayed in reaching the school by the traffic congestion and other drivers having to back up to allow the trucks to get through.
“The fire police couldn’t even get into the school,” she said.
“Thank God, it was a false alarm, but if it was a real fire here, the students, faculty and parents are still going into the school because there’s no fire police there because the road’s backed up,” Vargo-Wright said. “They can’t get to it.”