BOROUGH REDESIGN
Council gets first look at East Main streetscape plans, $3M in improvements included in project
LANSDALE » It’s taken several years of planning, and won’t be done for several more, but local residents now have an idea of what a new version of East Main Street could look like.
Borough officials gave an update last week on progress of the long-planned East Main Street streetscape project, meant to transform the look, and increase the safety and drainage, of several blocks of town.
“This is one of the largest grants that was given out in the state of Pennsylvania, through the Multimodal Transportation Fund. The project is over $3 million worth of improvements in the borough,” said traffic engineer Earl Armitage.
“That I think is a testament to the fact that the borough has been very successful in getting grants — and more importantly, in completing grants,” he said.
That grant funding was awarded by PennDOT in 2014, just after the borough completed similar streetscape projects to upgrade utilities and replace aging sidewalks with new brick and pavers on downtown Main, Broad and Madison Streets in 2011-12 and then on Wood and Vine Streets in 201314. Since then, few public updates have been given about the next phase of the project, which would extend the brick look and utility upgrades east from Broad Street to the North Penn Commons complex near Highland Road, beyond references on the borough’s long-term capital plan and road repair lists.
On Oct. 21, Armitage and fel
low traffic engineer Mark Bickerton of Pennoni and Associates unveiled the project they’ve been designing over that past half-decade, detailing how it has now been split into two phases. The first phase will focus on crosswalks surrounding the intersection of Main Street and the SEPTA train station near Madison Street, and the second phase will run from Broad to Highland.
“There’s a number of regulatory agencies involved here: you have SEPTA, with the train tracks and all of the transit users. We have PennDOT, with
their involvement along Main Street, and responsibility for Main Street, and then you have Lansdale Borough, who are responsible for everything else,” Bickerton said.
“The way the train tracks cross Main Street, with the skewed angle and multiple sets of tracks, spread out over 150 feet, is an unusual scenario, and something we’re all competing with. And all the agencies recognize that,” he said.
In that first phase, the engineer is proposing a series of safety upgrades where Main meets the tracks. A new cross
walk would be added crossing Main just west of Railroad Avenue, along with a new crosswalk heading west-to-east across Railroad, where a new sidewalk would be constructed just before the first of four sets of train tracks. A straight crosswalk area would be designated and striped crossing the three adjacent sets of rail tracks, before a brick platform between the third and fourth tracks, then another crosswalk to cross the fourth track roughly across from Walnut Street.
“We’re also recommending
tying in a porous pavement pilot project. There’s a tree pit right where we tie in, and we’re aware of some of the maintenance headaches that have gone on with the tree pits on Main Street,” Bickerton said.
Instead of the typical concrete pits seen elsewhere on Main Street, the engineer said, the tree pit just east of the fourth rail crossing would be filled with a ground rubber material designed to flex, grow and stretch as the tree and its roots expand, which should prevent buckling and maintain an even walking surface.
“We think this would be a good project to put it out, right in the downtown, and see how it works. A number of our other clients have tried it out and been happy with it,” he said.
The other main feature of the second phase is what SEPTA refers to as “dynamic envelopment,” and is marked as crosshatches on aerial photos. Each of the four rail lines would be buffered by white painted crosshatch markings on the roadway, to give drivers a better idea of where to safely stop.
“A lot of the (SEPTA) cars overhang the tracks, they can lean, they can tilt. This shows that limit, and displays it back to the vehicular traffic,” Bickerton said.
Mayor Garry Herbert asked if the first phase would also include drop gates for pedestrians where the rail crossings meet the new sidewalks. Bickerton said those have been discussed with SEPTA, and are not included with the streetscape project, but infrastructure to do so could be put in now.
“SEPTA wants to get new gates in, and if worse comes to worst we’d like to at least put accommodations out there for them, whether it’s just junction boxes and conduits, so this doesn’t have to get ripped up,” Bickerton said.
Councilman Leon Angelichio asked if the flexible tree pit material was known to have any issues with toxicity anywhere it’s been used, and the engineer said he did not know of any. The councilman also asked if the crosshatched safety zones around the rail tracks could be painted a different color, and Bickerton said “we had quite a bit of back and forth between SEPTA and PennDOT on that very matter.”
Their answer? SEPTA would have prefer red those marks be yellow, but PennDOT contacted numerous other state transportation agencies across the country, and their consensus was to keep the markings white.
Councilwoman Carrie Hawkins Charlton asked if the three crosswalks — crossing Main, crossing Railroad Avenue, and crossing the tracks — would come with any flashing light signals, and/or ground-level indicators. Bickerton said those details will be finalized during further reviews with SEPTA and PennDOT: “it’s something we’re definitely looking at, and as long as we can fit it in the budget, we’d certainly like to have a flashing beacon go in at the crossing.”
Councilwoman Meg Currie Teoh asked if the project had also looked at the current sidewalk where Walnut meets the easternmost rail track, where the sidewalk narrows and slopes,