The Concerns

The Conventional Approach to Highway Improvement

In the early 1990’s PennDOT studied the Route 41 corridor, publishing a report in 1994. This "Needs Assessment" outlined four main transportation aspects of the roadway that, at the time, PennDOT felt were the priorities to be addressed in any road improvement project. These were: safety, congestion, infrastructure and intermodality. The safety needs were obvious to any resident living within the corridor, with Route 41 being ranked as one of the Commonwealth’s "Top Five" most unsafe high truck volume corridors. Congestion is determined by Level of Service ratings assigned to a roadway following study and based on Federal Highway Administration guidelines. It is doubtful that anyone would argue that the long-neglected infrastructure of the roadway was in need of modernizing. And, intermodality recognizes that the roadway is used not just by motorized vehicles, but also by pedestrians, bicycles and buggies. Intermodality and multi-modality address the need to improve the corridor just for all modes of travel and to more safely and efficiently accommodate their interaction with the other modes. Any transportation project using federal funding is required to include these intermodal aspects.

Beginning in the mid-1990s then, PennDOT began developing alternatives to address the identified needs to the safety and congestion problems of Route 41. Federal law, under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), required that an Environmental Impact Statement be undertaken where all reasonable alternatives must be explored prior to the start of any improvement project. The ubiquitous "No Build" option, also a federal requirement, paled in comparison to the other alternatives developed by PennDOT. Using typical practice of the late twentieth century, PennDOT developed several variations on a theme whereby the primarily two-lane roadway would be widened to four lanes on the existing alignment (except through Avondale and Chatham), additional turn lanes and access roads would be built, and four-lane, limited-access, high-speed bypasses would be built around the Borough of Avondale and the village of Chatham.

Concern began mounting that there was no alternative being offered between these two extremes, potential options that would look beyond the four "transportation needs" and include a balance of other community-based needs and goals. The conventional approaches being developed and promoted by PennDOT would have significant direct impact on natural and historic resources along the roadbed, while also resulting in additional indirect and secondary impacts throughout the region, most notably inducing more traffic and development, catalyzing sprawl and eliminating farmland, promoting sprawl, threatening our rural communities, and damaging the environment.

The founders and supporters of S.A.V.E. were also concerned that PennDOT was only developing solutions for the southernmost 9.5 mile section of PA 41, from the Delaware state line to the PA41/926 intersection, potentially creating increased safety hazards on the northern end of the corridor, as four or six high-speed lanes funnel back down into a rural two-lane rural roadway. This 10-mile stretch at the north end of the corridor is not presently slated for improvement, although it is in PennDOT's long-range plans, even though accident data shows that fatal accidents are more concentrated north of Route 926. According to the Final Needs Study for PA 41, Section STY, December 1994:

...Fatal accidents were concentrated in the northernmost segment of the study corridor, where the fatality rate was 0.0852 compared to the statewide average rate of 0.0208. Also, 100% of the fatal accidents involved trucks. (p. 25).