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Road less traveled? W. Marlborough considers turning paved streets to gravel
to discourage traffic. Bucks' Tinicum has already done so.

Chester County's horse country aspires to a second claim to fame: becoming the place where the pavement ends.

West Marlborough Township is weighing a plan to tear up paved roads and replace them with gravel ones to make them less attractive to commuters and safer for horses.

"It is to keep people the hell out of our township," said Township Supervisor Hugh Lofting.

Traffic is a growing concern in rural areas, said William H. Fulton, executive director of the Chester County Planning Commission.

Residents in the county's booming exurbs "don't want to be the main road for anybody," Fulton said. "In the next few years, traffic calming is going to get a lot of attention."

Townships are already experimenting. Londonderry Township installed trial speed tables, or milder versions of speed bumps, on Jackson Road.

East Marlborough Township recently completed a roundabout on Route 82 near Unionville. A roundabout is a slower, safer form of traffic circle meant to replace traffic lights at intersections.

In rural, southern Chester County, an activist group called S.A.V.E. has been fighting the widening of Route 41 since 1997.

Marlborough's gravel plan "is a great idea," said Dee Durham, S.A.V.E.'s executive director.

It's not a first. Tinicum Township, Bucks County, has already converted a paved road to the gravel kind. It claims the lead in Southeast Pennsylvania with 18 miles of gravel road.

The township adopted an ordinance in 1989 that allows residents to petition for "scenic road" status and intervene in improvement plans, said Bruce Wallace, an artist and environmentalist who led the effort.

Tinicum hasn't paved a road since the ordinance passed. It "is definitely traffic calming," said Wallace, who lives on scenic – and dirt – Sheep Hole Road.

The opposite is happening elsewhere in the state, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. From 20,000 miles of unimproved roads in 2000, the total shrank to 18,500 miles last year.

West Marlborough's Lofting said he is already an oddity at state meetings of township officials. "People say, 'See that guy over there? He wants to make gravel roads. He must be nuts.' "

The idea isn't all that outlandish in West Marlborough. Once home to the King Ranch, the township is the kind of place where residents haul horsefeed in the back of Volvo station wagons.

Next door, Londonderry Township Board Chairman Marty Detering declared herself a cautious advocate, but she isn't eager to sell dust and dings to township residents as progress.

Lofting said he is apprehensive himself. His thoughts now are to experiment on himself and his neighbors on Lamborntown Road before chewing up more asphalt than motorists can swallow.

"I opened my big mouth, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon," he said.

Contact staff writer Todd Mason at 610-701-7614 or tmason@phillynews.com.