The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) is preparing a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for improvements to Pennsylvania Route 41 (PA 41). The basic needs for PA 41 were identified by PennDOT as safety, capacity to serve future traffic volumes, deteriorated infrastructure, and modal relationships. These needs have been well documented in a recent studies commissioned by PennDOT.

Currently, all of the PennDOT improvement alternatives to address the identified needs include widening PA 41 to four lanes from Route 7 to Route 926. This report describes a Two-Lane Alternative Plan for addressing the needs of PA 41 that maintains the corridor as a two-lane road, with safety and intersection improvements that will result in a safe, attractive road with adequate capacity to meet future traffic volumes. The two-lane plan described in this report addresses these needs of PA 41 while substantially reducing environmental impacts, secondary impacts, and costs compared with the four-lane PennDOT proposals. The two-lane plan takes advantage of the greater design flexibility afforded to state transportation agencies since the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) in 1991, and specifically allowed in the National Highway System legislation. The two-lane plan uses proven, innovative and attractive intersection designs and cross-section treatments.

Meeting the Project Needs

The two-lane alternative addresses the four basic needs of the project of safety, traffic capacity, infrastructure, and modal relationships.

Safety

The safety of PA 41 is primarily addressed through reducing the potential for traffic conflicts, and moderating travel speeds with traffic calming techniques, thereby reducing the potential for injuries. The safest form of intersection traffic control, the modern roundabout, is used at the most heavily traveled intersections. Between intersections, several concepts for typical cross sections are proposed that will moderate speeds, reduce potential traffic conflicts, and improve safety for all the road's users, including farm vehicles, pedestrians, and carriages.

Capacity

Using standard measures of road capacity, rather than road operating speeds, the two-lane plan provides ample capacity to meet the future traffic volumes projected by PennDOT and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). The conclusion that two lanes provide adequate future capacity differs from PennDOT's conclusion that the four lanes are needed because PennDOT is using traffic operation measures that emphasize traffic speed rather than the more important concern of traffic capacity.

Infrastructure

The concrete road bed of PA 41 is in deteriorated condition. There are several options for addressing this condition. While PennDOT has proposed a very expensive full reconstruction of the concrete roadbed, the two-lane plan proposes concrete rehabilitation. There are several rehabilitation techniques that could be used to rehabilitate the roadbed, which are far less costly and have been found by other states to be highly cost effective.

Modal Interrelationships

The two-lane plan proposed in this report primarily focuses on the traffic operations and design. However, the two-lane plan will be far more amenable to serve other modes of transportation. Pedestrians, bicyclists and buses will have far better access to the important current and future land uses along the corridor, as compared to the PennDOT four lane plans which highly restrict access to land uses. For example, transit buses that may be accessing a proposed new shopping center in New Garden would have to make a lengthy detour to the nearest grade-separated interchange to make a u-turn, in order to drop-off or pick-up passengers. The two-lane plan will allow access for all modes along this important corridor.

There are several goals that were incorporated into the plan as the design was developed. First and foremost among these goals is to meet the project needs as described above, with the most important of these goals always being safety. The following design goals were also considerations in the project design.

Compatibility with Local and Regional Land Use Goals and Plans

The two-lane plan is designed to support and complement the local and regional land use plans and goals, as envisioned in ISTEA and National Highway System legislation. The 4-lane proposals of PennDOT work contrary to the region's goals of agricultural preservation, compact development, and more choices in transportation.

Minimizing Primary and Secondary Environmental Impacts

Major transportation improvement projects such as the PennDOT proposals for PA 41 have numerous secondary effects, such as induced traffic, induced development and increased air pollutant emissions.

Induced development results from the reduction in highway travel time making the project area more accessible to employment and services; thereby increasing it's attractiveness for development. The two-lane plan will result in only minimal changes in travel time, avoiding the destabilizing increases of accessibility and development pressure. The current land use impact study, being conducted by the Chester County Planning Commission, may provide a basis for estimating induced development. Although the DVRPC has declined to share the data and analysis procedures used in the development of their population forecasts, it appears that they have not considered the effect of induced development from the proposed PennDOT four-lane plan.

Induced traffic results from additional travel that can be attributed to the change in conditions from a faster or wider highway. Examples of induced traffic include re-routing of current trips to use the new road, longer trips to more distant destinations, new trips, and trips made during the peak hour rather than during off-peak times. Because the two-lane plan addresses the needs of the project without altering regional travel times or accessibility, it will result in very little induced traffic. The induced traffic from the four-lane plan poses problems throughout the corridor, and especially severe impacts of traffic safety and congestion to the northern end of the Route 41 corridor. These impacts will be negligible with the two-lane plan.

Air Quality Impacts will result from both the increased volumes of traffic that will be drawn to the expanded road, especially trucks, and from the higher speeds that may result from the improvement. The two-lane plan will minimize impacts of air quality to the Wilmington area, as it will minimize induced traffic and maintain moderate, less polluting traffic speeds. The project area has experienced air pollutant standard violations routinely, and the Wilmington region particularly has had a difficult time demonstrating conformity with the Clean Air Act. The two-lane plan maintains traffic speeds in the range where NOx emissions are reduced, compared with the higher emissions generated at higher speeds anticipated under the four-lane plan of PennDOT. The PennDOT four-lane plan will also result in increases of emissions from diesel trucks, as it is specifically designed to encourage the use of Route 41 as a trucking corridor, and will bring with it increased emissions of particulates, which have especially severe health effects.

Traffic Congestion Impacts result from traffic generated by the project having impacts beyond the project boundaries, where there is inadequate capacity to meet the additional traffic. The Wilmington Area regional transportation plan shows that the highway corridors that lead to PA 41, including DE 41 and DE 7, are already congested. Furthermore, the Wilmington area's future traffic projections at the DE/PA state line are lower than those used by PennDOT/DVRPC, calling into question the higher traffic forecasts used by PennDOT to justify the four-lane highway alternatives. DVRPC has declined to provide the computer files needed to review their forecasting assumptions and modeling practices. Until this information is made available, an alternative forecast, that is more realistic and more compatible with the assumptions of neighboring regions, cannot be prepared.

The Two-Lane Alternative plan provides a safe, feasible, sustainable alternative to address the deficiencies and to meet the future needs of the entire Route 41 corridor. The traffic will be accommodated with minimal impact to the environment, and at a cost of just a small fraction of PennDOT's proposed 4-lane alternatives. The result will be a safe, attractive road which supports the region's planning and environmental goals.

The plan presented in this report is conceptual, and of sufficient detail to allow its inclusion as an amendment to the Preliminary Alternatives Analysis, and in the DEIS analysis of alternatives. There are many details that are more appropriately addressed later in the design process. In order for the DEIS to be complete, and evaluate all feasible alternatives, it must include a thorough comparative analysis of the two-lane alternative.

PennDOT's decision to deny access to the accident records in the project area has made it impossible to make a more detailed, accurate assessment of the safety benefits of a two-lane plan.

DVRPC's decision to deny access to its data and traffic forecasting models has limited the opportunity to provide a more complete analysis of the relative impacts of the two-lane plan compared with the PennDOT proposals, particularly in induced traffic and induced development. Of further consideration is the opportunity to manage future travel demand with a through truck restriction, as truck volumes appear to be a primary factor in PennDOT's conclusion that a four-lane highway is necessary.