No crosswalk planned for intersection near Mt. Lebanon’s Howe School
Harry Funk / Staff Signs indicating "no parking" along Bower Hill Road next to Temple Emanuel in Mt. Lebanon
A crosswalk on Crystal Drive at Gypsy Lane was requested for consideration.
Stop signs are recommended for Willow and Sage drives at Chalmers Place.
Kids will be kids, and apparently some of them cross the street where they’re not supposed to, in order to take a shortcut to school. And they’re not supposed to go that way, either.
Mt. Lebanon has a prescribed safe walking route for students, which does not include crossing Crystal Drive at Gypsy Lane on the way to Howe Elementary School. Having observed youngsters doing so, a nearby resident asked that a crosswalk be placed at the intersection.
The municipal traffic board, though, will not make such a recommendation, based on the report submitted by traffic engineer Mike Haberman of Gateway Engineers.
“In making that, I’m inviting pedestrians to cross there,” he told the board at its Oct. 7 meeting. “It’s not a good spot.”
The intersection was the subject of a traffic study five years ago, and it was determined that neither traffic volume nor average vehicle speed merited control measures. Mt. Lebanon police monitored the streets again last month and arrived at the same conclusion.
“It’s pretty consistent with what was in 2010,” Haberman said.
The safe walking route, developed by the school district and municipality, takes students along Gypsy Lane to Crystal Drive, where they stay on the same side of the street until they reach the intersection with Broadmoor Avenue, which leads to the Howe’s front entrance.
A 15-mph school zone extends mainly along Broadmoor and Anawanda avenues, for 1,250 feet. The state maximum is 1,600 feet, and extending the existing zone would not reach the Crystal-Gypsy intersection, Haberman explained.
In other traffic board business:
• The board plans to make a recommendation to the Mt. Lebanon Commission to have stop signs installed at the intersections of Sage and Willow drives with Chalmers Place.
A resident made the request through the police department’s traffic services unit to put controls at the intersections, which do not have signage. By law, motorists must yield to traffic at “T” intersections that are not marked.
“I don’t see anything wrong with putting a yield or stop sign,” Lt. Mark Rayburg of the traffic services unit told the board.
Haberman recommended stop signs because they are more common than yield signs in the local region.
A public hearing about the signs will be scheduled for the November traffic board meeting. Nearby residents will be notified.
• No-parking signs in front of Temple Emanuel on Bower Hill Road will be removed, at the synagogue’s request.
“Traditionally, we’ve never enforced those no-parking signs at times of worship,” Rayburg told the board, explaining that police often are present for special events to help ensure safety.
The signs recently were replaced, and the newer ones are more visible, as apparently many motorists were not aware that they existed in the first place, Haberman said. That section is the only one nearby where no-parking signs are placed, he noted.