Peters Township Council reverses decision on PennDOT traffic grant
A view of East McMurray and Valley Brook roads in Peters Township in 2008.
Map data ©2017 Google
Two weeks after voting against accepting a grant from the state Department of Transportation for traffic signal improvements in McMurray, Peters Township Council reversed its decision.
On Aug. 14, Councilman David Ball joined fellow members Monica Merrell and chairman Frank Arcuri in defeating the motion by a 3-2 vote. With council’s full contingent of seven members present during its Aug. 28 meeting, Ball joined vice chairman James Berquist and councilmen Frank Kosir Jr., Gary Stiegel Jr. and Robert Lewis to approve acceptance of the grant, 5-2.
The $382,950 matching grant, for signal improvements at the East McMurray Road intersections with Valley Brook and Thomas roads, is through PennDOT’s Green Light-Go program. The township’s share for the project is about $125,000, with $101,000 of that coming from the municipality’s traffic improvement fee program, township manager Paul Lauer previously said.
The lights at the high-volume intersections will incorporate adaptive signal control technologies. Township traffic engineer Michael Mudry, senior project manager with Upper St. Clair-based Traffic Planning and Design, attended the latest council meeting to explain how such signals function.
“We’ll have radar or video, depending on what we do with the design, all around on all the approaches,” he said. “And inside the traffic controller box at the intersection, it’s actually counting cars in real time.”
Accordingly, the system can adjust to variable traffic conditions to determine when and how long lights should be green.
“Based on some counts I did (Aug. 24), there’s probably a 25 to 30 percent improvement in traffic efficiency that we can do with that type of system,” Mudry said following a visit to the site.
Traffic at times backs up in all directions at East McMurray and Valley Brook roads, a situation that negatively impacts the other intersection, which is less than 400 feet to the south. Motorists who are stopped at the end of Thomas Road often have problems turning onto East McMurray.
“Today, the traffic just backs up to the intersection, and you hope somebody opens up a gap and lets you out. This is going to have a light that’s going to stop people and let people out in bunches, not just one at a time,” he said about the new system.
The signals at the two intersections will be coordinated to allow for optimal traffic flow and connected by fiber-optic cable.
Mudry acknowledged that vehicles are likely to continue to stack up at the intersections during certain times.
“I don’t want everybody to think that we’re going to build this and we’ll have no more traffic problems,” he said. “There’s still a good 20 to 30 minutes at about 4:45 to 5:15 where there’s just so much traffic, it doesn’t matter.”
The project represents the first adaptive traffic signal intersection in Peters Township and only the second in PennDOT District 12, which takes in Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties.