Jun 14, 2017 By Harry Funk 3 min read

Sometimes East McMurray Road is a good place to avoid in the vicinity of Peters Township High School.

“One of the things that we know from the location of the existing high school and what happens there twice a day is, because of left-hand turns, traffic is backed up terribly on the road,” township manager Paul Lauer said.

He provided a summary on June 12 for members of township council about a recent meeting addressing site development coordination for the former Rolling Hills Country Club property, situated four-fifths of a mile east of the current high school. The property is divided roughly in half between Peters Township School District, which is exploring the possibility of building a new high school on the site, and the municipality, with plans for a public park.

Lauer and Ed Zuk, township planning director, met with district Superintendent Jeannine French and others, with a primary topic concerning the potential impact of a new school on adjoining streets.

“Their focus,” Lauer said about district officials, “and understandably so, has been on the building, and it has not been on the off-site improvements that are necessary for this site.”

For example, the main entrance to the property could continue to be at the same place used by the country club, off the two-lane East McMurray Road.

“You have all these homes located on the other side of the street, so you can imagine the difficulty that you would have coming out of any of these driveways,” Lauer said. “It would seem to make sense that you would either have a left-hand turning lane into the site or a roundabout, even.”

Other access points could be from Center Church Road, a possibility that Michael Mudry, senior project manager at Traffic Planning & Design of Upper St. Clair, examined briefly.

“What Mike is suggesting is that what might make more sense is to realign Center Church Road so that it actually passes through the property, as opposed to attempting to make that blind right-hand turn out of the site,” Lauer reported. “The whole point of this, to me, is: We don’t know enough to be able to be making these decisions without the input of a traffic engineer.”

As such, participants in the meeting have asked Mudry to provide a proposal to assist the school district and municipality in addressing concerns about connecting the site with existing public streets.

Also discussed at the meeting were opportunities for shared infrastructure between the two entities, such as storm-water management, parking and public utilities.

“The other thing we wanted to offer them,” Lauer said about the district, “was access to the fire department and the police department for input at this early stage, as opposed to waiting until the plan gets to be a little bit more firm, and then it becomes a little bit more difficult to address their needs.”