Editor’s Note: The following post originally appeared on Michael Sutherland’s city planning blog, A Place for People. It has been edited and republished on Saucon Source with his permission.
When looking at my hometown of Hellertown, Pa., I have a few suggestions for the borough of how it can continue to becoming a great place for people.
Key Areas to Improve in Hellertown, PA
- Main Street/Route 412
Main Street is the main way north-south through Hellertown, which has led it to deal with a large amount of traffic. Being a state-owned road, PennDOT has turned it partially into a highway for cars. With a speed limit of 30 miles per hour, most drivers drive at least five more miles per hour. This creates a place hazardous to pedestrians, due to the risk of dying if hit by a car at fast speeds. One study has shown that after being hit by a car at 30 miles per hour, a pedestrian’s chance of survival is 45 percent. And with speeding taken into consideration on Main Street, 80 percent of pedestrians hit by a car at 40 miles per hour will not survive
So the question here is, what to do about this?
First, Main Street needs to be designed for traffic to travel at a slower speed. At some points this has already occurred naturally, with the 10-foot travel lanes that have parking on the edges. In other places though, the travel lanes have been widened to almost 20-foot lanes due to banning on-street parking in certain areas. This turns the street into a road that is wider than a normal highway travel lane, which encourages traffic to speed.
This leads to the second idea of reintroducing on-street parking wherever possible. Not only does this slow traffic speeds, but it also provides a buffer for the pedestrian realm on the sidewalk that makes the downtown more attractive.
Thirdly, adding in medians for pedestrians to cross Main Street in certain areas helps to allow for a shorter crossing distance for the vulnerable populations of the young and old, who take longer to cross the street.
Fourthly, creating greater connectivity on all the sidewalks by making them all ADA accessible is another goal. This has been an ongoing process in the borough, but is lacking in a few key areas in Hellertown’s core, such as outside Saucon Manor (a subsidized apartment complex for the elderly) and along Water Street heading west out of town to the Saucon Rail Trail.
2. Depot Street
Just recently while I was home on Christmas break I came upon the sign seen below along Depot Street by the Hellertown Pool.
An automatic speed timing machine for Depot Street means one thing.
As my friend Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns would say, “If you have to put a sign up telling drivers to slow down, you designed your street wrong.”
This street is fundamentally not safe due to fast-moving traffic that the highway-style street geometry provides.
If you want to drive fast, go north two miles and you will hit Interstate 78. Drive fast there, but not in town.
So the question here is, what can be done about this?
My one main solution would be to give the street a “road diet.”
This would entail shrinking the width of the street to create a street that is designed for traffic to move at 25 miles per hour. This would create around 10-foot-wide travel lanes, for example. And with the extra space, things such as protected bike lanes, a new sidewalk for the opposite side of the street that has none or a center median could be put in.
3. Detwiller Plaza and Easton Road
At the heart of Hellertown next to Borough Hall is Detwiller Plaza. It is a beautiful little park at the center of town with a fountain and a clock tower. It is a great place in town to go, but I think that Hellertown could make it even better.
Below is a picture of what the plaza looked like from a distance when engulfed by the intersection of the far too wide Easton Road.
Thankfully, as seen below, the borough has been able to improve the area and make it a better place for people.
Now even though the plaza has come a long way since 2008, the pedestrian crosswalk along Main Street is still too wide in my opinion.
Why not just close off Easton Road from Main Street to the entrance of the Borough Hall parking lot, just past the cars in the picture, and turn it into an uninterrupted park? Then, by making Easton Road two-way instead of one-way from Northampton Street, the street’s residents could still access their homes and have a pleasant place to live with little inconvenience to the area’s residents.
This is just the beginning of what I would like to change around the plaza. If it were up to me, I would buy up the ugly gas station behind the plaza, tear it out and put up something such as a beautiful mixed use building, or an extension of the plaza or even a community garden. Those things would all be a great addition to closing off the portion of Easton Road that I mentioned before.
But alas, it is sad to say that this would be very hard to do, since Easton Road is a state-owned route. And PennDOT sees more value in ramming speeding cars through the heart of a downtown than creating a great place for people. Even though an alternate route would not take much longer to get to, thanks to Hellertown’s wonderful street grid.
The Heart of the Matter
So in all of these suggestions for the borough, it may seem that I am against PennDOT. And in some cases that is true, but that is because in an effort to move traffic quickly, they tear apart the hearts of cities unknowingly to move people to their destinations quickly.
But I have to ask myself the question of if this is actually their fault? They are just trying to provide people with a quick way to get from place to place, due to our sprawling development pattern that we have had since after World War II. Is it actually our fault for the choices that we have made about how we design places? Is it just showing what we value in a place to live?
All of these questions get to the heart of the issue of why we have built places the way we have. And it seems to me that we value speed and convenience, to name just two observations, over a high quality place for people.
So I see this as more of a cultural issue. Our values have created the places where we live today, and if our values shifted differently, our physical environment would change too.
But if we think that we are going to solve all of our city planning issues by just building places that value people over cars, then we are only fooling ourselves.
While at Penn State, I have had many professors who teach classes on city planning tell me the problems in cities of hundreds of years past are the same problems of today.
So this begs me to ask the question of whether we should even try to solve the problems of cities if we still can’t solve them after so many years? Is there really any hope that we can make a difference?
I would say that I myself have many plans on how to solve these complex urban issues, but that so often I am led astray because I am selfish and make them all about me and what I want. I honestly just want to play God and create my own utopia.
For me, when it comes to these planning issues my motivation at the heart of it all is to care for my neighbors by giving them a great place in which to live. Things such as extra tax revenue are perks for local government, but provide much less satisfaction than seeing a smile on my neighbor’s face.
What do you all think? I would love to hear your thoughts on my ideas here!
Michael Sutherland is a 2012 graduate of Saucon Valley High School. He is currently a junior at Penn State, where he studies geography and blogs about city planning issues at A Place for People.