Street Road, a thoroughfare cutting through the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem, is a public safety disaster. PennDOT is investing in safety along the road, but locals say much more needs to be done.
Jason Lauglin reports on the conditions of Street Road in Philadelphia, but the premise of the article builds on its ubiquity around the country:
Where you live it’s called something else, but you’ve driven these miles of mismatched commerce -- Kohls, Kmart, and Golden Corral sharing a streetscape with motels, churches, and family businesses ensconced in old converted houses.
Laughlin reports that Street Road is also particularly unsafe: "Of the 50 locations in the five-county region with the highest concentration of car crashes in 2015, four were on the stretch of Street Road in Bensalem bracketed by I-95 and Route 1."
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) has invested $3.8 million in Street Road since 2015, but none of those changes meet the recommendations of a 2008 report from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission [pdf].
The article digs into the history of Street Road and the characteristics that make it particularly unsafe.
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