Lincoln Drive will get devices to force drivers to slow down, PennDot and city officials said

PennDot and the city plan to build four traffic-calming devices at either end of a dangerous stretch of Lincoln Drive in West Mount Airy along with other short-term measures to slow vehicles and improve safety, officials said Wednesday night during a Zoom briefing for a neighborhood group.

The proposals don’t go as far as many residents hoped — no roundabout is on the horizon for the oddly angled Emlen Circle intersection with Lincoln Drive, for instance — but people on the call said they were grateful that help is on the way.

“We can’t do everything that people think we can do and ask for but we definitely consider them,” said Vincent DeFlavia, an engineer with Traffic Planning and Design Inc. who conducted the safety study of Lincoln Drive for PennDot and developed the recommendations.

It was important to start with projects that could be quickly installed within existing regulatory and budgetary constraints, in order to make progress, and add more complicated and expensive safety fixes later, DeFlavia said. The devices, known as speed tables, are raised and force motorists who drive over them to slow down but, unlike traditional cement speed bumps, they are made of a material designed to minimize noise.

Fed-up residents have been pushing for several years to reduce speeding, aggressive driving, and near-daily crashes on and near Lincoln Drive, which has hairpin curves and a posted speed limit of 25 mph, and passes through dense neighborhoods.

“I love speed tables,” said Anne Dicker, a leader of the traffic-calming committee of West Mount Airy Neighbors, the civic group on the video conference. “They really slow vehicles down, and that makes all the difference for people walking.”

The devices also should put a damper on regular 2 a.m. drag races on the winding section of Lincoln Drive, Dicker said.

The traffic-calming projects are to be installed on Lincoln Drive between West Allens Lane on the north side and West Cliveden Street to the south, a distance of about 1.5 miles that is designated as state highway and thus falls under Penn Dot’s jurisdiction.

The plan also calls for rumble strips along the entire corridor; treating pavement on two sharp curves with a “high friction” surface that helps vehicle tires grip better in rainy conditions; and flexible posts with reflectors near corners to keep people from blocking sight lines by parking vehicles too close to intersections.

PennDot’s plan would install hardened lane-separator curbs to keep drivers from trying to pass over the yellow-striped centerline or using designated left-turn lanes to get past other drivers.

The work is set to begin this fall and to conclude in the spring or summer of 2024, according to a preliminary schedule, DeFlavia said.

A roundabout at Emlen Street, at the top of many residents’ wish lists, takes years to get designed and get approved, funded and built — in general, roundabouts cost $3 million to $7 million, said Vince Cerebone, an engineer who is traffic safety manager for PennDot’s Region 6 in Southeast Pennsylvania.

They are considered effective at speed control and would be feasible to build at the Emlen intersection in the future, DeFlavia said.

Ultimately, officials want to have automated speed-enforcement cameras on Lincoln Drive and other dangerous roadways. They are allowed only on Roosevelt Boulevard, and the cameras have led to a 60% drop in serious crashes since they were installed in 2020, said Richard Montanez, the deputy Streets commissioner for transportation.

Authorization for the Roosevelt cameras expires at the end of the year if the state legislature does not renew it. City officials and safety advocates are lobbying for a pending bill that would do that and allow the cameras on other streets in Philadelphia, Montanez said.

Lincoln Drive is on the city’s High Injury Network, the 12% of roads that see 80% of the Philadelphia crashes in which drivers, passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians are killed or seriously injured. City officials use the data to pinpoint problem areas as part of its Vision Zero project, which aims to reduce traffic fatalities to zero.