LehighValleyNews.com asked readers for input for The Road Ahead, our latest project examining local traffic and road safety. They rose to the challenge, sharing their takes on road design, traffic patterns, driving trends, public transit and more. Each week, The Road Scholar will review some of the concerns driving Lehigh Valley motorists. Comments from readers have been edited for grammar, space and clarity.
I just read your piece on the Farmersville Road improvements and you asked for other ideas, so here goes. One major reconstruction project that's needed is the hazardous diagonal intersection between Route 22 and West Tilghman Street in Upper Macungie Township. Awkward configuration and no acceleration lanes. That will be difficult to redesign. ~ Brian A.
After getting Brian's email, I realized I've never actually attempted to get on Route 22 from this interchange despite living in the region for nearly 15 years.
A quick review on Google Map's street view, however, resulted in some internal screaming. The road design here wouldn't cut modern engineering standards.
The good news is, this is one of the least busy portions of Route 22 in the region. Only 26,620 westbound vehicles travel on this portion of Route 22 each day, according to PennDOT data. It's a little busier for eastbound traffic, where an average of 34,930 vehicles a day use Route 22. By comparison, that's about half of the traffic on Route 22 between Route 145 and the Fullerton interchange.
But everything else is a mess.
Westbound traffic from Tilghman Street onto Route 22 goes from a strong curve to a ramp with no acceleration lane to speak of. It's somehow worse for eastbound traffic entering Route 22. Traffic goes from the left lane of Tilghman Street in a narrow tunnel to a short ramp that ends in a stop sign at Route 22.
The lanes from Route 22 to Tilghman Street leave a lot to be desired, too.
Westbound traffic merges onto Tilghman Street next to the ramp onto Route 22 west, requiring both lanes of traffic to watch for motorists entering and exiting the road. A similar situation plays out for eastbound traffic on Tilghman Street.
Using PennDOT's crash database, I identified 86 crashes that occurred in this interchange between 2019 and 2023 — the most recent years of data.
A whopping 34 of those crashes occurred in the exact same spot — on Route 22 east just in front of the entrance ramp from Tilghman Street. That doesn't include crashes a few dozen feet ahead where the merging takes place.
While the database doesn't provide all the details of those crashes, it shouldn't take a civil engineer to figure out that forcing traffic to merge onto a freeway from a dead stop with no acceleration lane is less than ideal.
The Lehigh Valley Transportation Study has made wide-ranging plans to improve vast sections of Route 22.
It didn't include this interchange in its Transportation Improvement Plan, which covers construction projects scheduled in the next four years. It didn't make the cut for the Long-Range Plan, either, which includes projects slated to occur in the next 25 years as well as worthwhile proposals that don't have funding lined up.
But just because a project's not in the study's plan doesn't mean there's no hope of it getting done. And that goes for any example, whether it's Tilghman Street or something that hasn't come up in this space.
Members of the public can lobby their representatives on the study to pursue road improvements. In this instance, that includes PennDOT, the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and Lehigh County officials. The study's joint technical committee and coordinating committee holds monthly virtual meetings, so anyone with an internet connection can follow along. In the case of a locally owned road or bridge, locals will want to contact elected officials in the host community.
If you do, I strongly recommend being firm but courteous. Odds are, the infrastructure in question came along long before the person you're contacting. There's also a strong chance that the problem in question would have been fixed by now if the funding was readily available.
But that doesn't mean the public needs to suffer in silence about it. The more people that public officials hear from, the more likely they are to act on it.
Solving problems often requires generating significant political will to realize a solution. More significant problems — and they don't get much larger than fixing Route 22 from a local perspective — require even more. But progress is being made. Plans are in place to spend a total of more than $97 million over the next eight years to improve the Route 191 and Fullerton interchanges.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Want to be plugged in to all things traffic and transit in the Lehigh Valley? Sign up for Tom Shortell's weekly Road Scholar newsletter and get it delivered to your in-box every Tuesday. Better yet, tell him what you're thinking — or what you want to know — at toms@lehighvalleynews.com.
