What’s up with these perilous Lehigh Valley highway ramps? The Road Scholar has answers

As part of our new traffic and road safety project, LehighValleyNews.com asked readers for input. 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've driven on highways in California at rush hour, and they move traffic SO much better than here. Their on-ramps are longer and give people time to get up to speed. They also have sufficient lanes to alleviate congestion. We can't have the exponential influx of residents and expect the current faulty infrastructure to keep up. PA traffic engineers have made some horrible decisions having people merging in opposing directions laterally across high speed highways. It's a recipe for disaster. — Anonymous

The interchanges on Route 22, Route 33, Route 222 and Route 309 were common fodder for complaints from readers, and for good reason. They're some of the most heavily traveled roads in the region, and some portions of them have had problematic road designs for generations.

So says Scott Vottero, the assistant district executive of design for PennDOT District 5, which oversees state-owned roads in the Lehigh Valley and many of its surrounding counties.

Engineers back in the 1950s leaned heavily on cloverleaf interchanges, he said, but they're a poor fit for the demands created by modern urban and suburban communities. The problem has only gotten worse for the Lehigh Valley with more residential, commercial and industrial development in the past 70 years.

The main goal is to improve the capacity on the highway itself, but funding is limited, Vottero said.

The state and federal governments require PennDOT to dedicate funding across a spectrum of transportation needs such as bridge and public transit. Given the limited dollars available, that doesn't leave enough to improve capacity on increasingly congested highways, he said.

"It's a balancing act when it comes to major interchanges. We're working close with the Lehigh Valley Metropolitan Planning Organization [also known as the Lehigh Valley Transportation Study] on SR 22 to look at the traffic," Vottero said.

Route 22 improvements

Back in 2019, PennDOT had to delay long-term plans to widen Route 22 after the federal government insisted Pennsylvania address it's historic underfunding of the interstate system. While that has come with planned improvements to Interstate 78, it's pushed back the improvements to Route 22. That would probably be beneficial to most communities, where the interstate is the major highway, but that's not the case for us.

"If money was no object and we're starting from scratch, it [Route 22] would be a six-lane highway from Route 33 to the Northeast Extension," Vottero said.

As for the interchanges, the dream would be to convert them to diamond-style interchanges like the Route 22/Route 145 interchange, he said. Motorists there have plenty of room to adjust their speed and safely merge, but the space simply isn't available in more cramped portions of the corridor, he said.

Instead, PennDOT has been making piecemeal improvements to Route 22 as space and funding allow. The Fullerton interchange used to be a nightmare for westbound traffic as there was no acceleration lane for vehicles entering one of the busiest stretches of the highway. That interchange was partially redesigned in 2019, and more construction is slated to begin there in 2030, according to the local Transportation Improvement Program, also known as the TIP.

Route 309

Another major project is underway in South Whitehall Township with the Route 309/Tilghman Street interchange. The short, tight cloverleaf ramps leave drivers with little space to change speeds and merge on and off the highway, making it one of the most crash-prone locations in the region. A PennDOT database of crashes shows 42 accidents occurred on the interchange in 2023, the most recent year of data available.

PennDOT kicked off a $91.6 million reconstruction of the interchange in September, but the heavy work won't begin until this spring, Vottero said. The work calls for longer acceleration and deceleration ramps, replacing two overpasses and reprogramming stop lights on Tilghman Street to better coordinate traffic.

Planning is underway for theRoute 309/Center Valley Parkway interchange, where four fatal crashes occurred between 2013 and 2023, according to state records. Vottero said PennDOT is planning to construct an overpass that will carry Route 309 over Center Valley Parkway to improve capacity and reduce conflict points — a technical term for spots where different directions of travel merge or intersect. The plans call for a diamond-style interchange instead of cloverleafs, but PennDOT believes that project won't start until 2026 and won't wrap up until nearly 2031.

But we're still years away from addressing other known problems.

The Route 22/Route 191 interchange saw 45 accidents in 2023, per PennDOT's crash database. (This includes 14 crashes near the corner of Route 191 and Highfield Drive, where northbound traffic often backs up due to the interchange's stop light.) This intersection won't see any construction until 2030, according to the TIP.

And the wait will be longer for some of the complaints readers sent the Road Scholar. Multiple people wrote in about the difficulties northbound drivers on Route 33 face when weaving through merging traffic to reach the Route 22 west ramp.

Vottero said that isn't something that's been on planners' radar.

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.