Safety measures considered for Johnston Road in Peters Township
Fifteen vehicle accidents were reported to police during a four-year period involving a relatively short span of Johnston Road in Peters Township.
“I was kind of surprised at the number of crashes,” said traffic engineer Mike Mudry during township council’s Feb. 14 meeting of the accidents that occurred from 2017-21. “It kind of caught my eye, because I wouldn’t expect to see that many in that time period in this small of an area.”
Mudry, Western Pennsylvania office manager for Traffic Planning and Design Inc., consulted with township director of engineering Mark Zemaitis about possible measures to make Johnston a safer road to travel.
“I thought the best approach here would be to upgrade signings and pavement markings,” Mudry told council. “There are some ‘curve’ signs out there. I think the first thing to do is go out and check the reflectivity of those, and if they’re 10 years old or older, just replace them. They’re probably beyond their useful life.”
He also suggested spelling out “slow curve” on the road’s surface, explaining that similar implementation by the state Department of Transportation has resulted in significant decreases in accidents, and installing flexible delineation posts along the side of the street.
“There are people already doing this kind of on their own,” he said, such as putting in their own posts and sticking reflective tape to trees.
Enhanced street lighting may be another possibility.
“There are utility poles out there,” Mudry said. “I just don’t know if they’re in the exact, right spot where we’d want a streetlight.”
Johnston Road is defined as a collector road, serving to move traffic from local streets to high-capacity arterial roads while providing access to residences. The posted speed limit is 25 mph, lower than the township’s target speed of 30 to 40 mph for collector roads, according to Mudry.
A traffic-calming study conducted in 2013 showed an “85th-percentile speed” of 46 mph, with the measure describing the speed that 15% of observed motorists are exceeding. By comparison, the measure had dropped to 34 and 35 mph, respectively, at two Johnston Road addresses where Mudry made recent observations.
Following the 2013 study, a township installed all-way stop signs at Johnston and Center Church roads, plus two electronic signs indicating how fast vehicles are traveling.
Nine years ago, a traffic count revealed 1,925 vehicles per 24 hours on Johnston Road. The 2022 observations showed 2,114 vehicles passing a point nearly equidistant between Center Church Road and Green Valley Lane, and 1,532 at Johnston’s intersection with Lintel Drive.
Despite the volume of traffic, Johnston’s width narrows to just 20 feet in places, well below the township standard of 24 feet for streets in new residential developments.
The status of Johnston as a collector road mainly is attributable to it serving as a primary connection between heavily traveled East McMurray and Thomas roads.