SANATOGA PA – How long does it take for a traffic light to test your patience? For Tammy Mayberry, it’s exactly 1 minute and 40 seconds.
The traffic signal at East High Street and Heritage Drive in Sanatoga, looking south from the center of Heritage.
At certain periods during weekday morning hours, that’s the timing interval for signals controlling traffic flow on East High Street at Heritage Drive in Sanatoga village to change. Mayberry’s clocked it personally.
The exasperated resident of Sunnybrook Village – the housing, retail and office complex that stretches from the north side of East High at Heritage west to Sunnybrook Road in Sanatoga – recently (Jan. 21, 2010) brought her stopwatch and a simple request to the Lower Pottsgrove (PA) Township Board of Commissioners. “Can you do anything” to reduce the delay at the intersection?, she asked.
The answer, “probably not,” took far fewer seconds than the wait for a green.
To be fair, township Manager Rodney Hawthorne was much more diplomatic. The problem, he said, is that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, which is responsible for East High Street and regulating the vehicular traffic it carries, has set pre-determined timing intervals for that signal and others during specific parts of the day based on earlier traffic counts. The timing for some signals even varies within a single hour, Hawthorne noted.
“What we can do,” Hawthorne said, “is check to make sure the timing is correct, but we can’t change the setting.”
That would have to suffice, if nothing else, Mayberry conceded, and offered her phone number so Hawthorne could follow up with results. “I’m not the only one who’s frustrated,” she said. “Some days there’s so little traffic on High while you’re waiting to turn left (from Heritage), people like me sit and time the light because they’re so annoyed.”
Related (to the Lower Pottsgrove Board of Commissioners’ Jan. 21 meeting):
- Sunnybrook Sign Money Awaits Hearing, Paperwork
- Township May Turn Off Some Street Lights
- Township Commissioners’ Meeting Tonight
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If you think that’s bad, you should sit at the light at CVS and S. Sunnybrook Road! On the weekend you can sit for as long as 5 minutes waiting for the light to change. Maple Ridge residents have long complained about this with no results. Good Luck!
The light at CVS is so short that you can hardly move your car onto High before it’s changing. This is going to lead to accidents.
Perhaps the relays in this equipment are getting stuck or need replacement.
The timing in these two locations is off at best.