Free advice for a cheap, quick fix to make a dangerous road safer. Will Harrisburg accept it?

Yahoo

07-03-2025

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — The 25-mile-per-hour speed limit signs couldn't be any more clear. But just as clear: Almost nobody goes that speed — or anything close to it.
'You'll see 50, 60,' said Corky Goldstein, who has lived for 53 in a house alongside where Division Street passes Italian Lake in uptown Harrisburg.
The problem isn't entirely new, but Goldstein says it has gotten worse since — ironically — the city successfully redesigned 2nd Street from a fast, three-lane, one-way street into a two-way, two-lane street with roundabouts and raised crosswalks. Unable to race up 2nd Street from downtown, some cars now do so up still-fast parallel north-south streets like 6th Street, and then they zoom across Division Street between 6th and 2nd. No stoplights, stop lights, roundabouts or even crosswalks at all, never mind raised ones. Forget 25 mph; drivers routinely seem to go twice that.
None of this surprises Jeff Speck, a globally-known city planner (at the Boston-based firm Speck Dempsey) and author of the books Walkable City and its sequel Walkable City Rules.
The problem, according to Speck: Standard driving lanes are 10 feet across, so a two-lane street should be 20 feet across. Beyond that, planners like Speck have found, increased width just causes people to drive more quickly, because the wider street creates the illusion that they can do so safely.
But ostensibly two-lane Division Street, including two little-used, barely-marked parallel parking lanes, is 46 feet across. The upshot?
'The lanes on division street in harrisburg are wider than highway width,' Speck said. 'So they're telling drivers — they're sending a very clear signal to drivers — which is to go highway speed.'
In fact, Speck was able to guess how fast cars go on the street, without knowing anything other than its width.
'It's posted at 25, right?' he said. 'I'm sure people are going twice that in those in those highway-width lanes — those wider-than-highway-width lanes.'
Not that more police enforcement of speed limits would hurt, but Speck said that can be a surprisingly ineffective solution, not to mention one that would further strain police resources in a city already struggling to battle a surge in violent crime.
'Manpower is a lot more expensive than paint,' Speck said, alluding to solution, which he generally charges cities for but agreed to provide to abc27 News for free, because he said it's just that straightforward in Harrisburg. 'I'm not recommending that the street be rebuilt. What I'm recommending is the sort of work that we do in many American communities, which is to essentially lay down a thin topcoat and restripe it.'
More specifically? Turn this:
Into this:
That's an abc27 News illustration using Speck's recommendations, which are to 'create a 20-foot, two-lane center section,' he said. 'I would pull the parked cars off one of the curbs to squeeze that 20 feet between parked cars, and then between the curb and those parked cars I have moved, I would create a two-way cycle path.'
Beyond that?
'That street does not have a lot of cars parked on it at certain times of day,' Speck said. 'But there are no markings suggesting that the parking lane isn't just part of the drive lane. The addition of some sort of stripe between the parking and the driving lane would visually narrow the driving lane' to one commensurate with the actual speed limit.
(The lack of a yellow centerline is no accident. 'When you remove the yellow centerline from a street, people drive seven miles an hour slower,' Speck said. 'This is somewhat counterintuitive, but that feeling of safety — knowing that the center line is there between you and oncoming traffic — actually causes you to go faster.')
And finally? Crosswalks wherever people like to cross, Speck said.
Goldstein, who is 84, talked about 'older people' crossing the street dangerously. Accustomed to the travel patterns, he helps escort other people — from schoolchildren to attendees at the Hadee Mosque, who often leave their cars parked there on a nice day and cross Division to walk along Italian Lake — across the street.
It's partly a quality-of-life issue, Goldstein said.
'People come to the lake to just walk around and relax and then try to cross the street,' he said. 'Whatever relaxation they had, [now] they're so stressed out.'
But he said it's more than only that. He has watched dogs get struck and killed trying to cross. So humans?
'We don't have to wait until someone is hurt badly or even killed,' Goldstein said.
Speck said the good thing about a street so ridiculously wide as Division is that the fix doesn't come with any difficult tradeoffs. Sometimes planners have to weigh a bike lane desired by some people against on-street parking desired by others. Division Street can have both, and providing both will make the road safer for drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike, he said.
City spokesperson Mischelle Moyer said leaders are aware of Division Street's problems.
'Our engineers and other involved parties are planning to hold the first of many community meetings, where public opinion and input will be welcomed and crucial to the success of the project,' said Moyer — the first such meeting, she said, is tentatively scheduled for early May. 'We will be discussing and showing some feasible options, which will 100% be dictated and chosen through resident input.'
But if the solution is so obvious and simple that one of the world's most sought-after city planners was willing to provide it for free, are 'many community meetings' really necessary in a city that in 2022 'paused' a plan to redesign State Street — once named of the deadliest streets in America — after a property owner complained to Mayor Wanda Williams about part of the plan, which could have reduced on-street parking in favor of a bike lane? Three years later, the project has never restarted.
And again: Unlike State Street, fixing Division Street requires no trade-off between the bike lane and parking.
'It's not a big deal to fix. If i was talking about an expensive deal or a big deal, I could understand it,' Goldstein said. 'This is not. They have the money to do this.'
So maybe instead of trying to reinvent another wheel and risking ending up with nothing, the city should just fix the street quickly, based on widely-accepted planning principles that have worked in countless other similar instances? And then if leaders want, they can hold meetings to hear what residents think, including if they want any further tweaks?
'That would be great,' Goldstein said.
'And again, it's just paint,' Speck said.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.