PennDOT plans to overhaul Route 1, widen section of Route 413 in Langhorne. Here's why locals are worried

A plan to modernize and improve safety on a section of the Route 1 Expressway in Lower Bucks County has hit a major speed bump, as historic Langhorne says the overhaul of the superhighway and widening of Route 413 will funnel more traffic through the tiny borough.

Residents and officials raised their concerns — and their preference for a 2014 PennDOT plan — at a Langhorne Planning Commission meeting earlier this month.

"We support the changes to make Route 1 safer," said Paul Schneider, the Langhorne planning vice chair, adding the borough should have been consulted earlier in PennDOT's planning. "They can find a way to solve the problem without ripping the heart out of a small borough."

The work is the third part of PennDOT's $349 million Route 1 Improvement Project to fix aging bridges and make the expressway safer for motorists. The plan calls for adding shoulders and replacing islands with barriers between the northbound and southbound lanes to help prevent accidents.

While Route 1, also called Lincoln Highway, runs through Middletown, Langhorne Manor and Langhorne near Route 413, the traffic issues at its intersection with Route 413 will have its biggest impact on Langhorne Borough, officials say.

The latest design would funnel the traffic on and off Route 1 at Route 413 into the circular sections of two new cloverleafs, with one connecting with southbound Route 413 toward Penndel and the other with northbound Route 413 toward Langhorne Borough, with an additional ramp for a cross street at Gillam Avenue.

The cloverleaf interchange would be used instead of letting traffic enter and exit the expressway using access roads that currently connect to several side streets that are perpendicular to the expressway. The affected side streets would be capped with dead ends or cul-de sacs so traffic would not reach the highway. These include Hulmeville, Hill, Station and Bellevue avenues.

A separate "slip ramp" designed interchange is planned for farther south on the expressway near Neshaminy High School in Middletown but that won't lead traffic to Langhorne Borough. It is also years away in the planning and actual construction.

At the Route 413 cloverleaf, Route 413 going north past the Woods Services property would be widened from two through lanes — one in each direction — and a turning lane in each direction to four lanes and turning lanes until it almost reaches the first cross street, Flowers Avenue, in Langhorne Borough, where it would narrow to two through lanes again.

This will create a traffic bottleneck at the Flowers Avenue and Route 413 intersection, where people now walk to the Bucks County Free Library's Langhorne branch as well as to the historic Bethlehem African Methodist Episcopal Church, borough officials said.

Speaking at an online Langhorne planning meeting Jan. 19, residents said their lovely, walkable town will be overrun with traffic trying to avoid the bottleneck on Route 413.

"We do not want the interchange which causes it (traffic). We've had it with four lanes in the past," Councilwoman Kathy Horwatt said. "Four lanes to two lanes. They (drivers) are trying to race each other to queue — get out in front."

Horwatt said PennDOT didn't inform the borough of the plan until June 8 last year when it was announced in a newsletter from state Rep. Frank Farry's 142nd District office.

"We were not notified. Langhorne Borough responded immediately the next day with a resolution in opposition," she said.

But Farry said that some officials from Langhorne Borough were in a call in May with PennDOT. Horwatt said that information was not shared with her or others until they were preparing for their June meeting.

"We believe in transparency. That's something we don't feel we were given," she said.

PennDOT gave the borough until July 3 for public comment on the cloverleaf proposal and then held a meeting with borough officials in September at Farry's office.

"They wanted us to come up with alternatives," Horwatt said.

Brian Smiley, chair of the borough's planning commission, showed about 30 people who attended the Jan. 18 planning meeting that the borough would like PennDOT to go back to a 2014 plan that would keep one or more of the side streets open to the expressway.

"We just don't want the interchange," Smiley stressed, speaking about the cloverleaf design.

"PennDOT could save millions of dollars by not building an interchange at 413," Horwatt said.

Langhorne resident Mike Spadaro recalled moving to the historic town after bringing his family to Bucks County to visit nearby Sesame Place in Middletown from Long Island, New York, for the first time in 1986. He took a ride while his wife and children were at the amusement park. The next day he stopped at a real estate office and a week later bought a house.

"I fell in love with Langhorne and moved here 36 years ago," he said.

He now worries for the future of the town, fearing additional traffic will change it.

Langhorne residents also are concerned that PennDOT will, in the future, continue to widen Route 413, cutting the entire borough into two sections, and even expand it up to the Newtown Bypass, past St. Mary Medical Center, a few miles up the road in Middletown.

But PennDOT Project Manager Sibty Hasan said that is not the case.

"We are not going into the (Langhorne Borough) historic district. That's absolutely out of the scope for this project," Hasan said, talking about the center of the old town that dates to colonial times.

Howatt, however, pointed out that the intersection of Flowers and Route 413 where the church is located is in the Langhorne National Historic District.

Expanding Route 413 up to the bypass is also totally out of the question, PennDOT officials said. A plan of that magnitude would have to involve both the Bucks County and Delaware Valley Regional Planning commissions, and nothing is planned.

"We're stopping short of the historic district, which matches the existing roadway. We're matching into the existing pavement (at Flowers Avenue)," said Jared Patrick, project manager for the firm of Johnson, Mirmiran & Thompson Inc., which is working with PennDOT on the highway redevelopment.

In addition to the normal traffic in the area, which is often slowed by the volume of vehicles going through town during rush hours, Kenneth Yerges, JM&T associate vice president, said a minor increase in traffic is expected as new housing complexes are planned for the area, including an apartment complex that Woods Services announced it plans to build off nearby Maple Avenue.

Woods plan: Woods Services to sell Langhorne tract to Toll; build 42-unit apartments on Middletown campus

But Langhorne residents said that the bottleneck created on Route 413 will have drivers turning off that route to use other streets in the borough to take them where they want to go and that can create safety issues.

"It's such a walkable community. Everybody walks here," Schneider said.

Farry, who also lives in the borough, acknowledged "there will be impacts in Langhorne Borough."

John Picerno, who owns the Conoco gas station and minimart at the intersection of the access road to the Route 1 Expressway and Bellevue Avenue, says the plan will kill his business.

Without the access road, and with Bellevue Avenue a dead-end at his property rather than connected to the highway as it is now, motorists will no longer stop at his shop, which he has owned for 11 years. He planned to retire and had the business in a sales agreement but that was put on hold because of PennDOT's plan.

"I might have to sue Middletown and PennDOT. It's a no-brainer. If they close the access road, I'm going to have to sue them in the millions ... It's so depressing to do something like that ... I put my heart and soul into it," he said. "If PennDOT takes it away, they're going to have to compensate me."

He said his gas station along Route 1 is a landmark for Langhorne. "Without our gas station, people drive right by the town."

Picerno also was concerned about PennDOT's proposal, now being studied, to build a noise barrier walls on both sides of the highway at an additional cost of $50 million, on top of the $80 million already earmarked for phase 3 of the expressway improvements. Property owners whose land lines the sides of the expressway wouldn't see across the highway once installed.

He said that the first reconstruction plan from 2014 for the Route 413 interchange would have kept the side streets open to the expressway but nearby residents opposed it, so what was supposed to be the first phase of the highway reconstruction was turned into the last phase to give PennDOT more time to come up with an alternative.

"The opportunity to redesign the project allowed PennDOT to incorporate the potential for noise walls, to reduce the paved area within the corridor, and potentially reduce municipal maintenance costs by removing portions of the existing frontage roads," PennDOT spokesman Brad Rudolph said.

In the meantime, PennDOT got started on the improvements to the expressway in the Bensalem area, a project called RC1. That portion of the project is expected to be finished ahead of schedule this year.

The second phase, or RC2, from Rockhill Drive to the Penndel interchange is on schedule to be finished in time for the Route 413 intersection work to begin in 2026.

Rudolph said one of the problems with the first 2014 plan is that residents in Langhorne Manor along the access roads worried that those roads would get more speeding traffic when there were backups on the main highway. But the Langhorne Borough planners still think a revised version of that plan is doable and gave it to Farry to present to PennDOT late last week.

"The U.S. 1 Section RC3 design team will review the (Langhorne) planning commission document and send the written response back to Representative Farry when the review is completed," Rudolph said in an email Tuesday. He said PennDot intends to issue a reply by Feb. 4.

But Farry said that PennDOT officials told him back in August that the cloverleaf plan would be built.

PennDOT cannot delay much longer the work it needs to do to prepare for the third phase of the project to begin, officials said. It needs to get environmental studies done and begin the process of securing properties through eminent domain if it wants to begin the construction work on the cloverleaf in 2026 as scheduled.

"Langhorne Borough should be focusing on mitigating measures to address pedestrian safety and traffic congestion mitigation," Farry said, to ensure they are included in whatever plan is finalized. PennDOT officials said they did want to include some widened sidewalks and safety measures for walkers and bicyclists along Route 413.

The PennDOT team said that by closing off some of the side roads onto Route 1 and putting the through traffic right on Route 413 where most motorists want to go to get to other parts of the county, it hopes to keep the traffic off side streets in Langhorne Borough.

"It's a balancing act. We're trying to do the best we can," Yerges said.

To contact Peg Quann, email mquann@couriertimes.com.

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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Route 1 and Route 413 in Langhorne to get major overhaul under $80 million PennDOT plan