Safer Roads for All
Safety Shoulder Stripes
Enhance Our Township
[November 2, 2014] A three year effort to make Haverford's main streets safer for walking and biking is now bearing fruit. You may have noticed new “safety shoulder stripes” appearing on many roads, especially starting this past week. Better definition of travel lanes, coupled with with the creation of usably wide striped-off shoulders for cyclists, offers benefits to everyone:
- Provides a safer place for bicycling along our main roads, where room permits and on-street parking is absent or little-used
- Fosters a positive traffic-calming effect on many of the faster drivers
- Increases what traffic engineers call "lane discipline"
- Lets drivers on side roads safely “nose out” a bit farther, to better see if it is clear for them to pull out onto the main road
- Puts road traffic farther away from pedestrians on sidewalks
- Can be used by pedestrians who must walk or jog along the edge of a road that lacks sidewalks
- Improves lane-edge visibility at night
Thanks to Haverford Township and PennDOT for supporting and implementing this effort!
The example above is along Ardmore Avenue at Morris Road and Elwell Field. You might notice new marked-off shoulder areas on stretches of Ardmore Avenue, Darby Road, Drexel Avenue, Eagle Road, Earlington Road, Glendale Road, Lawrence Road and Manoa Road.
In total, about eight miles of road (16 miles of shoulders), which were identified as sufficiently-wide candidates in a detailed study by the Haverford Walks and Bikes committee, have been completed. We greatly appreciate our township government and our state transportation department embracing the results and following through to implementation. It’s great to see the shoulder improvements throughout the township, and our network of “bike suitable” roads has been transformed and dramatically increased as a result.