PA Town Paints Squiggly Lanes to Slow Drivers Down, and It’s Sort of Working

Yesterday, local news around the greater Philly area (about an hour’s drive north of Center City, so “greater” is stretching it some) brought an odd speeding mitigation tactic to our attention. Traffic engineers and roadway officials in Montgomery Township, Pennsylvania wanted to slow down traffic on a short stretch of residential road between two major thoroughfares. Typically, you’d do this with speed bumps or signs that digitally shame people, but the powers that be are trialing a different tactic on Grays Lane: wobbly road lines and cones.

The speed limit here is 25 mph, but the township told NBC10 that many drivers have been flouting that directive for more than two years, and the situation’s not improving. The problem is that Grays Lane runs between PA Route 309 to the west and US Route 202 to the east, and traffic around here can be miserable around rush hour—take it from a local. The nonsensical, chronically under-construction five-point intersection just below Grays Lane that 309 runs through definitely doesn’t help things. The result of all this is predictable, especially in this era of Waze navigation; drivers are cutting through Grays to save time.

Residents have long had enough, and in February, the township’s board of supervisors approved the plan to paint chicanes across two blocks of the road. At the moment, there are large electronic signs warning drivers of a “new traffic pattern” ahead, along with cones on the outer white lines. And yeah, it’s strange to drive through. When I found out this controversial stretch was about 20 minutes from my house, I had to go check it out for myself.

In person, the path isn’t quite as jagged or kinked as some photos, taken with especially long focal lengths, would have you believe. That said, drivers tend not to stay neatly within the swaying lines. Of 20 cars I counted through the road this morning, I’d say nine displayed even a modicum of steering effort. Still, most of those drivers were apexing the curves like Formula 1 racers at Suzuka. I watched one Subaru driver straight-line the entire thing without dropping speed, entirely undeterred by oncoming traffic. On the other hand, I also watched another driver, seemingly extremely confused, damn near come to a stop at the bulletin and navigate the chicane at walking pace.

What I will say, even though I didn’t have a radar gun on me, was that it did seem that most cars slowed a bit through those two blocks. Maybe that’s the new pattern doing its job, or maybe that’s locals trying to take in precisely what the hell happened to this road. Right now, it’s too early to tell. Apparently, an alternate solution of installing speed bumps didn’t get anywhere because the road was deemed too steep (there’s a very slight incline driving up from Doylestown Road). Sometime soon, the township expects to install additional “posts” and obstructions in the middle of the road, to deter straight-lining.

Perhaps for today, at least, police should’ve edited one of those electronic boards to promise that this is no April Fools’ joke. “In response to many of the comments, yes, this is a legitimate precaution that has been put in place,” the township was forced to state in response to its own post about the measure on Facebook.

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