City Howl Help Desk: The bridge over troubled neighbors

IN PEACEFUL, residential Holmesburg one evening last week, an ambulance made a U-turn in the parking lot of a Sunoco station.

The driver looked confused. He drove slowly down a nearby street. It was as if he'd lost his hold on the neighborhood. What had changed?

Well, the Holme Avenue Bridge, which many drivers use to get from Roosevelt Boulevard to Interstate 95, had been torn down a few weeks before. PennDOT had been working to fix the almost-century-old bridge, believing it could be salvaged, and for eight months of construction, left one lane open.

But then, in mid-June, PennDOT decided the bridge might be compromised, agency spokeswoman Jenny Robinson said. On June 20, it shut the thing down.

Everything changed when the bridge went down, said Nova Lord, who lives right around the corner from the bridge. Suddenly, there were strange cars "whipping through" the quiet side streets where children play and ride their bikes, Lord said.

She and her boyfriend suspected the drivers were trying to get through to one of the major roads, but the bridge was closed and the detours weren't clearly marked.

Another hardship was traffic: Lord's boyfriend said he normally has a 15-minute commute, but once the bridge went down, that number shot up to an hour as vehicles backed up along residential Willits Road.

Weeks went by, and though PennDOT added a few signs to elaborate on the detour, it didn't seem to be enough. Last weekend, Lord's boyfriend said he watched a few cars drive up to the bridge construction site, turn around, and stop and ask him how to get to I-95.

GIVE US A SIGN: Help Desk spoke with Harold Windisch, the assistant construction engineer on the site, who said PennDOT was working on a revision of detours - its fourth because of community issues. PennDOT usually maps out detours in advance with community input, but because the bridge was closed so unexpectedly, PennDOT didn't have time to do it that way.

Windisch acknowledged the troubles neighbors are having with cars speeding through their quiet streets. He said PennDOT's designers are working on signs that will tell drivers to use Holme Circle, which would keep them off residential streets. The new signs just need to be approved, and they should be installed within a week, Windisch said.