Traffic Signals

From the moment the city replaced traffic lights with stop signs at 56th and Media streets in West Philadelphia, neighbors knew there would be problems. On April 18, three days after the Streets Department removed the signals, there was a three-car collision, and an 80-year-old woman was seriously injured. "Most of us said when they took the signals down this was going to happen," said Thomas Johnson, who lives a couple of doors from the intersection. The intersection is considered low-volume because only about 4,000 vehicles pass through it each day. Police statistics show that fewer pedestrian and traffic accidents occur when intersections are converted from signals to four-way stop signs.

Hold those stoplight sighs and bottleneck blues. The Montgomery County commissioners have approved a $1.5 million construction project intended to upgrade traffic signals and enhance traffic flow at 34 intersections throughout the county. Federal highway money will pay for $750,000 of the project, and the county and 17 municipalities will evenly split the remaining costs, said Leo Bagley, the county's transportation planner. The use of matching federal money for signal improvement is the first program of its kind in the state, Bagley said.

Don't floor it at red lights here. The township is one of 32 municipalities in the nation selected to receive a $15,000 federal grant to stop motorists from running red lights, U.S. transportation officials announced yesterday in Washington. Police Superintendent Henry P. Jansen said the Federal Highway Administration grant would be used to underwrite the cost of brochures, public service announcements and bumper stickers that read "I Stop for Red Light. " "The grant will pay for off-duty officers who will be working at the lights, so it won't make a dent in our budget," Jansen said.

Traveling on Street Road between Interstate 95 and Route 1 in Bensalem is no ride in the country. There are traffic signals galore. Eleven of them on the three-mile stretch. There is always traffic. At least 38,000 vehicles per day. There is the highway surface. Concrete that is crumbling fast. You get the picture: Red light. Bump. Green light. Bump. Red light . . . Wouldn't it be nice if all of the signals were synchronized, if the road were a smooth blacktop, if travel time through the township were cut in half?

Medics and firefighters trying to weave through traffic congestion may now change traffic-signal lights thanks to a strobe-light device developed for emergency vehicles that flashes about 800 times a minute. Requests for permits to upgrade traffic signals with the safety devices come in sporadically to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said Mark Kray, municipal-signals engineer. Sales of the devices have grown in southern Delaware County and 3M's Opticom receivers are used in Uwchlan, East and West Whiteland Townships in Chester County, said Stanley C. Bentley Sr., sales director at Signal Services Inc. in Exton.

Upper Dublin Township officials have agreed to wait until next month to vote on a plan for $6.3 million in road improvements around the Fort Washington Office Park. The proposed transportation development district was the topic of a public hearing Tuesday night that will continue Oct. 17 to give property owners more time to digest the information, said William Gift, president of the Board of Commissioners. "We thought that was a fairly reasonable request. . . . There's no reason for us to ram something down their throats," Gift said in an interview yesterday.

The city's seen the light in South Philadelphia. And the light is green - as in money - not red, as in red ink. We're talking traffic lights here, and they're getting easier to see. And cheaper to keep operational. The big change is the switch from the incandescent bulb of the days of Tom Edison to the light-emitting diode (LED) of the era of the VCR, the computer, the small appliance, virtually anything electronic. LEDs are pinhead-sized lights. They cost a lot less to operate than the incandescent.

Earlier this month, PennDot told residents of Ridley Park that it planned to close the Swarthmore Avenue bridge for two years to replace it. On Wednesday, residents told PennDot how that would affect their lives. A section of Swarthmore Avenue, which connects Chester Pike and MacDade Boulevard, would be closed for a complete overhaul in 1992. At a meeting Wednesday that included police and fire officials, members of the Borough Council and representatives of the Ridley Park Business Association, PennDot officials explained the three-phase project: Reroute traffic; tear down the bridge, which is structurally unsafe, and replace it. The plan would change the traffic flow on East Hinckley Avenue, the main street of the business district, and add a signal at Hinckley and Sellers Avenues.

Plans for a North Penn Expressway died six years ago, but the North Penn Chamber of Commerce hasn't forgotten about the land set aside for the defunct Route 309 bypass proposal. The state Department of Transportation is selling that land now, about 55 parcels, and the chamber wants the money from the sale to stay in the North Penn area. But, according to PennDOT spokeswoman Lois Morasco, that's not going to happen. Instead, proceeds from selling the land, some purchased as long as 20 years ago, will go to the state general highway fund, she said.

The Whitpain Board of Supervisors has decided to take legal action against a township resident who has refused to comply with various zoning and building codes on his Skippack Pike property. In a 3-0 vote Monday, the board authorized township solicitor J. Peirce Anderson to file suit in Montgomery County Court against Carl Lightfoot of the 200 block of Skippack Pike. Board Chairman Leigh P. Narducci abstained from the vote because he is Anderson's law partner. Board member William DeWald was not in attendance.