SELINSGROVE — The number of vehicles traveling on Attig Road has risen from about 200 a day to 2,000 due to detours, Monroe Township Secretary Stephanie McKinney said.
The township put a sensor out last month after hearing complaints from residents along Attig Road and nearby Monroe Manor residential development about the increasing traffic caused by detours during the construction of the southern section of the Central Susquehanna Valley Transportation (CSVT) project. The detours will be in place through December.
“People are not obeying the stop sign or the speed limit. We have concerns about safety,” Greenbrier Avenue resident Cheryl Stumpf told the township supervisors in late July.
McKinney said the sensor, which tracks the number of vehicles and their speed, revealed that 14,750 vehicles traveled on Attig Road in one week in August.
A similar count in 2019 showed 1,400 vehicles used the same road in one week, she said.
“It went from 200 a day to 2,000,” McKinney said. “We clocked one (motorist) going 78 mph.”
A majority of the motorists who traveled Attig Road last month during the week it was being observed, however, traveled below the 35 mph speed limit.
“The average speed was 29 mph,” she said.
Having 10 times the number of vehicles traveling on the narrow road has caused wear, said township road supervisor Terry Conrad.
“The side of the road was breaking” from the vehicles having to move over, he said.
Last week, the road crew closed Attig Road for a few hours as they widened the shoulder.
Following the July township meeting, Meck-Tech engineer Michael Thomas said, Pennsylvania Transportation Department officials were contacted about the complaints and they relocated and added more signs to help curtail thru traffic through the Monroe Manor development.
“I haven’t gotten any complaints so I assumed it helped,” he said.
While residents may not appreciate the heavier traffic, Thomas said, they are all public roads and can’t be closed to most vehicles.
“They have a right to use those roads. They don’t have a right to speed,” he said.
