East Whiteland Town Hall Provides Details About Transportation Projects on Routes 202 and 29

Representatives from PennDOT and the Transportation Management Association of Chester County spoke to East Whiteland residents Wednesday about two major road projects affecting the township this year.

Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission engineer Don Steele provided an update on the new four-way interchange, Exit 320 at Route 29. The turnpike interchange—located eight miles east of the Downingtown interchange and six miles west of the Valley Forge interchange—and should significantly relieve turnpike congestion as well as rush-hour traffic on Route 401, Steele said.

Four bridges are being constructed for the project: one over the turnpike, one over Atwater Drive, and two over Yellow Springs Road.

On March 21, the Mill Road detour went into effect, and will remain so until November, Steele said. The project began on March 25 of this year and should be open to traffic by the fall of 2012.

“The project will help with turnpike congestion at Valley Forge and Downingtown, and should help with congestion on 202 as well,” Steele said.

He added that the interchange will help pull traffic off of Route 401 during rush hour.

The $48 million project is funded by the Turnpike Commission through toll dollars.

The entire toll plaza will be EZ-Pass only, a feature that the Turnpike Commission would like to eventually implement at all of its exits, Steele said. The toll cost at the Route 29 interchange will be determined one to two months before the project is finished.

A few residents raised concerns about how the flow of traffic from this interchange would affect residential areas, to which Steele responded that the effect is uncertain. The purpose of the recently conducted Route 29 study was to determine whether the road could handle the increased traffic, not to study the potential effects on residential roads.

“Unfortunately, some of these things have to evolve and we have to see how much of an issue they are,” East Whiteland Township Supervisor Bill Holmes said.

East Whiteland will also be affected by a US 202 widening and reconstruction project on the 4.2 miles of US 202 in East Whiteland and Tredyffrin Townships. The groundbreaking for the four-year, $105.4 million project will take place on Thursday, April 21.

The Federal Highway Administration provided 80 percent of the project’s funding, with 20 percent provided by the state, Project Manager at Urban Engineers Dave Palmer said.

The first stage of construction, which will take six to eight weeks to complete, will involve overnight lane closures and some off-peak and weekend lane restrictions each way, Palmer said. During this stage, the outside southbound shoulder of US-202 will be rebuilt for use as a travel lane during later stages of construction.  The lane closures, which begin on April 21, will occur from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. for the next six to eight weeks, Palmer said.

After the southbound shoulder construction is finished, two lanes of southbound traffic will be shifted to the right for about six months, as work continues to rebuild and reconstruct the median for use as a northbound travel lane in the next stage of construction.

Throughout all four stages of construction, two lanes will remain open in both directions on US 202 during peak travel times, Palmer said.

For more details on construction and lane closures, see the PennDOT informational brochure attached to this article.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the US 202 construction will take place Thursday, April 21, at 10 a.m. at the Park & Ride facility on Matthews Road at the US 202/PA 29 Interchange. Parking will be available in the Park & Ride. 

“This is a chance to see the realization of a goal we started on in 1997,” TMACC executive director Mike Heron said. “It’s been quite a bit of time. It was more of a dream than anything else, and we now talk about this with a sense of accomplishment.”