Township Kicks Off Traffic Signal Retiming, Deals with Three Car Accidents

If anyone noticed a few seconds shaved off their commute time today, that wasn't an accident

On Tuesday, Cranberry Township kicked-off its new traffic signal patterns on some of the community's busiest corridors, including Route 19, Route 228, and Freedom Road.

The new pattern is characterized by  "leading lefts" and "lagging lefts." Turning movements will follow a different sequence. As an example, at the intersection of Route 19 with Route 228, all traffic in the northbound lanes of Route 19 will get a green light at once. Then, just the through traffic in both directions gets to go. Then all the traffic in the southbound lanes.

Prior to today, the pattern was to give a green light to left-turning traffic, followed by green lights to the through lanes.

While Jason Daily, director of public works, said the signal changes worked well the first day, it wasn't all smooth sailing.

Around 4:30 p.m., Daily said, three car accidents within 45 minutes of each other tied up traffic on Route 228 for at least an hour.

Daily said two of the accidents occurred near the state road's intersection with the Cranberry Woods Business Park. The other accident was near the highway's intersection with Franklin Road. 

Daily said the accidents were not caused because of the new signal patterns.

"They were not caused by the traffic re-timing, but they did impact the afternoon rush," he said.

The accidents also hampered Cranberry's plans to observe how the signals fared in that area for the early-evening rush hour. Daily said township workers spent most of Tuesday observing the new traffic signal patterns across the area and making adjustments as needed.

He said traffic engineers and technicians would return to the streets tomorrow to watch over traffic.

If you have an obervation to make about the new traffic patterns, call the township's Traffic Operations Center at 724-776-4806 ext. 1012.