Jul 7, 2009 11:00 pm US/Eastern
Chester Co. Officials Question PennDOT Spending
THORNDALE, Pa. (CBS 3) ―
At the intersection of Business Route 30 and Route 340 in Chester County, you won't find a lot of people walking. In fact, there are no sidewalks for long stretches of those roads.
But at the corner, you will find painted crosswalks, walk signals and handicap-accessible sidewalk ramps, also known as curb cuts.
It's something that bothers Chester County Commissioner Carol Aichele.
"I refer to these as curb cuts to nowhere," she said.
But what bothers her even more: PennDOT is about to spent more than $20,000 of federal stimulus money on this intersection, ripping out the curb cuts and rebuilding them. It's something PennDOT plans to do to 3,935 other ramps this summer in the five county Philadelphia region, consuming some $13 million of stimulus funds.
PennDOT says it has no choice. The state lost a 2007 lawsuit filed in Erie and now must rebuild every curb cut – 117,000 of them statewide – to higher standards. The ramps cannot be as steep. They must point directly into crosswalks instead of toward the center of the intersection. They must include raised domes for the visually impaired, and water cannot pond at the bottom of the ramp.
The reconstruction makes the ramps safer.
But it will cost taxpayers about $800 million over the next 10 years.
"It's a massive undertaking to replace, in the five-county Philadelphia area, 60,000 curb ramps," said PennDOT spokesman Eugene Blaum.
But he stresses that PennDOT is focusing on ramps where people walk.
"We're taking a close look to see if they are accessible to pedestrians," he said. "We're doing them where there are sidewalks."
Aichele says she understands the need for curb cuts in boroughs or cities, locations where people walk, but she just doesn't think rebuilding them is a good use of the stimulus money. Especially in areas where there are no pedestrians.
"What we got here are short term jobs, not an economic stimulus package," she said.
Aichele says the money would be better spent on big projects like the widening of Route 202.
"Chester County's [stimulus] allocation is just over $18 million," Aichele said. "We are going to spend a quarter of that" on rebuilding curb cuts.
PennDOT says it needed projects it could put in motion right away, and the curb cuts worked perfectly. It also says using federal money for the curb cut reconstruction will free up state money for bridge and road construction.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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