Jim Warner looks out his office window along Harrisburg Pike and sees traffic.

Plenty of it is coming into the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority, where Warner is executive director. Over the past three years, like so much else on Harrisburg Pike, the facility has been renovated, to the tune of $30 million. And while new efficiencies mean fewer trucks, the number of people dropping off old paint cans, used motor oil and other household hazardous waste has exploded — from 5,000 annually to 3,000 per month.

Warner also sees the potential for even more traffic. "I look out my window and I see Baker Campus," 54 acres of athletic fields owned by Franklin & Marshall College, fields that are being replaced by newer ones closer to the school. "That's not going to be left as a vacant field; 10 years from now I'll probably look out [the window] and see some sort of commercial development."

On Harrisburg Pike, it may be inevitable.

Harrisburg Pike is booming like no other corridor in Lancaster County. From North Prince Street in Lancaster city to State Road in East Hempfield Township, nearly a dozen multimillion-dollar projects are either proposed, under way or newly completed.

That's just the beginning. Over the next two decades, officials expect even more growth along the corridor. And planners are taking a closer look at the traffic-laden road, trying to figure out how they can prevent it from turning into one big parking lot.

On Monday the Lancaster County Planning Commission and the Harrisburg Pike Transportation and Land Use Study Steering Committee will host an open house to share some preliminary findings. They'll ask for input from citizens and talk about solutions, many of them incremental steps that together could have a big impact.

"The general perception of Lancastrians, including myself, is that it's a pretty highly congested corridor," said Dave Royer, the county's director of transportation planning. "It's not quite as bad as you might think."

Getting worse?
But the fear is that it's going to get worse.

There's not much room to widen the road, though portions of the corridor may be expanded if Manheim Township officials approve a plan by High Real Estate Group to build The Crossings, a $100 million shopping center across from Long's Park.

The plan is controversial, largely because it would generate so much traffic. William Cluck, an attorney representing a group calling itself "Smart Growth for Lancaster" (see related story), has challenged the developer's traffic study and claimed that while millions would be spent to reconfigure the Route 30/Harrisburg Pike interchange, traffic could overwhelm intersections all along the corridor.

"Everyone's pointing at the high accident rate at Dillerville and [North] President," said Cluck. "I'm getting calls from people who live along President who are very upset" at the prospect of even more traffic.

But more traffic along the Harrisburg Pike is guaranteed.

At the western edge of the five-mile corridor, the State Road/Centerville Road intersection, Charter Homes wants to build a massive "village" called Independence, which would have 3,200 homes, its own school and its own train station.

Two new hospitals have recently been completed on the Lancaster General Health Campus, with the newest, the Surgery Center, opening its doors earlier this month. Hospital spokesman John Lines said there are no additional plans on the table right now, but "as demand for health care at the health campus and the nearby Women & Babies Hospital continues to grow, we will expand our facilities and services to meet that demand. There is room on the campus property for additional health-care services, and both facilities were designed with the ability to expand."

Across from the Health Campus, Woodcrest Villa is undergoing a massive expansion; Park City is expanding, and several new stores have opened in the Fountain Shoppes, a separate retail strip between Bon-Ton and J.C. Penney.

East of Long's Park, R.R. Donnelley & Sons announced last year it was planning a $40 million expansion. The Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority's expansion should be completed early next year, said Warner. Students have moved into Franklin & Marshall College's College Row, with the first retailer, Filling's, opening last week.

F&M also hopes to relocate the Dillerville railyard to a tract behind the post office on Harrisburg Pike and open up the current railyard for redevelopment.

The Lancaster Arts Hotel opened last year near the Harrisburg Pike/Mulberry Street intersection, and city planners have approved the Lancaster Family YMCA's plan to build a three-story, 41,443-square-foot facility, to replace the one on North Queen Street, near the same intersection.

The scale of development is matched nowhere else in Lancaster County. "There are a lot of other really good corridors, but I'm not sure there are any that are a county-wide draw," said Lisa Riggs, executive director of the James Street Improvement District. "Whether you live in Gap or Quarryville, the main U.S. post office is there. So is the largest enclosed shopping mall in the county, and Long's Park."

The average trip from Route 283/State Road to Prince Street along the corridor takes 12 to 14 minutes, she said. Traffic doesn't really spike at rush hour; rather, it's continuous: "At the mall, people are in and out all day," she said; same at Woodcrest Villa, the post office, the waste authority and other properties. And the number of special events — from Christmas shopping season to summer concerts at Long's Park — also pack more volume onto the road.

Crash statistics and other specific figures will not be available until Monday's meeting, said county planner Royer.

Walkers and cyclists
Planners hope to keep the corridor passable not just for vehicles, but for pedestrians and bicyclists, too. "We know there's a latent demand for bike and foot traffic," said Royer. That could, for example, mean the possibility of sidewalks all the way from Prince Street to Long's Park, or bicycle lanes.

Widening the entire corridor simply won't be possible. But timing the stoplights or reducing the number of "curb cuts," forcing properties to use a common entrance or exit, could help.

"I know there are people who feel Harrisburg Pike is already congested, and why would we want more," said the JSID's Riggs. "But this is where we want development, rather than putting it in places where you'd have to build infrastructure from scratch.

"This is all about smart growth."

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Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.
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