Making Route 1 safer was the focus of a public meeting in Newark Tuesday.
The forum, hosted by State Sen. Stephanie Hansen (D-Middletown), State Rep. Ed Osienski (D-Glasgow) and DelDOT, follows a crash that killed five people on Route 1 in early July.
“There has been an abnormally high number of fatalities on our roadways in the last month. And that really highlights the need for us to do more education on our Strategic Highway Safety Plan,” said DelDOT Secretary Jennifer Cohan.
Cohan adds that the event offered DelDOT an opportunity to teach the public about it’s goal to keep improving safety measures until there are zero deaths on state roadways.
DelDOT engineers Mark Luszcz and Don Weber presented crash data as well as plans for four median barrier installation projects.
The planned installations cover roughly 27 miles, mostly on the area of Route 1 between Odessa and Dover.
It’s merely a coincidence one of these projects is planned for the area where the high-profile crash occurred. According to Wever, the plans have been in the works since the winter, and some are nearly ready to be put out for contract bid.
The DelDOT team also showed videos of vehicles hitting different barriers made of concrete, steel and high-tension cables.
Most of the planned projects will be high-tension cable barriers, which DelDOT officials say are the most cost-effective and forgiving when struck.
The four federally-funded projects will likely cost around $4 million dollars total, and construction on the first few should begin by the end of the year.
Cohan hopes construction on the first few projects will be completed next spring, though the Department will know more about project timelines when the contract has been assigned.
Sen. Hansen said she requested Tuesday’s presentation because she wanted to know what the department’s improvement plans were, and whether their decisions were data-based.
“You know I wish this barrier along Route 1 had been in place a month ago,” she said. “But I think what we should take away from this is we do have an agency that is on top of things.”
DelDOT’s Luszcz and Weber said that other planned safety enhancements include additional signage and high-friction roadway material.
Rep. Osienski and Sen. Hansen chair the House and Senate Transportation Committees.
