Efforts by DelDOT to develop updated plans for Sussex County’s east-west transportation corridors reveal lesser-known challenges arising from the county’s growth.
One ongoing study focuses on Bridgeville and Greenwood — the former of which grew by 25 percent in the past decade — in Western Sussex County, where the agency recently surveyed residents to set priorities for roadway and traffic safety updates.
Like elsewhere in Sussex County, the surveys revealed an evolving tangle of pressures facing small rural towns. Those include the familiar – requests to create dedicated lanes for farm equipment, for instance – to the relatively new.
A stakeholder group from Bridgeville and Greenwood told DelDOT last week their towns are starting to draw federal employees who commute to DC several times a week, creating regular weekday traffic that small rural roads can’t accommodate.
DelDOT Transportation Planner Jennifer Cinelli-Miller says that trend is a byproduct of the federal government giving employees more leeway to work from home, creating new long-distance commuters never factored into previous traffic plans.
“Unfortunately, it's causing different types of movement than we ever accounted for before," she told local stakeholders. "Before, we could count on tourists. Now it's people who live here, consider this their full-time residents, and are commuting to their job.”
Discussions also highlighted more obscure transportation concerns. DelDOT noted new housing developments that favor cul-de-sac streets make it difficult to travel from town to town without using highways like Route 13, increasing congestion and making it more difficult to pursue pedestrian improvements.
Cinelli-Miller urged the two towns to coordinate their growth plans to avoid creating two isolated pockets of development connected only by a single highway and overburdened side roads.
“Especially as growth happens and it brings the town's boundaries closer to each other," she said. "It's going to go a long way to be able to support one another in how you develop — to have some shared resources.”
The discussions are part of a broader Coastal Corridors Study that is still in the community engagement phase.
