‘Things like this saves lives’

Hopewell Borough officials recently celebrated the partnerships involved in lowering the speed limit on county roads Route 518 and Route 654 that make up East and West Broad Street to 25 miles per hour (mph) and the award of a $1.5 million Safe Routes to School grant.

They were joined with Mercer County officials, school district administration, Hopewell Township Mayor Courtney Peters-Manning, and members of the borough’s Pedestrian, Bicycle and Safety Advisory Committee (PBSAC).

“While this is huge for us it is only the beginning,” Hopewell Borough Mayor Ryan Kennedy said. “It took us years to get to this point of 25 mph and we are not going to stop working.

“This grant gives us the opportunity to start planning and putting things together with what we want to have with our streets and connecting families and friends with our schools and parks in a safe way. This is the flag of the next part of our work and journey.”

The entire length of Broad Street is now 25 mph. Additionally, a portion of Route 654 west of Broad Street in Hopewell Township was reduced from 45 mph to 35 mph.

Borough officials thanked Hopewell Township and Mayor Courtney Peters-Manning for their partnership and support in authorizing the transition speed heading into the borough to 35 mph. Officials also thanked Hopewell Township police who serve Hopewell Borough as well as the township.

“I’m so happy we have in house our administrator, our professionals, and this team of residents with their own amazing talents that put things together on this issue … [they are] our eyes and ears,” Kennedy added, saying those things are “then [sent] up the chain for the town to work with the county and regional nonprofits to craft the solutions we need.”

There are three components to pedestrian and bicycle safety for a community such as the borough – the speed limit, enforcement with a great police department, and physical improvements, Kennedy said.

“Today shows that when everybody works together, we can get great things done,” Mercer County Executive Dan Benson said. “Every study shows the more walkable you make a community, the safer you make it for pedestrian and bicyclists, it actually makes it safe for motorists as well.

“Too often we take the statistics of those deaths as being a given and they are not. They are preventable and things like this saves lives.”

Officials also recognized the award of a $1.5 million Safe Routes to School grant to make improvements.

Administered by the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT), the Safe Routes to School grant program is a federally funded program to increase pedestrian safety among motorists and
schoolchildren.

“I’m incredibly excited and we have never done anything like this before in the borough,” Council President Krista Weaver said. “It has been such a long time since we have had any significant traffic safety improvements here.

“We have had several crashes, serious injuries, we had a fatality in 2021 and that is what really started this process and got the PBSAC to form and begin their work which launched us on this path.”

The projects that would be covered in the grant include filling important gaps in the borough’s sidewalk network and adding sidewalk extensions that would allow pedestrians to safely walk to places such as St. Michael’s Farm Preserve.

Other grant funded projects include rectangular rapidly flashing beacons at multiple major crossings along Broad Street and Princeton Avenue and upgrades to other crosswalks and overhead flashing lights at Hopewell Elementary School.

“To me the most exciting things are the sidewalk connections outside of the borough, so we are going to have a sidewalk that connects the borough to Kings Path and that will allow all the kids in that neighborhood to walk and bike to school and people to easily walk in town from there,” Weaver said.

“We are also going to add a sidewalk connection to Princeton Avenue to St. Michael’s Farm Preserve. Implementation does take a while and other people I have spoken to said you do have to have a certain amount of patience for this. It is going to improve safety so much I think it is well worth the wait.”

Borough officials thanked Board of Education president Anita Williams Galiano and School District Superintendent Rosetta Treece, who were on hand representing the school district, as well as the leadership of Greater Mercer Transportaion Management Association, and borough staff.

“It will be some time before we can pick off these projects and implement them,” Kennedy explained. “We haven’t set our schedule on what is going to come first, but for the next couple years we will implementing some of these programs and improvements on our streets, filling in missing sidewalks, increasing the number of pedestrian crossings that have pedestrian activated beacon lights and a whole list of improvements.

“There is still a design phase [that we] have to figure out who is going to build them. This will be a couple of years of planning and rollout of projects. It is not all going to come in a day.”