An aerial view of the Cedar Street exit along Route 30 in Hempfield. (Sean Stipp | TribLive)
Story by JEFF HIMLER
TribLive
June 29, 2025
A note left on the door of their new Hempfield home 21 years ago was the first sign of trouble for Kristie Harvey’s family.
It was from a young driver, admitting to having hit a perimeter wall on Harvey’s lot just off the Cedar Street exit of Route 30.
It was a sign of things to come.
Motorists over the next two decades have regularly failed to negotiate the sharp, curving off-ramp from westbound Route 30, sometimes ending up in Harvey’s yard.
The Cedar Street exit is one of several trouble spots along Route 30 in Westmoreland County where crashes have become a concern for those who drive, live, work and enforce traffic laws along the major east-west corridor.
The county is crossed by a 41-mile stretch of the route initially designated as the Lincoln Highway in 1913. From the advent of the Model T to the current age of electric and hybrid cars, daily traffic volumes on the road have grown into tens of thousands at the western end of the county.
From 2015 through 2024, the Westmoreland segment of Route 30 witnessed 3,429 crashes, about two dozen of them involving fatalities — bringing the need for safety improvements to the forefront.
A wreck at the Harvey home in 2012 destroyed the family’s porch. Another involved a driver who had to be rescued from a car that overturned.
“Our retaining wall was destroyed at least 10 times,” Harvey said. “Our vehicles have also been struck multiple times. If we wouldn’t have had the wall, they’d probably have been in our living room.”
She believes factors contributing to many of the crashes include excessive speed and drivers mistaking the exit ramp for an extra traffic lane.
“I’ve been in contact with PennDOT for so many years,” Harvey said, “just begging them to please put up more signage, do something.”
She’s hopeful that an upcoming improvement project will improve driver and resident safety.
The work, tentatively slated to begin in late fall, will include additional signs alerting motorists to the exit and advising them to slow to 15 mph. The exit also will receive pavement markings and a high-friction surface treatment designed to decrease a vehicle’s stopping distance while increasing skid resistance.
“We’re putting the high-friction surface on so that cars tend to stay in control when they’re taking the off-ramp,” said Jeremy Hughes, assistant district executive for design with PennDOT District 12. “Cars are taking that exit at too high a speed, and they’re not being able to make that right turn.”
Also, he said, “We want to get the driver to be able to identify what lane they’re in so they can react accordingly and either stay off the ramp or take the ramp if that’s where they want to go.”
Harvey said those improvements can’t come soon enough. The township plans to open a community park nearby, including a new road connecting to the westbound Cedar Street ramps via adjacent Spruce Street.
She expressed hope that “these changes will make a safer situation for all, especially with … the number of residents that will be using the exit to access the park. The increased traffic due to the new park demands more attention to safety measures.”
The decision to improve the Cedar Street exit, though seemingly timed fortuitously, was made independently of the park plans, according to Hughes.
Factors that influenced the decision included public input, reports that PennDOT maintenance crews were frequently replacing signs damaged by out-of-control vehicles and a tally of car crashes that exceeds the expected number for that type of ramp.
“We try to be as data-driven as we can” when prioritizing and designing traffic improvements, Hughes said.
According to PennDOT’s online crash database. there were 15 reported vehicle wrecks from 2015 through 2024 on westbound Route 30 in the vicinity of the Cedar Street ramp. There were no fatalities during that period, but one crash in 2023 resulted in a suspected serious injury. All but four of the wrecks involved a vehicle hitting a fixed object.
An average of 1,600 vehicles per day use the ramp, according to PennDOT.
The project has an estimated cost of $400,000, which will be funded through the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program.
Hughes said the exit work is an example of a relatively inexpensive and simple improvement that can provide the biggest bang in enhanced safety compared to invested time and resources, as PennDOT considers feasible updates of portions of the Greensburg bypass portion of Route 30.
“It would be some years before we could put anything major into design on the Route 30 bypass section,” Hughes said. “You might see other small interim-type projects like you’ll see at Cedar Street.”
That section of highway, stretching between Westmoreland Mall and the Gabriel’s plaza in Hempfield, may have been in sync with current design concepts when it was constructed in the 1950s, but development has changed travel patterns along the corridor.
“Route 30 has always had a serious influx of traffic due to the last 10 to 15 years when we’ve developed more shopping and we’ve developed more attractions like the casino (at Westmoreland Mall),” said Trooper Tristan Tappe, a state police community affairs officer. “It’s important to obey the speed limit, give other drivers a safe distance and know your surroundings without driving distracted.”
Any extensive reworking of the Cedar Street exit would be challenging to design because it is close to the border of the City of Greensburg, where residential and commercial development are more dense, Hughes said.
“If the day comes to do a project there, it will be very controversial,” Hughes said. “It will be the desire of the people who are traveling to have a modern section of road … but residents will want to see something that’s more restrained, that doesn’t take additional land or change land use.”
A major Route 30 improvement project is on the horizon in North Huntingdon. PennDOT is proposing to install a median barrier to separate the eastbound lanes from the westbound lanes and restrict potentially dangerous left turns. Extra “jughandle” lanes would be added at key spots to allow drivers to shift between the two directions of travel.
Hughes doesn’t expect construction of the Route 30 improvements in North Huntingdon to begin before 2028. With an estimated cost of more than $75 million, the project stretches over about 2½ miles, from the junction with Route 48 in North Versailles to Carpenter Lane in North Huntingdon.
Project planners are working on the final design and pursuing right-of-way acquisition while looking to tap federal and state funding.
Opinions about the project are mixed among those doing business along that section of Route 30.
Peter Swigart, owner of Elite Motors, a used car dealership, said he views the Route 30 project as a waste of tax dollars.
“What price are you paying for these improvements?” he said. “I don’t think they’re going to achieve anything.”
He suggested the project may not result in the safety improvements that planners anticipate.
“If you’re going to put a barrier down the center of the highway, traffic just goes faster, it doesn’t slow down,” he said. “They’re not going to reduce the amount of accidents and collisions because people are going to drive faster.”
Swigart said he would prefer PennDOT restrict left turns and cross-traffic only at points where crashes have been a problem.
He said customers may have to drive a half-mile out of their way to reach his business after the barriers and jughandles are in place, and some other businesses will experience an even greater impact if they are displaced to make way for the road improvements.
At the Styles by Santone hair salon, owner Tammy Santone said she fully supports the median barrier and other improvements after seeing several crashes in front of her business — one of them involving a client.
“They were pulling out, and somebody came flying down the road,” Santone said. “I have personal reasons, too. I live right behind the salon.
“A lot of the people who come here will say how they hate driving on Route 30. A lot of them go all the way up to Route 48 and come around that way just so they don’t have to cross the road. They’re not going to be worried about going an extra minute on the road to hit a (jughandle) turnaround.”
Santone said she is so concerned about the hazards her customers face when pulling from her lot onto Route 30 that she has posted signs advising them to instead take a side road and reenter Route 30.
“It is much safer because of the better view they have of Route 30,” she said.
Norm Candelore, owner of a local chain of about a half-dozen Candelore’s Barking Beauties dog grooming and boarding locations, isn’t overly concerned about the impact the median barrier will have on his North Huntingdon venue.
“I’m not for or against it,” he said of the Route 30 project, while adding, “That road is heavily traveled and it’s not a very safe road. We’re all in favor of safety.
“It’s dangerous if you’re stopped to make a left-hand turn. People fly on Route 30, and they don’t pay attention all the time.”
While his customers may have to travel an extra half-mile to get turned in the right direction, Candelore noted they don’t have to make that trip every day.
“They know they’re going to visit us every four to six weeks, so they can plan in advance and have time to do it,” he said.
PennDOT has studied the possibility of extending the Route 30 improvements farther east in North Huntingdon and continuing into Irwin, ending at the 10th Street intersection. But even if more funding becomes available, Hughes said, acting on that study would be years in the future.
“We’re not even into the preliminary engineering for it,” he said.
If the Route 30 project were to be extended to 10th Street, it would still stop short of the Dunkin’ restaurant in Irwin — where police have responded to ongoing traffic safety concerns.
Irwin police Chief Dan Wensel said his officers monitor the area during weekday morning rush hours and regularly ticket Dunkin’ customers who ignore signage and make an illegal left turn out of the business onto Route 30.
That adds to a simultaneous hazard: cars that often are backed up into the right eastbound lane of the highway, waiting to enter the restaurant’s drive-thru lane.
“They’re backed up sometimes 10 cars deep,” Wensel said. “People are in a hurry and they want to get out and get going. Unfortunately, they’re not doing it in a safe manner.”
There was no response to messages left with a Dunkin’ staff member seeking comment.
While not able to cite the total number of crashes at the location, Wensel said they’ve increased by about 15% over the past year.
The intersections of Route 30 with Colonial Manor Road, in North Huntingdon, and with Colony Drive, in Irwin, are among top Westmoreland County road sites PennDOT is considering for possible safety-related improvements. The North Huntingdon intersection would be included in the potential expansion of the median barrier project but might be considered for separate attention.
“This is a perceived priority, but there are a lot of other intersections. These might not be the first things we get to in Westmoreland County. We look at excess crashes for how much traffic there is. You want to solve problems in the places where the crashes are going up.”
According to PennDOT data, there was one fatal crash near Colonial Manor Road in 2022 — among 36 wrecks there in from 2015 through 2024, including four others involving suspected serious injuries. The Colony Drive location also accounted for 36 crashes in the same time period, including a fatal wreck in 2020.
An average of 24,000 vehicles per day pass through the Colonial Manor Road intersection while the average daily traffic count at the Colony Drive location is 28,000.
Westbound motorists running the red light is a particular problem at Colonial Manor Road, according to Hughes.
“Our traffic unit has looked into interim improvements we could make there, but they don’t have anything in design,” he said.
Some options might be modifying the traffic signal’s timing, adding lane markings or installing advance signs to warn approaching traffic when the signal ahead is about to turn red — though the latter idea wouldn’t work with the signal’s existing hardware.
Vehicles pull through the Dunkin’ drive-thru onto U.S. Route 30 in Irwin. (Massoud Hossaini | TribLive)
Vehicles pull through the Dunkin’ drive-thru onto U.S. Route 30 in Irwin. (Massoud Hossaini | TribLive)
U.S. Route 30 is pictured in Irwin. (Massoud Hossaini | TribLive)
U.S. Route 30 is pictured in Irwin. (Massoud Hossaini | TribLive)
In Ligonier Township, much of the eastbound lane of Route 30 is divided from the westbound lane either by the Loyalhanna Creek or a broad median strip. Strategically placed “do not enter” signs are meant to prevent head-on, wrong-way crashes.
“We’ve had a lot of calls for vehicles going the wrong way, and (PennDOT) did put up some more signs,” said Ligonier Valley police Chief Michael Matrunics.
Lt. Eric Eslary, 40, an officer with the then separate Ligonier Township Police Department, was killed on May 5, 2015, when the patrol unit was struck by a vehicle headed the wrong way on westbound Route 30 near the Idlewild and Soak Zone park.
Less than a year later, on April 25, 2016, James Fillman Jr., 39, of Darlington was killed when authorities said he purposely drove his car head-on into a tractor-trailer in the same area of westbound Route 30. The death was ruled a suicide.
In another safety measure, motorists entering Route 30 westbound from the west end of Ligonier Borough’s Main Street must turn right and are not permitted to cross both lanes of traffic to turn east at a break in the median.
Still, Matrunics said, collisions occur there. “Rear-end collisions or pulling out in front of oncoming cars are pretty common,” he said.
The vicinity of the Route 259 intersection is another trouble spot — where a fatal crash occurred in the eastbound lanes in 2024, among 16 wrecks in that spot since 2015.
That intersection sees an average of 17,000 vehicles per day, according to PennDOT.
It’s a place, according to Matrunics, where motorists have unsuccessfully tried to reverse direction on the highway by making a last-minute left turn — perhaps after missing the entrance to nearby Idlewild.
“They make a left-hand turn from the right lane, crossing over the passing lane and putting themselves into oncoming traffic that’s coming in the same direction,” he said.
Speeding is a common problem on the stretch of Route 30 that is difficult for his officers to curb as long as Pennsylvania law prevents local police from using radar enforcement.
“We’ve actually stopped and issued tickets for people going 80 or 90 mph,” Matrunics said.
Jeff Himler is a TribLive reporter covering Greater Latrobe, Ligonier Valley, Mt. Pleasant Area and Derry Area school districts and their communities. He also reports on transportation issues. A journalist for more than three decades, he enjoys delving into local history. He can be reached at jhimler@triblive.com.