This area off of 5th Street will be made into 200 parking spaces.
By Maddy Vitale
A nondescript vacant piece of property next to the marshlands holds the key to making the Landis Avenue-Commonwealth Avenue corridor between Sea Isle and Strathmere safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.
Resolving concerns among Upper Township officials on the Strathmere side, Cape May County plans to use the vacant land to create new parking that will be lost as part of a restriping plan along the busy corridor.
The property is owned by Sea Isle City.
Sea Isle officials have agreed to the county’s plan to turn the land into 200 spaces of parking.
Sea Isle Council President Jack Gibson called it a great compromise.
“Sea Isle City is on board. I personally was pleased to see the county’s solution to the parking that would be lost to make the corridor safer,” Gibson said in a phone interview.
Wider buffers in the three-mile stretch would be created by the restriping plan, to protect bikers and pedestrians from motor vehicle traffic.
This area off of 5th Street will be made into 200 parking spaces.
The plan calls for using land off of 5th Street for the parking spaces in the compromise. “The restriping will be a nice improvement and a safe one and a badly needed one,” Gibson noted. “The pedestrians and bicyclists need extra space. I think this is a necessary and worthwhile project.”
Wider buffers created by the restriping plan will help to protect bikers from motor vehicle traffic on the road.
The roadway is dotted with a series of yellow signs warning motorists to be careful of the bikers, pedestrians and, yes, the turtles, in hopes of avoiding accidents.
Michael Dannemiller, principal engineer for NV5, a consulting firm working on the project for the county, had said in a report that there were 16 motor vehicle accidents on the stretch of road between 2012 and 2016. In 2016, a bicyclist was killed by a car in Upper Township. Two pedestrians were injured when they were hit by cars.
