Route 322 To Undergo Major Upgrades to Improve Safety, Efficiency

One of the major thoroughfares in and out of State College will see some major updates in the coming years.

Route 322 East past Boalsburg and up through Potters Mill is a windy, two-lane road, unlike the four-lane expressway that makes up most of the highway. State legislators have tried for over a decade to update the highway with little success – but that all changed on Wednesday.

Representatives from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the state legislature held a ground breaking ceremony outside the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Potters Mills Wednesday afternoon. They announced the beginning of a long-awaited project to improve safety along Route 322, ultimately turning the two-lane section into a four-lane highway.

At the ceremony, State Representative Kerry Benninghoff said he was “just devastated” when funding for the previous attempt to upgrade Route 322 fell through about ten years ago.

He said there have been 38 crashes along this particularly dangerous stretch of road between 2009 and 2013, at least one of which was fatal. Benninghof says that seeing those kinds of accidents when he served as a county coroner was a major motivation for him to run for office to improve road safety in the area.

Benninghoff noted that updating Route 322 isn’t just a safety issue. It will also improve the connection between Centre County and surrounding areas, allowing the highway to serve as a corridor for economic development.

PennDOT design services engineer Steven Fantechi says the project has three main components. The first is to upgrade the intersection with Sand Mountain Road, creating a proper interchange with on and off ramps.

Next is to connect local roads to that intersection, creating alternate routes to and around Route 322. That phase is expected to start by late 2015.

Fantechi says the third phase is the most extensive: building a new four-lane roadway in a new, nearby location to connect with the other parts of Route 322. The existing two-lane section of 322 will be reworked into another local road. This is expected to be underway by the fall of 2016.

“When the funding was pulled from this project over a decade ago, we were told this would never happen,” State Senator Jake Corman said at the groundbreaking ceremony.

He said that Act 89 – an effort of the state legislature that is funding the Route 322 project and other infrastructure improvements – is one of the highlights of his career as a legislature.

He looks forward to seeing this project improve the congestion and safety issues along Route 322, especially considering how important the heavily-traveled road is for buses from the Penns Valley School District. 

“For every resident of Potters Mills that has seen accidents and watched their family suffer because of the lack of safety here, that’s all coming to an end,” PennDOT Secretary Barry Schoch said.

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