Southwestern municipalities join together to plan infrastructure improvements
Four municipalities in the southwestern part of Butler County — Cranberry and Jackson townships, Zelienople and Harmony — are putting the finishing touches on a plan to make their roads safer for drivers and pedestrians.
Officially known as the Southwest Butler County Multi-Municipal Safety Action Plan, the initiative — first announced in early 2025 — has focused the last year on collecting input from the public in an effort to address problematic roads in the region.
Jackson Township, Cranberry Township, Zelienople and Harmony have approved motions to officially adopt the plan.
According to Cranberry Township Manager Dan Santoro, the joint venture came about naturally, as the four municipalities have collaborated in the past on other matters.
“We’ve all been working together, along with other municipalities in the southwest section, on multiple things,” Santoro said. “We’ve had the Southwest Butler Stormwater (Authority), and that’s produced results. And that led us to talking about an EMS alliance. This was just another in a series of us working cooperatively as municipalities to identify challenges and working cooperatively to find solutions.”
The project dates back to 2023, when the four municipalities collectively received funding through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program, or SS4A, for the creation and implementation of a safety action plan to find and plug gaps in road safety in the study area.
The program was developed out of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021, which appropriated $5 billion for safety improvements across the nation. This is the last year of that program.
“The focus of the program, from the federal level, is driving down fatalities and serious injuries. We’re not saying the other crashes aren’t important, that’s really the focus of the program, and this data’s what we use to form the basis of the projects you’ll see,” said Andy Waple, a consultant with AECOM, the infrastructure consulting firm that helped with planning.
The four-member planning committee, with the help of AECOM, began gathering feedback from the public in early 2025 and compiling it into a draft action plan. During a public engagement period between July and August 2025, residents of the southwest area made 404 suggestions through the project’s website for traffic improvements, ranging from identifying dangerous crosswalks to complaints about speeding drivers.
During the study period, the planning committee also gathered information on the most likely spots for crashes and pedestrian-involved accidents in the five-year stretch between 2019 and 2023.
For instance, data shared at Cranberry’s board of supervisors meeting Thursday, March 26, showed 1,739 total crashes over that time period. Thirty of those were “angle crashes,” such as someone running a stop sign and T-boning another car. Another 26% included cars hitting “fixed objects,” like trees or mailboxes, and are often the result of two-lane back roads that access residential areas and are “handling more traffic than they have in the past.” The data showed that 19% were rear-end crashes, and “indicative of road congestion.”
Cranberry data over that time period includes 13 fatalities. It also includes 46 serious injuries and crashes, including 17 pedestrians and six cyclists.
“We’ve formed a data-driven perspective and identified safety related improvements, where the most critical areas are, to areas there are safety concerns,” Santoro said. “This is based on actual crashes, not anecdotally talking about it. We’ve identified those projects. It’s an important tool for us as we continue to identify future projects, and begin to address those.”
The draft plan, released in February, highlights five major priority projects which are estimated to cost a total of $49.3 million. Other, smaller safety projects are also included in the draft plan.
The largest of the proposed projects is a series of safety improvements along Gudekunst and Zehner School roads in Jackson Township. Safety countermeasures would include an improved intersection with Route 19, the creation of a new four-way intersection with Lutz Road and a roundabout at the Steeb Road intersection. Estimated costs for the projects would add up to $21.45 million.
In the draft study, Zehner School Road at Gudekunst Road was listed as one of the most frequent intersections for crashes, with 1.14 crashes there per 1 million vehicle miles traveled.
Other major improvements include the installation of a four-leg roundabout at the intersection of Evans City Road and Main Street in Harmony at a cost of $6.52 million, and the creation of a pedestrian-centered “living street” social space at the intersection of Main and Mercer streets for $2.29 million in Harmony. Various pedestrian safety enhancements along state Route 68 in Zelienople are also planned at a cost of $9.38 million, and pedestrian safety enhancements to Powell Road in Cranberry Township at a cost of $9.66 million.
Santoro said there’s no timeline yet for when the full plan will be carried out to completion. He said after Cranberry approved the plan at its March 26 board meeting, the next step is implementation, which includes going after grants to assist in funding.
“There’s no timelines at this point because we don’t know how successful we will be at engineering and/or securing grants,” Santoro said. “But we'll continue to move forward with the concepts and trying to get funding.”
