By Glenn Rolfe

LEWES — Delaware’s Department of Transportation is catching up with traffic in Five Points, and a working group is onboard.

After two decades with no large-scale transportation improvements and rapid growth in the area, the department and Sussex County launched a study about the intersection of US 9, Del. 1 and Savannah Road six years ago, as well as the Five Points Working Group.

At the time, the consensus quickly went from leaving the crossing alone to nearby residents saying they had difficulty getting out of their homes, department planner Jenn Cinelli-Miller said Monday at a meeting of the working group at Cape Henlopen High School.

“We are now 20 years behind where we should have been with our infrastructure improvements,” she said.

Comprised of about a dozen individuals — and two County Council members, Mark Schaeffer and John Rieley — the Five Points group offers input and recommendations.

“We came in with a vision of, we are going to start this from ground zero. We’re not going to look back,” said Ms. Cinelli-Miller. “We’re going to start with Five Points, and we’re going to move forward.”

As of this month, 64 of 78 of the body’s recommendations are in progress or completed, including Savannah Road sidewalk improvements, a shared-use path on Munchy Branch Road and a study about extending Mulberry Knoll Road.

However, a long-range vision for the Five Points intersection is not in the works.

“And part of the reason we haven’t gotten to the intersection is everyone goes through that intersection right now,” said Leah Kacanda, a senior transportation planner with Whitman, Requardt & Associates LLP. “So all of the projects in (DelDOT’s Capital Transportation Program) in this general area are kind of aimed at alleviating the congestion in that one spot and building a little bit ... more redundancy in the network.”

Two initiatives that planners believe will greatly enhance traffic flow in the area near Five Points are the Plantation Road and Del. 1/Minos Conaway projects.

With groundbreaking in February, upgrades to Plantation Road — on the southwest side of Del. 1, south of Del. 9 — were identified as a high priority by Sussex County Council, due to increased development in the corridor recently. Its purpose is to preserve mobility for local residents and businesses, while providing improvements along Plantation Road to reduce congestion, improve safety and accommodate anticipated growth in traffic.

The Minos Conaway effort, north of Five Points, is designed to maintain capacity on the north-south corridor and improve safety at Del. 1’s unsignalized, grade-separated intersection with Minos Conaway Road, while improving mobility and access.

“The biggest is the Minos Conaway project, which is about to be underway soon. That will have another east-west crossing for cars, just north of the Five Points intersection,” said Ms. Kacanda. “And you can understand why that is important. Because, if and when we get to doing something at Five Points, (it) is essentially going to be offline. So maintaining traffic through that area is going to be a really big challenge.”

An eventual redo at Five Points itself would hinge on other construction.

“A lot of the focus with these other projects, kind of, planking it is to build a little bit more redundancy in the network, so there is more ways to go east-west across Del. 1 and also get further south on Del. 1 to bypass the Five Points intersection,” said Ms. Kacanda.

“And then, once all those improvements are made, we also need to evaluate how traffic is responding to them, so we can understand that new flow because all of that information is going to inform how we, kind of, attack the actual nut of the problem — the Five Points intersection. It’s going to be a big investment and a big inconvenience for folks, given the amount of traffic that passes through that area, so we want to make sure we are doing it right.”

Also under consideration at this very preliminary stage is a pedestrian/bike bridge, or bridges, over Del. 1 around Five Points. Several sites were considered via the SR 1 Low-Stress Bikeways Study, planned capital projects and the Highway Safety Improvement Program. From that, two locations were assessed for feasibility: Marsh Road/Shady Road and Bryan Drive/Tanger Outlets, Ms. Kacanda said.

For now, though, the working group will continue to “guide us, inform and help us reach out to the community,” she added. “It’s a very diverse group of folks here that really help make sure what is going on is on the public’s radar.”

During the 2015-20 tenure of Jennifer Cohan as transportation secretary, the county and the department developed a closer working relationship and the following initiatives:
• Sharing of real-time data.
• The Henlopen Transportation Improvement District, the first such district in Sussex County.
• The Funding Accelerating Safety in Transportation (FAST) Track Program, which sets aside county funding to allow certain road projects to move up the priority ladder.
• A memorandum of understanding for land development coordination.
• A commercial interconnectivity requirement.
The working group report for 2022 will be presented in person and virtually June 14 at 6 p.m. at Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes.

Staff writer Glenn Rolfe can be reached at grolfe@iniusa.org. Follow @glennrolfeBTBN on Twitter.