Park Hills police have been conducting traffic studies on the city’s stretch of Amsterdam Road, which is already a traffic overflow route when I-71/75 is backed up and is expected to get worse as the Brent Spence Bridge Corridor project picks up speed.
A main artery that funnels commuters to and from Crescent Springs, Park Hills, and Villa Hills to Covington and the bridge, the road gets over 100,000 vehicles a month.
Park Hills city council members spoke of the importance of solving this congested and road-worn throughway at this week’s council meeting.
“The traffic count on Amsterdam rivals that of Dixie Highway,” council member Pamela Spoor said, “which is maintained by the state, and it is a maintenance obligation that is overwhelming for a city of our size.”
Part of the cause of the high level of vehicles is because the road leads to Devou Park.
But another issue, council members pointed out, is that Amsterdam road has become a traffic overflow alternate route for whenever there are backups on 71/75 or Dixie Highway.
The road is simply not structured to accommodate all that traffic, especially since it is in need of significant repair, council members said.
Park Hills officials are in the bidding process of getting funding for the repairs. But how a small city like Park Hills, populating just near 3000 people, accommodates all that excess traffic on its residential streets has become a larger city planning issue.
Kenton County used to maintain Amsterdam Road. Back around 2005, it was siphoned off in chunks to Park Hills and other neighborhoods, which one could say fixed the logistics headache for the county. Unfortunately, there were already issues with the road back then that council members said they regret were not addressed before the transfer of responsibility.
“Perhaps we can gift the road back to the county,” one councilman joked at the meeting.
For a small city like Park Hills to financially take on not only the needed repairs but now the impending traffic funneling issues to be caused by bridge work is a tall order, council members said.
“It literally is the elephant in the room at every infrastructure meeting and every budget consideration because it’s a big deal,” Spoor said.
Discussions on whether to seek help from Kenton County and the state to ameliorate this issue will continue. Other creative alternatives to address it could be to make the stretch of Amsterdam Road going out of Park Hills a one-way so as to force traffic onto Dixie Highway — which is where they want traffic to flow anyway — into the main artery to Covington and the bridge, as well as to the Park Hills business district, where they want people to go.
In addition, members proposed at the meeting that when there is a need for traffic to overflow into neighborhoods off of the highway, there needs to be a better system in place for detour signs directing traffic away from narrow residential streets toward I-275.
Stay tuned for updates on this ongoing issue on which the council is working diligently with county officials, police, engineers, and road construction professionals.
