Latest in a series of posts about Lehigh University and the Southside 
Gadfly loves a plan.
Planning is creative.
Gadfly authored and collaborated in many a plan during 50 Lehigh years.
He used to say planning was aphrodisiac.
So this Packer Ave. thing has aroused him about as much as an 80-year-old man can be aroused.
It’s given him incentive to look at plans.
Here’s an interesting thing that he found in Lehigh’s 2012 Master Plan, the one operative now.
There are on Lehigh’s campus “existing hot spots” and “proposed hot spots.”
An existing hot spot is marked by the arrow on the left of this illustration. It maps a heavily traveled student path from the traditional center of campus at the flagpole across Packer Ave. (which, interestingly, is color-coded for “traffic calming”) at the trouble spot we all know, and continues on to Campus Square at Morton St., debouching [good SAT word] on to New St. heading toward 4th. Thus the students flow toward the Southside business district.
But lookee here.
On the right another arrow shows a proposed hot spot brooking Packer a little farther east (but still before Webster) and continuing down to Morton, where it debouches into Adams St. on the way to 4th so that you can catch a meal at Jenny’s.
Not one but two heavy traffic streams crossing Packer.
Now this is a 2012 Lehigh Master Plan. Already aging a bit. And Plans are just “plans.” They change. They die. Who knows if it’s still operative in all aspects.
But we know that there’s a Lehigh building boom going, and Gadfly was impressed by the number of elements he read about in the Master Plan that have been or are being achieved. Somebody on the Hill is checking off the boxes.
The Master Plan doesn’t explicitly say so, but it suggests that Lehigh may be “engineering” another pedestrian safety situation.
Thus, we might bank on that second crossing creating even a greater need for doing something about the traffic flow on Packer.
But, even so, does “traffic calming” — the label the Lehigh Master Plan pins to Packer — need to morph into traffic purging?
to be continued . . .
(Gadfly, have you nothing to write out besides the possible vacation of Packer?????)
