Mercer Street, near the Sherwood Avenue intersection.
Drive either way on busy Haddonfield Road in Cherry Hill near the Garden State Park shopping area and congested traffic and stoplights slow your journey.
Some drivers instead choose to navigate the parallel Mercer Street — but that ad hoc bypass has been the bane of the Locustwood neighborhood because of speeding cars and generally unsafe conditions that even can make walking dangerous, according to neighbors.
"Many, including neighbors, have confessed to using Mercer Street instead of Haddonfield because Mercer Street is a straight shot with no stop signs and nothing to slow you down," Mercer Street resident Marie Connors told Township Council last week. "There is constant speeding in Locustwood and no discernible enforcement."
Locustwood neighbors lined up at the Council meeting on April 28 to underscore their concerns over speeding on the road, an otherwise quiet residential street that mostly does not have sidewalks, although the Township has begun to install them.
"There is enforcement that is taking place, but clearly we need to do more, and the (police) chief and his team will be assessing that," Mayor David Fleisher told the residents at the meeting. Before the meeting, Fleisher and other Township officials met with some residents to hear their concerns.
Through-streets across Cherry Hill have similar challenges, Fleisher said. "We have speed studies, and (the roads) all need to be improved. But I just want to make it clear that every place around town is going to receive the appropriate attention."
The number of violations that have piled up seems heavy for a street lined with homes and yards.
Between January 2024 and April this year, 364 motor vehicles were stopped by police and 168 citations were issued on Mercer Street, according to statistics provided to 70and73.com by the mayor's chief of staff, Brian Bauerle.
In the Locustwood neighborhood as a whole in the same period, 691 vehicles were stopped and 389 citations were issued, according to Bauerle. The totals include the Mercer Street statistics.
"This is a residential neighborhood and should be zero tolerance for speeding in residential neighborhoods," Connors told Township Council members. She recommended four-way stop signs on Mercer Street and raised, striped crosswalks at some intersections.
Neighbors speaking at the meeting said some drivers blow through the stop signs for the streets connecting to Mercer Street.
While residents see a neighborhood when they look out their windows, others look at it as a driver's convenience.
"I had a conversation with an adult who works at (Cherry Hill) West...she said 'What neighborhood do you live in?' and I said 'I live in Locustwood' she laughed and she said 'That's not a neighborhood, that's a cut-through. Everybody knows that,'" Bedford Avenue resident Jeanne Bracy told Council.
"My kids personally are scared to walk to school because the cars go so fast down our streets," she said, noting that because there are no sidewalks on her street she tells her children to stand on the neighbor's lawn to wait for the bus.
Denise Tocco, a 38-year Mercer Street resident, said she no longer rides her bicycle or walks or 2-year-old granddaughter on Mercer Street. She gets nervous every time she backs her car out.
"There are just normal things that you would do in a neighborhood, but yet we're a little afraid," she told Council members.
Another Mercer Street homeowner, Carlos Ruthner, told Council members that they should double the traffic fines for drivers caught speeding on Mercer Street and other cut-through-streets in Cherry Hill.
"It's going to hurt your pocket and you're going to feel it and learn, right? So you're going to think twice about doing it again," he said.Â
Ruthner also said police responding to emergency calls and leaving their headquarters in the town building on Mercer Street should be waved away from his street.
"Instead of flying down Mercer to get to Route 70 they can just quickly get out to Haddonfield Road and get to Route 70 that way," he told Council members.
Community activist Anne Einhorn, a longtime Kingston resident who closely follows development plans in Cherry Hill, told Council:Â "These people have struggled enough."
