NEWTOWN -- As John Hixenbaugh starts to make coffee in the morning at his AmeriStop Food Mart in Newtown, traffic begins to pile up, starting at the Main Street-Round Bottom Road intersection and running 2 miles east.
He stares at 35,000 daily commuters headed toward Cincinnati, coming from several arteries and feeding into Main Street (Ohio 32).
From 7 to 9 a.m. and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. each weekday, the village is one big traffic jam. Officials are looking into ideas to relieve the congestion, but in the meantime, motorists must sit and wait. And merchants will continue to watch as traffic creeps by.
"My business is suffering," Mr. Hixenbaugh said. "There is no traffic light near me, and nobody gets off to shop for fear of losing their place in line. If they get off Route 32, it is hard to get back on. Trying to make a left turn onto Route 32 during rush hour is like asking a cat to have 10 lives."
Mr. Hixenbaugh has fought for two years to get a traffic light near his business.
"It may or may not ease the traffic flow, but I project it could improve my business 35 percent," Mr. Hixenbaugh said.
His problem is typical of merchants along the busy street in Newtown. The small village sits in the middle of what the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments (OKI) calls the Eastern Corridor, which stretches from Cincinnati to Batavia and from Northern Kentucky to Milford.
Ohio 32 is one of eight major highways that move 425,000 vehicles daily in the corridor.
"We are the hub in this massive corridor," Newtown Mayor Curt Cosby said. "Most of the traffic coming off (U.S.) Route 50 and I-275 feeds into 32 and clogs up right in the heart of Newtown during rush hours."
The daily traffic count on the two-lane road in Newtown is almost equal to that on Columbia Parkway's four lanes. The Cincinnati city engineer's office's most recent count on Columbia Parkway at Stanley Avenue in Mount Lookout recorded 41,710 daily vehicles. Mr. Cosby attributes the traffic increase in Newtown to population growth farther east in Clermont, Brown and Adams counties, and to growth in the eastern section of Newtown with development of Ivy Hills, an upscale golf course community.
"The population in Newtown jumped from 1,589 in 1990 to 2,511 in 1997," the mayor said.
OKI projects that the population in the Eastern Corridor will go from 161,000 in 1990 to 196,000 by 2020.
Michael Arnold, owner of a BP service station at Church and Main and a third-generation merchant at that corner, has seen many changes in Newtown, but never a traffic problem this big.
"I have customers who say they don't want to drive through Newtown during rush hours," Mr. Arnold said.
He thinks he may be better off than Mr. Hixenbaugh because there is a light at Church and Main.
"But I may be losing business because the heavy traffic may be blocking customers," Mr. Arnold said. "I questioned whether another traffic light will help because they are not synchronized. If you beat one, the next one stops you. Sometimes the traffic gets backed up, and cars wait through two traffic light changes before they can move."
Carl Wardrip, who lives in Clermont County's Eastgate area and works in Cincinnati, fights the jam each day.
"It slows me down in the morning and in the afternoon," Mr. Wardrip said.
Mr. Cosby and the village council have drafted a plan they hope will relieve the traffic problem. It has been presented to the Hamilton County Engineer's Office and to OKI as part of the Eastern Corridor highway project.
The plan calls for widening Ohio 32 from River Hills Drive east to Newtown's corporation limit, and realigning the intersection of Round Bottom Road and Ohio 32, to connect Round Bottom with River Hills Drive, half a block east.
"This could eliminate one traffic light and allow more space for left-turn storage lanes," Mr. Cosby said.
The plan also would widen Valley Lane to four lanes between Round Bottom and Newtown roads.
"We don't want to reroute traffic around Newtown, but we want better control of it. We don't want to widen Route 32 in the heart of Newtown because it would destroy the small-town aura," Mr. Cosby said.
The mayor has no figures on the plan's cost. He knows Newtown can't fund it.
Ted Hubbard, deputy county engineer, said the plan is being considered, but realigning the Round Bottom-Ohio 32 intersection could cause a problem for the county.
"If this is done it would have to use the land where our eastern branch office is. We would have to find another facility," Mr. Hubbard said.
