Owners of McBride Station ‘at their breaking point’ with repeated crashes along Route 8

PENN TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Owners of a popular bar in Penn Township tell Channel 11 they’re at their wit’s end after repeated crashes along Route 8.

A truck plowed into McBride Station back in June and it’s far from the first time. The latest crash was just last week.

“Since we’ve taken over, for sure, we’ve had at least four good, catastrophic hits to the building,” McBride Station owner Serena Martz said. “It’s nonstop. We get hit at least two to three times a year. Not all the time is it so catastrophic.”

McBride Station, which was founded in 1934, has been in the Martz family since 1984.

“Since we bought it in ‘84, we’ve had three fatalities. How many people have to die?” Serena Martz said.

One of the fatal crashes involved a 16-year-old Knoch High School student, who was killed in 2017.

“We were both here when that kid died and it’s just something you never want to see, you know, a 16-year-old kid. It still bugs me to this day that this kid died for no reason,” owner Tim Martz said.

The Martzes have reached their breaking point after a driver hit took out some scaffolding on Nov. 2 that was in place to fix damage from a previous crash.

They want PennDOT to come up with a solution since their historic bar predates Route 8.

“We had a front parking lot. They took it all away. They put the highway right up against the face of our building, but they won’t protect us,” Serena Martz said.

The Martzes have contacted PennDot numerous times asking for a guide rail between the bar and the road, but PennDot has told them the spot doesn’t meet proper criteria.

And the couple is not allowed to put up anything on their own either.

We asked PennDOT about the issue. They sent us the following statement:

We have spoken with the property owner in the past regarding her request for a barrier installation and her business location and explained that guide rail is not an option for this location.

Since a guide rail itself is an obstruction which can cause considerable damage to a vehicle and injury to a motorist, it is installed only when comprehensive design criteria are met.  Included within these design criteria are the following:

· Vertical height of the embankment

· Embankment slope

· Average daily traffic

The District Guide Rail Review Committee has reviewed this location in the past and has determined that this location does not meet the design criteria for the installation of guide rail.

Although we cannot place guide rail to alleviate this concern, the property owner has the right to install an approved protective device on the property outside of the highway right-of-way.  The Department is available to assist, upon request, in identifying the right-of-way location.

We pulled the crash data for 500′ in each direction from McBride Station.  There were two reported crashes in 2019 and both were minor crashes with only vehicle damages.  Neither of these crashes which happened in 2019 had any relationship to the exact bar location.  While we do have the June crash in our records, 2023 data does not show up in any reports because the data is not yet complete.

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