LUMBERTON – The N.C. Department of Transportation is using a number of innovative intersection designs across the state and adopting new technology to improve traffic and pedestrian safety.
Kevin Lacy, the department’s chief traffic engineer, told a group in Robeson County on Thursday morning the agency is constructing various safety improvement projects, from rumble strips to all-way stops, and from roundabouts to reduced-conflict intersections. The changes are being made based on traffic and crash data, local input and budgeting realities, he said.
“We have a lot of tools in our tool box to make our roadways safer, and we are deploying them where they are needed and can make an important difference,” Lacy told the Robeson County Vision Zero Task Force.
The task force is a group of locally elected officials and other community stakeholders committed to reducing traffic deaths. In Robeson County, an average of 45 people die in crashes each year, according to the department’s Mobility and Safety Division.
Those highway improvements are paying off, Lacy said. A departmental analysis of some of the improved sites reveals a significant drop in overall crashes. They include:
- A Gaston County roundabout: a 60 percent decrease;
- A raised median along a stretch of Ramsey Street in Fayetteville: a 31 percent decrease; and
- A Lee County directional crossover that redirects drivers from the side road into turning right first onto U.S. 1: a 91 percent decrease
NCDOT has made the same kind of improvements in Robeson County, including:
Although a crash analysis post construction has not been done locally at some of the locations, Lacy said the department would expect similar declines in crashes.
In other matters Thursday, Mark Ezzell, director of the N.C. Governor’s Highway Safety Program, updated the task force on recent grant recipients for various safety initiatives across the county. The group also received a report from Lumberton Police Department’s traffic safety officer.
Another way NCDOT improves intersection safety is installing all-way stops where they are warranted. A dozen Robeson County intersections have been converted to all-way stops since 1998, with nine more locations planned. At one of the locations studied (Rennert and Mount Olive Church roads), the number of crashes per year plummeted by almost 60 percent after the improvement was made in 2010.
Additionally, the department recently spent $2.2 million on placing longer-lasting, higher-visibility pavement markings on 244 miles of secondary rounds. According to a three-year departmental analysis of 191 miles of roadway around the state restriped in this same way, crashes decreased by 13 percent, and crashes involving vehicles departing from the travel lane declined 30 percent.
“Those percentages may not sound like a lot, but what we call lane-departure crashes account for over half of all fatal crashes statewide,” Lacy said.