STARKVILLE — Starkville is rolling out a redesign of the intersection of South Montgomery Street and East Lampkin Street, reducing it to two lanes and expanding sidewalks to make it less chaotic.
The board of aldermen approved a $211,000 bid from Groundstone Construction Tuesday to implement the new layout. With an estimated February start and late April finish, planners hope one of the city’s traffic headaches will soon be a thing of the past.
“Montgomery and Lampkin is the most problematic intersection, based on its structure, which is necessitated primarily by the railroad crossing we don’t control,” Mayor Lynn Spruill said Tuesday. “Going to a narrowed and reduced lane structure simplifies the choices of who goes next and improves the visibility of those at the intersection.”
Lampkin Street currently expands to four lanes as it approaches the intersection’s four-way stop from the east, giving a dedicated lane each to drivers going straight, turning right or left and passing from the opposite direction. Montgomery Street remains three lanes on either side of the intersection, two passing lanes and one turning.
Railroad tracks also cut through the intersection diagonally, and the western side of Lampkin stops about 10 feet short of its crosswalk so stopped cars aren’t sitting on the railroad tracks. The western sidewalk stops even further back to avoid the rails.
The new design will expand three of the sidewalks to bring them in line with the existing southeast corner, and in line with what the city’s zoning says should already exist along that stretch. The intersection will be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act once the project is finished, with shallower angles on its ramps and fewer bumps where asphalt meets concrete.
That will sacrifice a lane on either side of the Lampkin Street, but City Engineer Cody Burnett told The Dispatch it’s an intentional decision to try and improve the intersection’s clarity. With just one car at a time approaching the intersection from a given direction, he hopes it will be easier to tell who arrived at the four-way stop first.
“You have too many options and too little visibility,” he said. “You don’t need a dedicated turning lane east/west, and if you’re in a turn lane, you’re blocking the visibility of the person next to you. Nobody can see who got there first. They don’t know whose turn it is or where to go. The goal here is to … let everybody else at the intersection see that there’s one car here, who got there first and where they’re supposed to be.”
Some elements, however, can’t be fixed with a simple redesign. The offset lane forcing drivers on the west side of Lampkin Street to stop short of the intersection is a product of where the two streets and the railroad intersect, and is still present in the new layout.
Burnett said the only ways to fix that would be a more permanent legal agreement that the railroad won’t be used or intensive infrastructure like a bridge or tunnel.
“The angle of that railroad is why you have to be so far back,” he said. “We’d have to either have the railroad relocated or the right of way dedicated to the city. … As long as it’s there and it could potentially someday be live, that’s the best we can do.”
The new sidewalk also saves private developers space in the long run. Burnett said the city’s engineering department drew up these plans as a template for others to follow as renovations continue west along Lampkin Street, and setting the precedent of narrowing the road now ensures businesses and real estate firms won’t be expected to give up their property to bring the sidewalk in line with zoning.
The sidewalk will narrow as it goes down the street, and the extra space will be used for parking. Burnett said the project will add a total of 33 striped parallel parking spaces to the area, and city workers will repaint any existing spaces that have faded.
Beyond this one intersection, Burnett hopes Montgomery and Lampkin would be the start of a broader effort to renovate Starkville’s busiest streets. He said plans for the Main Street Redesign Project should be finalized by the end of the month, with a tentative start date in early spring. He expects Highway 182’s renovations, which are ongoing, to be complete in around a year and a half as well.
“I don’t want this to be a one-off deal,” he said. “I want this to be a program for the city where we’re taking care of our most trafficked intersections. … We’ve made a big push on Lampkin in the last few months, but I’d like to see this for all of our heavily travelled intersections for cyclists and pedestrians. This is a data point in a much larger vision of pedestrian improvements for the city.”
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