A bright yellow school bus laid on its side at the intersection of Highway 25 and Longview Road close to a banged up black sedan. Emergency personnel worked to help those injured and clear the scene quickly but thoroughly.
While Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District sixth-12th grade students were on the bus, they only suffered minor injuries. However, the bus driver and the driver of the private vehicle suffered more serious injuries.
That Nov. 1 incident prompted District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller, whose district the intersection is in, to call the Mississippi Department of Transportation Northern Commissioner John Caldwell.
“They were already looking into it, and this has been an area that was addressed in 2017 after I came on to the board,” said Miller.
In 2017, rumble strips — grooved patterns on the pavement to alert drivers to a hazard — and signs were installed by MDOT to reduce traffic accidents in that area. Though the installation was five years ago, Miller and Caldwell both said the intersection has been on their radar even before the school bus wreck because of the wrecks that happen there.
“What might’ve worked five years ago may not work today,” Caldwell said. “We are always in a constant state of trying to find ways to improve, and certainly it’s an intersection that has warranted another deep dive. The 2017 improvements followed a series of accidents. Hopefully they’ve done some good for a short time, but apparently they haven’t done enough good, so we’re back to the drawing board to try to find a better solution that can last into the years ahead.”
Road hazards and concerns regarding intersections like the Highway 25-Longview Road intersection are evaluated every day by MDOT’s traffic safety division. Miller said a majority of the collisions have been far-side collisions where people are crossing over Highway 25 from Longview Road and are hitting the cars broadside.
Caldwell said the reason the intersection poses such a hazard to drivers is a combination of many variables but there are two main problems: high traffic and impatient drivers.
“Sometimes it’s just a matter of the drivers are less patient,” Caldwell said. “You get a combination of higher traffic on the cross-street versus the higher traffic on the main thoroughfare and then people don’t like to wait. They like to stop for a second and go.”
When it comes to addressing the problem, Caldwell said MDOT’s traffic safety division will evaluate the intersection, then there will be a traffic study to note what type of vehicles pass through, peak times of traffic and other variables that increase hazards.
Once the traffic study is complete, MDOT will decide what the best way to address the problem is, and there are many options for slowing down traffic flow to avoid accidents.
“Everybody is in agreement that we need to do something, so then you’ve got to find out what is that solution,” Caldwell said. “Is it a light? Is it a stop sign? Is it a roundabout? Sometimes we completely stop cross-traffic coming over, and we create a J-turn. There are so many different options that we have to consider for what is the best not only for today’s traffic but for tomorrow’s traffic.”
Caldwell said MDOT is in the stage of getting a study together for the area and expects to come to a solution in “months not years.” In order to have accurate results, the study and solution process still must be slow and methodical to ensure that proper traffic measures are put in place.
Miller said she and the other supervisors expect to hear from Caldwell within the next month as they were already looking at the intersection prior to the bus wreck.
“We need to make that intersection as safe as we possibly can for the citizens,” Miller said.
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