The Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) plans to begin a project next week aimed at increasing safety on Highway 12.
Road quality and safety have been hot-button local issues in Oktibbeha County and MDOT plans to address both through an improvement project that will feature a raised median and improved traffic signal technology on the area’s busiest state highway.
Mississippi Highway Commissioner Mike Tagert, who oversees the northern district, told the SDN about a recent safety audit conducted by MDOT, which shed light on the problems facing Highway 12 in the city of Starkville.
Tagert said the audit analyzed accidents on Highway 12 over the last five years, looking at 60 months of crashes along the route.
“The safety engineers found Highway 12 in the city has one of the highest accident rates of any state road north of the Jackson metro area,” he said.
The audit reported a slew of right angle crashes, along with a high number of rear-end and head-on collisions. Nearly 500 injuries have been associated with the route during the five-year span, Tagert said.
To mitigate potential danger, Tagert said MDOT will implement a raised median, which has been shown to decrease the possibility of these kinds of accidents by 50 percent.
Additionally, Tagert said the safety improvement plans call for installing and upgrading traffic signals along the Highway 12 corridor.
The new signals will rely on timed sensors that will slow travel speeds, but ultimately improve traffic flow along the route.
“We have a major congestion problem on Highway 12,” he said. “There is just nowhere to go. Nothing we do is going to fix the large game day traffic, because it’s an anomaly you can’t fix. But day-to-day traffic, signal improvement and upgrades will have a tremendously positive impact on that corridor.”
As infrastructure debates persist in the region, Tagert said it is important to maintain roads before building new ones.
“We try to take the resources we have, and we are trying to focus on the maintenance and safety aspects of the system we built,” he said. “We think it is irresponsible to build new roads when you can’t properly maintain the old road system.”