Road workers consider safety a problem

Web posted September 11, 1999

By Alisa DeMao
Staff Writer

At 3:16 p.m., on cue, the cars melt away as if by magic.

The street in front of Augusta Christian Schools is clear again, traffic is flowing smoothly, motorists go about their day. Baston Road hardly looks like a street with a congestion problem.

But for the past hour and 15 minutes, at least a dozen cars were in both lanes as traffic slowed to a crawl, sometimes to a stop.

The road, which runs between Washington and Fury's Ferry roads in Columbia County, is one of three in the county rated as ``seriously congested'' in an annual report by an Augusta Regional Transportation Study committee.

For a roadway to qualify as seriously congested, traffic must move more than 30 percent slower than the posted speed limit.

On Baston Road, during peak morning and afternoon traffic hours, it can come to a standstill as parents pick up their children from school.

``The poor policeman -- on the first day of school, he came up and said `What's going on? We have to get this traffic moving,''' said elementary school Principal Patricia Watters, who noted that unsuspecting motorists often think an accident or construction is holding them up.

``It's like that every day from 2 to 3:10 or 3:15 p.m. Longtime people, who have lived here and are used to it, know not to go on Baston Road at that time.''

Other Columbia County roads labeled seriously congested are a section of Bobby Jones Expressway between Interstate 20 and Washington Road and a section of Flowing Wells Road between Wheeler and Washington roads.

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None of the Aiken County streets studied this year was seriously congested.

But Richmond County had four stretches of roadway that qualified: downtown sections of 15th and 13th streets; Wheeler Road from Flowing Wells Road to Walton Way Extension, along the perimeter of the Augusta Exchange shopping center; and a

segment of Wrightsboro Road between Barton Chapel and Jackson roads.

``Congestion decreases the quality of life,'' said Richmond County transportation planner Mary Huffstetler, who helped compile the report, the fifth annual look at congested roads. ``The time you spend sitting in your car is time you could be at your job or with your family. And with our upcoming nonattainment status ... sitting in a stalled vehicle adds to the degradation of our air-quality.''

Augusta, like other major Georgia cities, faces the possibility of being declared a nonattainment zone under federal clean-air guidelines if air quality continues to fall.

Safety also is a problem on congested streets, road workers said.

Knowing where congestion is likely to happen helps traffic engineers develop plans to fix it -- plans that can be as simple as changing the timing on a stop light or including pedestrian and bicycle paths to encourage drivers to use other methods of travel or as expensive and complicated as road construction that improves intersections or adds lanes, Mrs. Huffstetler said.

Plans to ease congestion in downtown Augusta include installing a traffic signal at the intersection of 15th Street and Central Avenue and changing the timing of existing signals on 13th Street, traffic engineer Jim Huffstetler said. Engineers also are studying plans to modify the Wheeler Road intersections with Robert C. Daniel Jr. Parkway and with Interstate 520.

The report -- titled Congestion Management System -- also lists roads that are marginally congested and at risk of congestion, which gives traffic officials a chance to head off problems.

``Instead of waiting for something to get to the point of congestion, we can go ahead and do something about it,'' Mr. Huffstetler said.

Alisa DeMao can be reached at (706) 823-3223 or ademao@augustachronicle.com.