We’ve *heard* that South Carolina drivers are not the best – okay, maybe we’ve seen it a little too. 🤷 But in a city that’s growing exponentially, with roads that are sometimes a tad bit too small for heavy traffic, tackling how to reduce congestion + collisions is a priority.
Notorious intersections that we try to avoid (and why):
🚗 East North Street at Haywood Road: 28k+ vehicles pass through the intersection.
🚗 East North Street at N. Pleasantburg Drive: 45k vehicles pass through daily. The area is surrounded by several neighborhoods, apartment complexes + busy shopping centers
🚗 Green Avenue at Dunbar Street downtown (behind Greenville High School): the city hasn’t provided a ‘reason’ but we’re thinking it has to do with heavy school traffic, emergency vehicle traffic to St. Francis Downtown and lack of turn signal and lane. Got an idea why? Let us know.
🚗 High-volume areas near I-85 + I-385: these areas see more than 100k cars a day and more than 80 accidents last year.
🚗 Haywood Road at Orchard Park + Pelham Road saw 62 collisions (that’s an average of one every five days). Part of the reason? Drivers often ignore the no turn on red sign. They are there for a reason y’all.
The main causes of accidents, regardless of the intersection or street, are following too closely or speeding (or both), but sometimes the problems are also related to road design. For example, the intersection of I-85 and Woodruff Road saw high collision rates because drivers were trying to turn left in front of multi-lane congestion. That’s why you now see barriers in front of Starbucks + Zoe’s. The change has dramatically decreased the number of crashes.
Some good news: Within Greenville city limits, highway fatalities fell from 13 in 2016 to just nine in 2017 (with just two to-date this year).
But what’s being done: The Greenville Police Department knows these problem intersections, studies the previous month’s number of crashes + creates a plan for the next month. The department uses a Collision Density Map that shows locations + causes for each accident within the study (speed, traffic, time + crash reconstructions).
We want to know, where do you never drive and why? Let us know your good + bad road experiences.
