Motorists see what the future may hold on Vineville Avenue as Macon-Bibb County crews closed parts of the reversible lane over the last week to repair equipment.
Red and green Xs overhead note the traffic patterns that shift daily with two lanes inbound to downtown in the morning that switch to outbound in the afternoon.
“This may be the only system like that left in the state because they removed most of them,” Macon-Bibb County Director of Facilities Management Robert Ryals said in a recent meeting of the Complete Streets Committee.
The Georgia Department of Transportation is considering alternatives because the reversible lane’s days are numbered as the signal boxes are no longer in production.
“It’s getting almost impossible to get parts,” Ryals said. “When we can get parts, the lead time is almost six months.”
When a car crash destroyed one box weeks ago, they harvested parts from another box at the end of the reversible lane near Park Street and Forest Hill Road.
The repair shortened the reversible lane on the north side.
More recently, a gecko got inside another signal cabinet, short circuited the power board and started a little fire. The creature’s skeleton helped crews pinpoint the cause of the electrical failure. Another box near the Georgia Academy for the Blind has been intermittently going out.
Workers shifted equipment from another box farther north and were hooking it back up Wednesday afternoon and hoping it would work.
Ryals fears a catastrophic failure could take out the whole system.
“We’re looking into different configurations with the lanes and doing traffic studies now,” he said.
The Georgia Department of Transportation is responsible for Vineville, which is a state highway and also known as U.S. 41.
Macon-Bibb County is working with GDOT to come up with a solution, but it won’t be easy.
Ryals said Wednesday that the state will ultimately decide whether to upgrade the whole system or change the traffic pattern.
Complete Streets committee member Rachel Umana sees the dilemma as an opportunity.
“When looking at Vineville, I hope we will be able to look at pedestrian connectivity,” Umana said.
Ryals said he would talk to GDOT about that, but was not too optimistic there was enough space along the busy thoroughfare for those kinds of improvements.
“The biggest problem there is right-of-way. Everything is so close,” he said. “There’s not enough state-owned right-of-way to do that.”
Weston Stroud, Macon-Bibb County’s traffic safety manager pointed out that the Blind Academy had already requested enhancing nearby sidewalks where they train students to navigate around traffic.
Relocating utilities would also be a challenge, Stroud said.
Ryals worries about changing the reversible lane into a turn lane because locals have established patterns that could lead to head-on collisions.
“They drive it so much, it’s habit,” he said. “They’ll think it’s open even though it’s not. We’ll have to put out some bollards or delineate the change somehow to make sure they know it’s not open anymore.”
He is waiting for the results of GDOT’s traffic study to develop an alternative to the soon to be defunct reversible lane. While there is no timeline for a solution, there might not be much time left.
“It’s their call for a long-term solution,” Ryals said.
One option is to permanently make the center lane an inbound lane.
“It stands to reason that most people migrate in the morning and most everybody comes to work at the same time, between about 8:30 and 9,” Ryals said.
Commuters generally head straight to work in the morning, but may take a different route home to run errands or grocery shop. They also leave work at more staggered times.
“I wouldn’t assume there would be the same volume of concentrated traffic heading out,” he said. “We’re looking into potential possibilities.”
Ryals lauded GDOT for expediting the traffic study because as the gecko incident shows, time is of the essence.
“They have been great partners as usual to help us work through the issue,” he said. “We really appreciate the partnership.”
— Civic Journalism Senior Fellow Liz Fabian covers Macon-Bibb County government entities for The Macon Newsroom and can be reached at fabian_lj@mercer.edu or 478-301-2976.
