Ingham County's most dangerous intersections
The LSJ has an article listing the 10 most dangerous intersections based on traffic incidents per year.
Here's the list:
1. Grand River Avenue at Hagadorn Road: 68 crashes
2. Saginaw Street at Clippert Street, 58 crashes
3. Jolly Road at Cedar Street, 55 crashes
4. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard at Holmes Road, 52 crashes
5. Miller Road at Cedar Street, 41 crashes
6. Dunckel Road at Jolly Road, 41 crashes
7. Coolidge Road at Lake Lansing Road, 39 crashes
8. Grand River Avenue at Clippert Street, 37 crashes
9. Grand River Avenue at Howard Street, 35 crashes
10. Saginaw Street at Homer Street, 34 crashes
What do you think should be done to these intersections to make them safer?
Also, it would be helpful if the data said what type of accidents happen. Do they involve people turning right-on-red? Pedestrians? Left-turns? Protected lefts? etc.
Speaking on a couple here:
#1 The intersection isn't oddly shaped. It's a standard four-way intersection with protected left turns and no right-on-red. When I drive this intersection I usually see people rushing to make the left-turn because the light doesn't seem to last long enough.
#2 On Clippert just north of this intersection driving southbound there are some really bad humps in the road that throws off most people. High speed traffic on Saginaw combined with potentially slower traffic on Clippert (especially due to the humps) doesn't help. Saginaw is one-way here, and Clippert is two-ways. I know turning left from Saginaw on to Clippert can be a tight squeeze.
#8 This one is only about 360 feet away from #2. I think the heavy one-way traffic on both Grand River Ave and Saginaw Street make traveling this section of Clippert pretty scary. Crossing Grand River here along Clippert is very dangerous, as the road is 5 lanes wide and traffic is coming from Saginaw, Grand River, and also numerous businesses such as the Speedway and Burger King.
Comments
It should be no surprise to anyone that a full four of these are around the clusterf%ck that is Frandor. This is one place where I think changing some streets to two-way might actually appreciably help, but I'm not even sure where to begin.
I frequent the mall quite a bit (almost always coming from the west), and some observations I have are:
Turning southbound onto Clippert from Saginaw is more tricky than it looks because the corner is so tight. With traffic coming down Saginaw so fast, I'd bet almost all the accidents here are rear-enders (i.e. car can clear itself onto southbound Clippert quickly enough). I'd imagine after that the next biggest problems are turning left onto Saginaw from Clippert north of the intersection. The center of the intersection sits on something of a small hill, so your site lines trying to judge what's coming up Clippert from the south can be non-existent when you're waiting to turn left.
Another blind spot is trying to turn left from Clippert onto Grand River. Because of the curve before this intersection, and it again sitting lower than everything east and south, you can't see over the hill coming down from Grand River that well. You can sometimes wait at this light-less intersection for minutes, sometimes. Some people just don't wait and just take their lives into their hands.
I think that easily the most dangerous manuever, however, is coming off of northbound US-127 to try and go east on Saginaw. The problem is that there is no other good way to go east, so you get one chance. The only other way is to miss the Saginaw intersection and then have to circle around using Grand River and Howard, which could be four different lights. I don't know how long the street is to get to Saginaw, but I ALWAYS try and let people merge to get to Saginaw if I can. There is no room for error, and the biggest problem is that it's what most out-of-towners use to get to campus instead of getting off at Kalamazoo. It's a last-chance exit unless you're going to be going all the way up to Lake Lansing.
I honestly don't know how you improve this aside from maybe making Grand River two ways to alleviate the use of Saginaw for ALL east-bound trips.
As for some of the others, #7 is just the result of way too much traffic since the boom of Eastwood and the Northern Tier. Same with #1 to an extent. The rest just seem like driver impatience, folks trying to beat left-turn signals at the light, mostly.
I am not quite a senior citizen yet, but I find driving in this area quite frightening and confusing. It's the one place in Lansing that reminds me of Boston and not in a good way. There is not much room to change the traffic pattern there, maybe dividing the through traffic from the local. If you go into the through traffic lane you would be restricted from turning say until you pass 127, or perhaps a traffic circle where Saginaw and Grand River cross. Speed limit and traffic enforcement, and coordinated lights might help.
With #10, Homer Street could have a stop sign added for those already traveling on Homer and forcing them to yield to traffic that is exiting 127 North. This is very common in the Detroit area freeways (at least the Lodge and parts of I-75) with service roads.
I mean, you could have a full-on traffic signal during much of the day and then turn it flashing yellow later in the night. There is certainly enough traffice for that. I hadn't even thought of that.
A stop/yield sign would be a great idea at the 127 exit, a traffic signal may work but I'd be worried about traffic backing up onto the freeway when the exit's light was red. They really need to do something with that exit though, along with the Clippert/Saginaw/Grand River intersections. I've never noticed anything too bad about any of the other intersections on that list though.
It would be interesting to look at a pre frandor 127 map to see where and how a better street grid could have been built in the area. 496 and 127 are poorly designed with many exits that should have much slower speed limits on exit ramps as they approach the city streets and cross roads.