Major roadwork is coming to the Richmond Road and Athens Boonesboro Road corridor.
The project, slated to get underway early this year, will extend from Eagle Creek Drive to the entrance to Brenda Cowan Elementary.
“The corridor experiences heavy traffic congestion and has been identified as a priority high crash corridor,” the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet says on a web page explaining the project. “The volume of traffic continues to grow, with more residential neighborhoods, retail stores and restaurants and a new school. Some of the traffic signals are too tightly spaced, which slows traffic flow and the corridor lacks places for people to bike, walk and cross the street safely, despite being adjacent to Lexington’s largest city park.”
This project aims to improve that.
Several intersections will be reconfigured to require motorists to turn right off side streets onto Richmond Road and Athens Boonesboro. Those who would have turned left will instead have to make a U-turn. The traffic pattern is referred to as an R-CUT, for Restricted Crossing U-Turn, and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet says the pattern can improve traffic flow and reduce serious crashes.
In other parts of the country, R-CUTs are also referred to as J-turns, and in some states, a series of R-CUTs like the ones planned for Richmond Road are called a superstreet.
An R-cut intersection helps decrease traffic accidents by restricting turns through intersections. An R-cut intersection will go live Monday, July 22, 2024, on Athens Boonesboro Road.
Athens Boonesboro already has an R-CUT at Competition Drive, the exit from the new soccer stadium onto the main road.
Over the next year and a half, R-CUTs will be installed where Richmond Road intersects with Squires Road and Yorkshire Boulevard, Ellerslie Park Boulevard, Hays Boulevard and Aphids Way, as well as at the entrance to Brenda Cowan Elementary.
At those intersections, motorists on the side streets will have to turn right onto Richmond Road and won’t have the option to make a left turn or go straight across Richmond Road. Instead, they’ll be able to make a U-turn on Richmond Road from adjacent medians.
Drivers on Richmond Road will still be able to go left, right or straight at each intersection.
The Richmond Road intersection at Old Richmond Road and the entrance to Jacobson Park will also see a major change.
The traffic signal there will be removed, the Old Richmond Road intersection will be closed and traffic will be diverted onto Aphids Way, which has already seen increased traffic in recent years.
Aphids Way will be reconstructed to accommodate more traffic with the closing of Old Richmond Road, according to the Transportation Cabinet.
While the current Jacobson Park entrance will stay where it is, the median on Richmond Road will be extended, prohibiting outbound Richmond Road traffic from turning left into the park there, and the traffic signal at that location will be removed.
A new Jacobson Park entrance will be constructed across from Ellerslie Park Boulevard, and a traffic signal will be added at that intersection.
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet has proposed a new construction project which would implement restricted crossing U-turns at several intersections in the Richmond Road and Athens Boonesboro corridor.
Hays Boulevard is the most congested of the intersections along Richmond Road, the Transportation Cabinet says. To better accommodate traffic turning onto Hays from Richmond Road, dual left turn lanes will be added on Richmond Road, helping reduce delays for drivers.
At the Brenda Cowan Elementary entrance, drivers leaving the school will have to turn toward I-75, and then make a U-turn if they want to head in toward town. The Transportation Cabinet says on its website that it does not believe there’s enough traffic volume to warrant a traffic signal at the school’s entrance, but that officials “will continue to monitor traffic volumes and safety trends.”
The cabinet is also proposing a shared-use path on the north side of Richmond Road from Yorkshire Boulevard to Hays Boulevard, which will allow biking and walking access to Jacobson Park.
The process of obtaining the right-of-way for the project is “complete or nearly complete,” according to the Transportation Cabinet, and utility relocation is expected to start early in 2025.
The Transportation Cabinet expects to advertise for bids from contractors early in the year, with a goal of construction beginning in the spring.
The work should be finished by summer 2026.
The project is expected to cost $12.75 million, with funding coming from the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program, the state’s maintenance and resurfacing program and an allocation from the Lexington Area Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Cutting down on crashes
“We definitely have an issue with traffic flow in that corridor,” said Joseph Hale, who was recently elected to represent District 7, which includes the Richmond Road area, on the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council. “That’s one of the most dangerous segments of road in all of Kentucky, statistically.”
In September 2020, an analysis of collisions along the corridor was completed before the design phase of the project began, said Transportation Cabinet spokeswoman Natasha Lacy.
Between 2015 and 2020, she said there were 67 collisions, four of which involved serious injuries, on Richmond Road at the intersection with Yorkshire Boulevard and Squires Road. There were 29 collisions on Richmond Road at Ellerslie Park Boulevard, three of which were either fatal or caused serious injury, and there were 17 collisions on Richmond Road at Shoreside Drive, two of which involved serious injury.
The Transportation Cabinet says angle and left-turn collisions are a particular problem on Richmond Road, and those crashes tend to be more severe.
R-CUTs can help prevent crashes by reducing the number of locations where vehicles cross paths at an intersection. While there are 32 potential conflict points in a traditional intersection, an R-CUT has just 14, and there are fewer places where a “T-bone” crash can occur.
The Transportation Cabinet says R-CUTS can reduce the overall number of crashes by up to 40% and reduce the number of fatal crashes by 50% or more.
R-CUTs near Elizabethtown have reduced injury collisions by more than 80%, according to the cabinet. An analysis of six standalone R-CUTs in Hardin County and R-CUTS opened in 2022 along the U.S. 31W corridor in Elizabethtown showed that injuries dropped from 44 per year to eight per year, the cabinet said in a news release. The overall average number of crashes per year dropped from 267 before the R-CUTs were built to 138 per year afterward, a 48% reduction, according to the cabinet.
“The data and analysis helped guide the project team in making the recommendation for the most cost-effective safety countermeasure,” Lacy said in an email. “The reduction of conflict points, along with the successful implementation of RCUT intersections in a similar roadway context, led to the recommendation of the RCUT concept as the optimal solution in an effort to reduce collisions while also making a positive impact on traffic congestion.”
The cabinet says R-CUTs are also safer for pedestrians crossing the street.
Hale said widening the road would have been much more costly and would not have made the corridor safer.
As traffic comes off Interstate 75 onto Athens Boonesboro, he said, drivers are “still in interstate mode.”
“We need safer and more efficient,” he said.
The Transportation Cabinet says R-CUTS improve efficiency by helping traffic flow more freely. Eliminating left turn lights on side streets means signals can stay green longer on both the main road and side streets, and more vehicles can go at the same time, reducing driver wait time.
Hale has been following the project closely and meeting with neighborhood groups to keep them informed.
“This is a project that I’m inheriting, so I’m going to be on top of it as much as I can,” he said.
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