After a year when car crashes killed a record 23 people in Athens, in 2022 the Athens-Clarke County Commission passed a Vision Zero resolution vowing to eliminate traffic deaths by 2037. Now, local transportation officials are using a $1 million federal Safe Streets for All grant to make a plan to turn that promise into reality.
Drivers kill an average of 12 people a year in Athens. So far this year, six fatal crashes have killed a total of seven people, including five pedestrians.
About 85% of crashes happen on Athens’ “high injury network,” which encompasses 128 miles of roadway and 25 intersections—just 18% of the city’s total transportation network. This includes major arterials like Atlanta Highway, Lexington Road, North Avenue, Hawthorne Avenue, Prince Avenue and Barnett Shoals Road, as well as some smaller but busy collectors like Danielsville Road, Whit Davis Road, Milledge Avenue and Chase Street. The most frequent cause is failure to yield (37% of crashes), and the most common type is an angled crash such as a T-bone (36%).
Speed is a major factor in whether a crash causes a tragedy—90% of people who are hit by a vehicle going 23 miles per hour survive, while 90% of people who are struck by a vehicle traveling 58 miles per hour die. More than half of crashes that kill or seriously injure someone in Athens happen on a road where the speed limit is 45 mph or higher. But simply lowering the speed limit isn’t enough. Experts say motorists tend to drive as fast as they feel comfortable driving, so street design is more effective at reducing speeds.
To that end, the ACC Transportation and Public Works Department will conduct a “quick build” pilot project this fall, testing a cheap and easy fix for a dangerous local intersection utilizing simple, temporary tools like paint and plastic cones. “The cool thing about this is we can test the street design and most importantly get feedback; then we can alter or improvise either within that pilot or at the conclusion of it,” consultant Courtney Frisch told the ACC Commission at a Sept. 9 work session.
The location has not been chosen, but one candidate is the intersection of Danielsville and Ila roads, which has a dangerous Y-shaped intersection. Two people have died in crashes this year on Danielsville Road. “I think that [55 mph] speed limit on a two-lane highway and no lights is another accident waiting to happen,” said Commissioner Ovita Thornton, who represents the area.
In addition, the county will be installing AI sensors on various roadways to measure not only crashes, but near-misses.
Several commissioners brought up Atlanta Highway, a seven-lane road where crosswalks are few and far between. Several people have been killed there trying to cross on foot. A Georgia Department of Transportation Project scheduled to start in 2027 will add a median and a walking and biking path between Epps Bridge Parkway and Hancock Avenue, where GDOT is also building a roundabout to make the intersection safer.
As Commissioner Melissa Link and Mayor Kelly Girtz noted, many of Athens’ highways were built at a time when the city was much smaller, and now that it’s grown, designs that prioritize moving cars quickly over the safety of people who are walking or biking are no longer appropriate. Jefferson Road, for example, should not have the same fast-moving design near Bishop Park as it does further out toward Jackson County. “You have a growing population; you have more people moving around getting groceries, picking up kids. We’ve not adapted our roadways to be safer,” Girtz said.
Link wanted to know about the overlap between the high injury network and TSPLOST 2026 projects. The commission is due to approve a project list for the transportation sales tax in December, with a public vote scheduled for May. “We stayed out of the weeds on overlap and concentrated on good projects,” said Alex Sams, chair of the TSPLOST advisory committee.
Commissioner Stephanie Johnson demanded a public presentation on TSPLOST, although as other commissioners reminded her, the commission had just seen one last month and will see more this fall, and the presentation is available online. Lately the mayor and commission has been opening up the floor for questions on some agenda items, rather than sitting through a PowerPoint, in an effort to shorten meetings that often ran four or five hours.
Commissioners had little to say about two other transportation-related items on the work session agenda—a Sycamore Drive sidewalk and pedestrian improvements in the Stonehenge neighborhood. Both projects were up for further discussion at the Sept. 16 agenda-setting meeting.
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