Proposed changes could make downtown Columbus safer for pedestrians

COLUMBUS, Miss. (WCBI) – Some proposed changes could make for a safer downtown Columbus.

City Engineer Kevin Stafford talked with the city council Thursday morning about a plan to expand walkways and slow down traffic in the downtown area.

Turning the friendly city into a safer city is the goal of city leaders in Columbus.

Stafford said the downtown area gets a lot of car traffic. But drivers have to share city streets with pedestrians, and it’s not always safe for those on foot.

“We had complaints about pedestrians couldn’t cross the street in time before the light changed; cars that are parked right now on main street they back out and it’s hard to see oncoming traffic and you’re backing into oncoming traffic so they wanted to see if we could do something about that,” said Stafford.

The downtown area has five lanes but Stafford and MDOT have a proposed plan to narrow that down to three lanes and expand curbs out a little further

“You move it to the back side of the parked vehicle so in Columbus that’s about 14 ft and you do it on both sides so you’ve automatically already reduced the distance across by 28 ft,” said Stafford.

Stafford said at the intersection by Zacharys, the signs don’t always change to tell pedestrians when to stop or go.

But there’s a plan to upgrade that.

“Right now, running off of loops in the asphalt, those loops are only as good as the asphalt is, and near the end of the asphalt life, they tend to fail more times than not. We’re going to convert to radar detection which is a little white box that is up on the poles and radar detects what vehicles are there,” said Stafford.

Stafford said the overall goal is safety for drivers and pedestrians in the downtown area.

A large part of that has to do with drivers slowing down and there are some other ideas on how to do that.

“At a roundabout, you don’t have to stop so it just slows everybody down but the other thing a roundabout does is for the pedestrian you just have to cross one lane at a time there’s refuges in the middle,” said Stafford.

Stafford and the city council are expected to talk more about the downtown safety plan at the next city council meeting.

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