CORNELIA – Drivers in Cornelia, take notice. The City of Cornelia will be activating a pair of new four-way stops on Monday, April 10.
One of those stops is on one of the city’s major arteries, Wayside Street, at the intersection of Hoyt Street.
“Wayside Street, we’ve struggled with this for years,” said Cornelia City Manager Donald Anderson. “The residents complain about the high rates of speed because it’s a straight shot from Level Grove to Old Cleveland and Main Street.”
But the city didn’t just decide to install the four-way stop based on complaints.
“We had a traffic study done on Hoyt Street between Wayside and Irvin because, according to our police department, we’ve had 24 accidents on Hoyt Street in that area since 2014,” Anderson said. “As a result of the traffic study, we actually have two four-way stops going in. The intersection of Hoyt and Galloway Street is going to be a four-way stop. And the intersection at Hoyt and Wayside Street will be a four-way stop.”
But the new four-way stop at Hoyt and Wayside streets won’t be what was suggested, because city leaders felt that would be intrusive and create other issues, such as limiting travel for residents.
“The engineers actually recommended a raised island, making Hoyt Street a right-in, right-out, but the commissioners feel that that will create more headaches than it’s worth because of school bus traffic, people that live on the other side of Wayside that use Hoyt Street to get to work would essentially have to go up to Level Grove,” Anderson said.
Anderson mentioned the daycare center located on the corner of Hoyt and Wayside streets, noting that traffic counts calculating the speed showed a total of 53,642 vehicles traveled on Wayside Street in a seven-day period.
“Of those, 85 percent were over the posted speed limit,” Anderson said. “The top speed registered was 94.2 miles an hour, and the average speed was 32.7, but the low speed was 5.6 because obviously somebody was slowing down to make a turn. There is a speeding problem on Wayside Street, there’s a safety problem with that intersection, and the commissioners felt that the best solution was to go ahead and make this a four-way stop. It’s about middle way between Level Grove and Old Cleveland and Main Street, so it provides a good breaking point to slow the cars down.”
The change to traffic on Wayside Street is going to catch many drivers off guard, Anderson said.
“Obviously the one at Hoyt and Wayside is going to be a drastic traffic pattern change, because I know the road is over 100 years old and I’m sure it’s been a straight-through ever since the road has been built,” Anderson said.
