As Greenwood continues to grow and expand east and south, semis using rural roads is becoming just as much of an issue as truck traffic in the city’s core.
Residents — especially those in southeast Greenwood — complain regularly about truck traffic on narrow one- and two-lane roads on the city-county borders. It’s a safety concern, they say.
At times, those residents have pleaded with council members to deny proposed developments, such as when Vineyard Community Church attempted a rezone so it could sell its old property southeast of the Worthsville Road interchange to a major warehouse developer. The residents’ sole concern was increased truck traffic, which they argue is a danger to their kids. Since then, the city has gotten several calls from those residents every time a semi accident occurs in that area, which is happening more and more, city officials said.
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What the city has found, council member Mike Campbell said, is semis are using county roads to travel between cities — for example, from Greenwood to Shelbyville — instead of using the interstates, which are much safer, he said.
Until now, it was mostly a downtown issue due to narrow streets, compact neighborhoods and pedestrian safety, and most of the city’s truck traffic bans are in the downtown area. But now, with more and more distribution and manufacturing centers going in on the east and southeast side of Greenwood, in close proximity to homes, it has become an issue on county roads as well.
Last month, the Greenwood City Council approved banning truck traffic on a county road on the city’s southeast side because semis were having trouble turning north onto it, and weighed the possibility of banning it on another road in the same area.
The council voted unanimously to ban truck traffic on County Road 75 East, which runs between Worthsville and Stop 18 roads, alongside subdivisions to the west and mostly farmland to the east.
The council also considered banning truck traffic on County Road 250 East, which sees the bulk of this issue, but decided not to because the entire road is not within city limits, and legally, they can only install signs within their jurisdiction, which some council members feared would cause confusion and more problems.
If a truck driver turned onto the road south of the city and then saw signs banning trucks once they were in the city, there is no where for them to turn around, and that would causes more safety concerns, Campbell said.
Truck drivers are coming off Interstate 74 in Shelby County and making their way into Johnson County and specifically Greenwood from the east, but the roads, especially outside the city limits, aren’t equipped to handle it.
“There’s not a whole lot we can do about it, at least not at the present,” Campbell said.
But the city recently started discussions with the county about possible solutions, he said.
“A lot of the people who are expressing concerns don’t actually live in the city,” Campbell said. “We appreciate that, because that tells us that what we’re doing has an impact outside of the city as well, especially in that southeast corner.”
Typically what happens is a semi runs off the side of the road into a ditch, because there is no shoulder, or they can’t clear a bend in the road, he said.
School buses also use those roads, at times stopping to let kids on and off the bus, residents argue, and the roads aren’t wide enough for two large vehicles to pass one another, which either causes a crash or leaves one of them off the side of the road.
The city is already considering ways to limit truck traffic on those roads as more and more warehouses come to the area. Some of those businesses have agreed to insist their truck drivers only use their access roads, Worthsville Road and Interstate 65.
“Our hope is that the truck traffic at those distribution centers out there will just hop on Worthsville Road and take it over to the highway, because county roads aren’t really built to handle truck traffic,” Campbell said.
The city is spending more than $2 million to widen Worthsville Road to the county line to better manage that increase in traffic.
City staff take several things into consideration when deciding whether to ban truck traffic on certain roads, such the physical characteristics of the road along the route such as any curves or turns that would be difficult for trucks and existing bridges or culverts have weight restrictions.
“Then there are more subjective considerations, such as a hypothetical trend of trucks using a local road as a cut-through in residential areas to access a commercial or industrial area, when there is a nearby higher-classification road available to arrive at the same destination,” said Daniel Johnston, city engineer. “Many GPS devices show the quickest route which may inadvertently guide trucks toward those local-roads. Installing the signs would instruct the trucks to find another route.”
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Greenwood is considering how to limit semi-truck traffic on rural roads on the southeast side of the city.
Semis are already banned on the following Greenwood roads:
- Main Street between Emerson Avenue and U.S. Highway 31
- Alexander Street between Airport Parkway and Country Aire Lane
- Country Aire Drive between Country Aire Lane and Emerson Avenue
- Sherman Drive From County Line Drive to Christy Drive
- Christy Drive from Meridian Street to Airport Parkway
- Suncrest Drive from Meridian Street to Mikes Way
- Mikes Way
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