On Tuesday night, dozens of area residents turned out at a church meeting hall in south Springfield to learn about the future of East Sunshine Street.
Betty Johnson was one of them.
She told KSMU, “Well yeah, I think there’s too many crashes involving left turns, people trying to get in and out of businesses.”
The Missouri Department of Transportation has a $10.7 million-dollar plan to improve East Sunshine Street. The project begins at Glenstone Avenue and stretches past Highway 65 all the way east to Farm Road 199.
It’s one of the busiest thoroughfares in Springfield — and Missouri. MODoT says the road gets up to 32,000 vehicles per day currently — and will likely add thousands more in the next 15 years.
MODoT data show East Sunshine is twice as crash-prone as the state average. Most other big Springfield roads have much lower crash rates.
Proposed solutions include better signals and sidewalks, more turn lanes — and 8-inch raised medians to block left turns along parts of the corridor. MODoT’s Kristi Bachman explains.
She said, “Raised medians on a high-volume urban route is one of the most effective strategies on reducing crashes. So we picked strategic locations, it’s not a raised median on the whole corridor. It’s just strategic locations where we had the higher crash rates and good access to a signal. We want people to make turns using the signal instead of making left turns mid-block at various entrances where there’s more potential of being a crash.”
But those medians worry businesses along East Sunshine, who fear customers in cars will pass them by instead of using MODoT’s proposed U-turns and signals to reach their locations.
MODoT recently found 728 crashes on East Sunshine — five of them fatal — over a five-year period. Officials at the public meeting on Tuesday told KSMU the crash total is likely an undercount. But, citing that same crash total, business advocates say the proposed solution doesn’t fit the perceived problem.
“That’s not a significant risk that justifies the construction of the median," said local businessman Neil Stenger at a Springfield City Council meeting 10 months ago. Ozarks Public Radio caught up with him Tuesday at the MODoT meeting.
Stenger said, “MODoT has made some changes to the original design, in an attempt to take into account the local concerns, but they still are designing from a standpoint of safety without any regard to the economic impact to the local businesses along the street.”
Stenger said MODoT’s current plan was still “too aggressive” in terms of safety planning. He thinks it needs more balance between safety and economics.
MODoT’s timeline for the project calls for plan development and acquiring right-of way this year, with construction not expected until 2025. The department's website offers more information including email updates.
