A $15.5 million project on Arkansas 12 west of Rainbow Curve in Bentonville is making traffic worse for now.
Bentonville resident Dusty Gray won’t like what he’s gonna hear from The Guru, an unparalleled Grim Reaper of traffic news.
Afterwards, West Fork’s Milton Jones wonders if College Avenue in Fayetteville should be modified.
Question: “Please help!” Gray writes. “Bentonville is rerouting Arkansas 112 where it connects with Arkansas 12, and they are aligning it with I Street.
“With the way they have traffic configured now, there is no left-turn lane for drivers going west on Arkansas 12 to make a left turn onto 112. It has traffic backed up for miles for the afternoon commute. Please convince the city to move the barrels and create a left-turn lane to make this drive (which is borderline insanity on a good day) tolerable again.”
Answer: Concrete barriers replaced the orange barrels last week and serve the orange-barrel purpose.
Gray pegged this mess perfectly. It’s a bad delay that’s expected to stay bad for months.
“There was a left-turn lane, and now there’s not for right now,” said Mike Churchwell, a city transportation engineer who drove The Guru through the 12-112 area Tuesday afternoon. “It’s not the perfect scenario, but it’s the best we could come up with.”
The left-turn lane that let westbound Arkansas 12 drivers turn south onto Arkansas 112 is being shared with drivers going straight.
The straight drivers must wait behind left-turners although there is a brief permissive left turn on the traffic signal to help a bit.
Widening a half-mile part of Arkansas 12 to five lanes will take six more months. In four months, traffic moves over to the relocated Arkansas 112 that lines up with Southwest I Street. That’s when a traffic signal at SW H Street will be removed and a new signal at SW I Street will be activated.
I Street’s widening to five lanes from Arkansas 12 to Arkansas 102 won’t be done until September 2012, Churchwell said.
Q: “Southbound traffic on College Avenue needs to merge left while approaching Milsap Road to make room for traffic coming on from Fulbright Expressway,” Jones writes.
“Since College has two southbound lanes, it seems like a no-brainer for the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to put up a signon the College overpass that reads ‘through traffic merge left,’ and then require traffic in the right lane to yield to Fulbright drivers. Only cars needing to turn right at Milsap should be in the right lane.
Why doesn’t some genius traffic engineer fix this?”
A: Joe Shipman, a Highway Department’s district engineer, said he’d ask a traffic engineer to see if anything can be done to improve the College/Fulbright/Milsap area.
The Guru isn’t sure Jones’ idea would help, but it’s worth studying.
Robert J. Smith, aka The Guru, writes on traffic issues in Northwest Arkansas on Fridays. He can be reached at nwaonline.com/guru or [email protected].
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/10/2011