Soon, it’ll all be back to normal.
Traffic backups caused by repaving of State Road 46 East and bridge work on State Road 46 West should clear near the end of the month — just in time to be replaced by the traffic Brown Countians are used to in October.
Drivers have encountered periodic stops and slowness on the east and west legs of the highway most of the summer.
The Indiana Department of Transportation began replacing a culvert and bridge on 46 West at Bond Cemetery Road in June, then began milling and repaving 46 East between Columbus and Nashville in July.
The temporary light that was controlling traffic one lane at a time on 46 West was taken down when that project wrapped up around the end of August.
The 46 East work will continue until “near the end of the month,” INDOT spokesman Harry Maginity said after talking to the project engineer last week.
The contractor was to finish paving the road shoulder on Sept. 12, but work on the “full reconstruction” segment at Tipton Lakes in Columbus is ongoing, he said.
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The new asphalt on State Road 46 East will receive center-line and edge-line rumble stripes, Maginity said. They will be sealed, which requires five days of cure time; then, pavement markings will go down, he said.
Rumble stripes were installed on 46 East more than three years ago in an effort to reduce lane-cross and off-road crashes.
About 27 percent of crashes in Indiana occur when vehicles veer off the side of the road, while 18 percent are head-on crashes, involving vehicles traveling into another lane, Maginity told The Republic (Columbus) in 2016. INDOT travel safety statistics show that center-line warning systems reduce traffic fatalities and injuries by 44 percent by alerting a driver when his or her car leaves its lane, he said.
In 2015, a Brown County resident who lived near State Road 46 started a Facebook movement against the stripes because of their noise. The following year, INDOT was working to install the stripes with a “quieter design” along all state highways in the Seymour INDOT district, the Republic reported.
Sidewalk plans?
In February, a group of Brown County residents lobbied the Nashville Town Council to add a sidewalk along State Road 46 East from the CVS stoplight to the Hawthorne Drive stoplight.
They didn’t have much persuading to do; council President “Buzz” King agreed that a sidewalk was needed and has been for years.
The unanswered question was how to pay for it.
It’s still unanswered.
INDOT is not planning to create the sidewalk while it is repaving State Road 46 East.
However, the state would be willing to partner with the town or county to do it, Maginity said.
“This could be done with local funding or with matching funds, should Community Crossings or Local Public Agency (LPA) awards be made,” he said. “Both entities understand the application process.”
The county and the town have until Sept. 28 to turn in their requests for Community Crossings road projects for 2019.
Annie Hawk, one of the leaders of the BC Paths for People sidewalk movement, was hopeful that Community Crossings could be the funding mechanism when she learned about that state grant opportunity. It covers 75 percent of the cost of projects for a community this size.
The county does not have a State Road 46 sidewalk on its Community Crossings request list for next year. It announced its grant project hopefuls in mid-July.
The town doesn’t have the sidewalk project on its list either, though that list was not finished as of Sept. 12.
Nashville Utility Coordinator Sean Cassiday said he’s been under the impression that the town can’t ask for that sidewalk because it would be a stand-alone project not connected to another town road project. “Unless something’s changed from Community Crossings that I don’t know about, at this point you can’t just do Community Crossings for a sidewalk project,” he said.
As far as finding money elsewhere in the town budget to do it, Cassiday said that’s not likely. “We’ve got too many sidewalks in town that need work and not enough money to do that,” he said.
Ideally, BC Paths for People would like to see a sidewalk along the south side of the highway. It would go along the berm in front of the Brown County Inn, past the sheriff’s department, into the floodplain and over the creek, along the IGA property and up to the Hawthorne Drive intersection, Hawk told town council members, the county commissioners and other interested residents in a group email Aug. 27.
On Sept. 12, she said she hadn’t heard back from anyone about the feasibility or interest in funding it.
The sidewalk request is in memory of James “David” Sturgeon, who was hit and killed while trying to cross State Road 46 East near Hawthorne Drive last September.
Earlier this year, local leaders did ask for several changes to State Road 46 East since the state was replacing the pavement anyway. Then-Town Manager Scott Rudd, Cassiday and Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner met with INDOT about more than 50 suggested improvements. The list was compiled with input from county leaders, the school system, town leaders and law enforcement.
Adding a sidewalk from the CVS to the Seasons Lodge, with crosswalks at intersections, was on that list, as well as adding a bike lane on both sides of the road from town to Brown County State Park. Other suggestions included extending the reduced 40 mph speed limit to Parkview Road instead of where it stops now near Snyder Farm, adding a traffic light at the state park entrance, and changing some pavement markings to help with driver safety.
Maginity, who was working on gathering answers to those requests last week, said Sunday that INDOT is not planning to add bike lanes at this time.
