Councilman Frush Advocates For Four-Way Stop Signs
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
City Councilman Jerry Frush told the Warsaw Traffic Commission Wednesday that a four-way stop sign at the intersection of Husky Trail and North Pointe Drive probably would have saved an 8-year-old boy’s life earlier this year and advocated for its use.
But Warsaw Street Superintendent Jeff Beeler pointed out that there are state rules that dictate how, when and if traffic signs and signals are put up.
Frush’s comment came about as part of his argument that four-way stop signs are better and cheaper than traffic signals.
Earlier in the meeting, Traffic Administrator Steve Foster reminded the commission that they have been working on some things over the past several months regarding school zones.
Warsaw Police Dept. Capt. Joel Beam said one of the areas of concern was that school crossing signals on Ind. 15 seem to be off, so when kids are walking to school, the flashing lights aren’t timed correctly for when kids are actually walking to school.
He said, “We’re working with the state to get that corrected. We’re getting closer. We still have some adjustments to make, we thought we had it, but we did not. We’re getting closer. Probably by the next meeting we should be good to go.”
Foster asked Warsaw Street Superintendent Jeff Beeler if he had any information or updates on the lights on Husky Trail. Beeler said not yet, and he still has to get with the school to work on it and get it scheduled.
Dr. David Robertson, Warsaw Community Schools chief academic officer, said he could meet with Beeler. “I think what we saw (at the August meeting), we were happy with that. I know we have that (memorandum of understanding) with the mayor for the cost sharing of the traffic signal,” Robertson said.
At the August meeting, the commission looked at flashing solar speed boards and street crossing traffic signals. Each set of two costs between $13,000 to $16,000, depending on how the city wants the speed boards and lights to look.
Mayor Joe Thallemer asked Beeler if those had to be engineered once the city decides what it wanted to do. Beeler said it would take five to six weeks for them to be engineered.
Eight-year-old Gideon Cook was killed by a turning vehicle June 10 as he was crossing Husky Trail at North Pointe Drive to Harrison Elementary School. Since that incident, the Traffic Commission has been looking at ways to improve student crossings at all Warsaw schools, but especially at Harrison.
Frush told the commission, “As probably most of you know, I’m in favor of four-way stop signs. I think we could use them in this town. I think we could on Husky Trail there at the school. I think it would have been very beneficial.”
He said he’s seen the four-way stop signs used in other towns, and he’s talked to police departments in those towns and they find them to be “very good.”
“They don’t have any accidents, and they darn sure don’t have any pedestrians get hit,” Frush said. “You’re talking about putting lights out there at Husky Trail. I don’t know what that’s going to cost. I saw in the paper it’s $13,000 to $16,000. You can put four-way stop signs up there for less than $1,000. And I don’t see why this isn’t done. We can try it up there.”
He suggested the four-way stop signs could be tried for 60 or 90 days and see what happens.
“I don’t think we’d have any accidents,” he said. He named a few places with four-way stops, like the stop in front of Menard’s, where in 2016 no accidents were reported. “What’s that tell you? Four-way stops are safe, so why don’t we use them? And they’re also cheap.”
He said it was worth trying and why they didn’t try it was “beyond him.” He said he’d have to see a good reason, but didn’t think the commission had one.
Beeler responded, “According to the Indiana (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Device), which is what governs all the signage that we put up, for one, a stop sign can not be used as a traffic control speed deterrent device. So we need to, one, determine what would be the cause of needing to put a stop sign on Husky Trail. So if speed was the cause of the accident, a stop sign is not an allowable use for that.
“Two, you can not do a 60-day trial of a stop sign because that would cause more confusion and so that is not an option, according to the MUTCD. So there are rules in place that are easily accessible through INDOT of allowances for stop signs, requirements for stop signs and what is needed to put them in place,” Beeler said.
He pointed out that the Michiana Area Council of Governments has done many studies on stop signs on highly traveled roads, and there’s a lot of information out there for the city to do new signal modernization and not doing stop signs.
“As we have talked about the last almost three years now, at least the signal that’s going on here at Center and Buffalo streets, that is a project that’s going to be tied in to INDOT’s signal modernization project that is going to be happening in 2021. That’s also tied in to the railroads, which we all know causes traffic concerns and issues in Warsaw. The railroad is going to be communicating, as we have been told anyway, with INDOT on their signals. Those signals, then in turn, will then be communicating with our signals to help with clearing out traffic backups during those train events, which we will not be able to stop,” Beeler continued.
All of that is going toward helping with the issues that the city has complained about in the past, he said. The traffic signals communicating with each other will help alleviate traffic issues the city has. The new signals going in are tied to the internet and at 5 a.m. daily the clocks within the signals will be reset.
Beeler said the traffic flow will dramatically improve once everything gets tied in together, but it will take some time for that to happen.
He said there’s plenty of documentation out there of the rules and regulations of the “why, how, what, when and where” that different traffic control devices should be used. “For us to go against that would be a dangerous thing.”
Frush replied he had a list of some of that stuff but didn’t see where it talked about traffic control devices on city roads like Husky Trail. He said Husky Trail already had four-way stops at CR 200 and in front of Menards “and putting a four-way stop in there at Husky Trail, I think would have saved that young boy’s life. Now it’s too late for that young boy, but it could happen to another person.”
He said putting two blinking lights out there was no “big deal.”
City Planner Jeremy Skinner agreed with Frush’s principle that four-way stop signs stop traffic, but “there’s a lot more that goes into us just putting four-way stops everywhere we think we can potentially impact whether or not someone was hit or not hit.”
He said a traffic study is being done on Husky Trail to see what options the city has. The study is based on the state code that Beeler described, Skinner said, but he didn’t know what the study would tell them.
