NCDOT finds a cheap and easy way to prevent fatal crashes at rural intersections
When the N.C. Department of Transportation set out to reduce the number of serious crashes at rural intersections a few years ago, it tried a quick and cheap solution: stop signs.
It’s working.
NCDOT has converted 350 rural crossroads from two-way stops to four-way stops and says the result has been a significant drop in crashes, especially those that kill or seriously injure people.
There had been 165 serious injury crashes at those intersections in the years before they were converted to all-way stops, says Shawn Troy, NCDOT’s State Traffic Safety Engineer. Since then, there have been eight such crashes at those intersections, Troy said.
Before the conversions, 81 people had died in crashes at those intersections. Since the change, the number killed has dropped to zero.
It’s not that drivers don’t run into each other, Troy said. But when they do they’re both going about 5 mph.
“So it really speaks to the reduced speed of the collisions,” he said. “When you have a crash and someone’s going 55 and another person is just pulling out of an intersection, those crashes tend to be severe.”
NCDOT first studied the effect of changing intersections to all-way stops back in 2010. At the time, the state had converted about 50 rural intersections and wanted to see if it was working. It was, and over the next decade the state converted another 50 intersections statewide, Troy said.
Then in 2020, as fatal crashes nationwide were spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic, NCDOT reached for a proven safety measure. It studied hundreds of rural intersections statewide and has converted another 250 to all-way stops in the past three years, including several in rural parts of Johnston County.
“It’s really going with the philosophy if we know something works, let’s try to do more of it,” Troy said. “And we know that the all-way stop has been successful, and so we decided to ramp up that piece of the program in 2020.”
And it doesn’t take a lot of time or money to install “stop ahead” and stop signs. It generally costs $20,000 to $40,000 to convert an intersection to all-way stop, Troy said, far cheaper than installing traffic lights or a roundabout.
They’re also more predictable for drivers, who don’t have to wonder if they’re going to make it through the green light ahead.
Not all rural intersections are good candidates for all-way stop. NCDOT looks for places with a significant number of crashes but not so much traffic that bringing everyone to a halt will create big backups.
And sometimes the all-way stop is a temporary measure. NCDOT made the intersection of N.C. 42 and N.C. 96 east of Clayton an all-way stop in 2019 but began replacing the signs with a roundabout this year.
NCDOT continues to evaluate rural crossroads that might be good candidates for all-way stops. The effort caught the attention of the Roadway Safety Foundation, a national nonprofit that works to make highways safer, and the Federal Highway Administration, which recently gave the department one of its annual national awards.
Last year, 1,784 people died in crashes in North Carolina, the most since the early 1970s, according to the Division of Motor Vehicles. Through the first half of this year, traffic fatalities in the state were up another 3.5% compared to the same period last year, according to estimates from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
