New Circle Road barrier needs improvement
Question: I was wondering why the safety barrier project on New Circle Road was not completed. It extends from Richmond Road to Leestown Road and there it stops. Why doesn’t the barrier extend to the limited access portions of New Circle Road? I think the portion of the barrier that is up is great.
Answer: An article in the July 31, 2007 Herald-Leader explains that barriers were planned for unsignalized portions of New Circle Road:
“It’s a bit like a giant rubber band running down the middle of New Circle Road — designed to stretch out when hit, then spring back.
A new $2.5 million cable barrier system being installed in the median of an 11-mile stretch of New Circle will be more forgiving than concrete barriers or steel guardrails, so people in vehicles that strike the cables are less likely to have serious injuries.
And the system is designed to keep cars from crossing New Circle’s grass median into oncoming traffic — an increasing problem along the busy, unsignalized section of Lexington’s loop road.
Within the next three or four weeks, installation of cable median barriers along the unsignalized part of New Circle Road, from Richmond Road almost to Old Frankfort Pike, should be complete.
The project is designed to curb the number of serious accidents caused by vehicles crossing the median along that stretch of New Circle.”
Linda Niemi
Filed under: Uncategorized
My mother was a public school librarian. I earned a bachelor’s degree in music and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Kentucky. The Herald-Leader hired me as a news assistant 25 years ago; soon after, I moved to the news research department, where I’ve been ever since. We used to clip newspapers. Now, almost all of our research is online. We've come a long way.
I believe the reason the barrier ends between Old Frankfort and Leestown is because that is where the median switches from a depressed to a raised median.