Tag Archives: Quarterman Road

“Your streets are designed to kill people.”

Roads that are designed to kill, By Mark Rosenberg, August 18, 2009:

They said the speed limit should be 30 kilometers per hour (about 18.6 miles per hour) or less if we wanted pedestrians to have much of a chance of surviving.

That’s what people in Sweden say. In their country, roads are actually designed to be safe. Unlike ours:

“This is where you live? This is your neighborhood? Your streets are designed to kill people.’’

It’s not hard to find descriptions of Sweden’s Vision Zero for no road deaths:

Vehicle speed is the most important regulating factor for safe road traffic.

Hm, so slower is safer.

Quarterman Road (like many other rural roads in Lowndes County) is a local neighborhood road, with tractors, bicycles, dogs, deer, and mothers rolling babies in strollers. According to Claes Tingvall, Director of Traffic Safety, Swedish Road Administration:

The idea of ”shared space” between pedestrians and vehicles has been trialed successfully in Gothenburg and other cities, as long as the environment has been redesigned for slow traffic.

And a budget-conscious county may be interested that he also says this:

The new safety principle, to control kinetic energy, is by itself cheaper than accident prevention. And once that investment is made it produces benefits every year.

Not to mention the benefit of fewer traffic accidents, injuries, and deaths.

Upset in Lower Lowndes

In today’s VDT Upset about development:

Bill Herndon and his neighbors are unhappy about a development being built in their backyards.
Marvin Peavy, owner of Peavy Properties, has already rented some of the Mar-Mel-Go apartments, and about 70 of the projected 150 apartments have been completed. The other 80 units are scheduled to be added soon.
The two-story apartment buildings rise uncomfortably close to the homes of Pinebrook Drive residents, such as Herndon. Windows of the complex look directly into their backyards and homes.

Marvin Peavy, now why does that name ring a bell? Ah, yes, CEO and CFO of Lower Lowndes, Inc. the corporation that bought 62.53 acres on Quarterman Road and attempted to rezone it from E-A to R-21 back in 2007. One of the neighbors saw the sign out front and a bunch of us helped convince the County Commission to deny the rezoning.

This time it’s so bad another developer is complaining:

Robert Eddington also lives on Pinebrook Drive. He is a builder and said everyone has a right to develop their property. What he’s disturbed about, among other issues, is that the plans they were shown are not being followed. Eddington was told most of the trees would be spared to protect their privacy, but when he came home several days later, they were all gone except a few.
…
Eddington and his neighbors successfully fought a similar development on nearby Water Oak Drive four years ago. They had no such opportunity this time, he said. No notices of any hearing were posted. Neither Herndon nor Fuhrer saw any notices posted announcing zoning or development hearings by the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners.

Hm, given that the ULDC got changed a year or so back to require notification of rezoning mailed to adjoining property owners, in addition to a notice in the newspaper and a sign out front, if there was no sign and neighbors didn’t get notices, I wonder if there’s a legal problem with the rezoning.

Ah, this takes me back:

Eddington’s fence was damaged during Mar-Mel-Go construction. When contractors finally fixed it 17 months later, he said his wife asked about the gate that was supposed to be installed. The site manager told his wife that it wouldn’t be installed until the rest of the apartments were completed. Eddington said they were originally told these would be “luxury condos,” but are very different from the way they were described.

The previous subdivision (not Peavy’s) that did get built on Quarterman Road (because its zoning was grandfathered in way back in the 1980s) involved a builder shoving building trash through my fence into my field. And streetlights that were installed by the developer but never turned on until the subdivision residents got the Commission to institute a special tax district to pay for them.

Curious how yet again “the plans they were shown are not being followed.”

Maybe if the neighbors go to the county they’ll get redress:

Herndon and his neighbors pooled their money several years ago and spent $4,400 to pave Pinewood Drive, so they feel they have a stake in how the road is used. He approached the Lowndes County Commission about the residents’ concerns and was eventually connected with County Engineer Mike Fletcher.
Fletcher said a $30,000 siren-controlled gate would be installed on Pinewood Drive for emergency vehicle access only, eliminating unwanted traffic through their neighborhood. The property owner is responsible for installing the gate, said Kevin Beals, Lowndes County development reviewer.

Ah, finger pointing! Not the county government’s problem; it’s up to the property owner. Nevermind the county commission approved the development with certain plans and requirements.

Well, maybe if the neighbors escalate to the county manager:

Lowndes County Manager Joe Pritchard said he thinks Pinebrook Drive residents “have some legitimate questions and we ought to be able to provide a reasonable answer.” Pritchard said he plans to meet with County Engineer Mike Fletcher and Zoning Administrator Carmella Braswell on Monday to discuss the development and see what remedies might be available.

Yes, we’ve seen that process many times before. Note he doesn’t say they’ll provide any actual fixes to any of the problems, just “a reasonable answer”. We’ll see if these neighbors get any satisfaction this time.

According to the County Commission calendar, there’s a work session coming up Monday 13 July at 8:30AM and a commission meeting coming up Tuesday 14 July at 5:30PM. The Tuesday public meetings always have an agenda item for Citizens Wishing to the Heard. The work sessions usually don’t, but if you go you can hear what the commissioners have to say about subjects that have come before them, and often you can talk to them directly before or after the meeting.

Paving Quarterman Road

Several months ago a contract for grubbing and clearing Quarterman Road was let. I posted about some of the results of that.

Yesterday, 10AM, March 12 11, 2009, was the bid selection meeting for the contract for paving Quarterman Road. It was a public meeting. Carolyn Selby reports the following bids were read:

Scruggs	$1,394,660.47
Reames	$1,502,909.80
Hancock	$1,495,737.76

The low bid was selected, so Scruggs will be paving Quarterman Road.

The county engineer had estimated $1,336,000.00 for the project.

The county commission will vote on March 24, 2009 at the regular meeting.

What Happened to the Canopies

A while back I posted about Partial Win: Canopies May be Saved. Here’s what happened.

Before	After	Now

You may recognize that first picture from the Nov 6th post in this blog, Save Our Canopy Road. A copy of that blog post along with a neighorhood meeting notice with the same picture was in the materials staff gave to the Commission, so both staff and Commissioners should have been aware that that entrance was the symbol of the canopy. Despite a Commissioner telling us that the county would start with some noncontentious part of the clearing, the very first thing the county did was to tear all the limbs off those signature oaks at the entrance to the north canopy, and then tear them completely down and grub up the ground like a plowed field. That and tear down the neighboring fence. Here’s another view:

What looks like a plowed field is where those oaks used to be.

Now don’t get me wrong. The entire canopy is on the right of way the county owns, and, as I’ve said numerous times in public County Commission meetings, I do appreciate the county saving at least some part of the canopy, and I especially appreciate the Commissioners literally going out of their way on Nov 9th by piling into a van and driving out there to look at the situation, and then, as Chairman Casey said in the public meeting on Nov 10th, putting his thumb in the chest of the county engineer and telling him to find a way to save the canopies. And indeed, a significant part of the canopy is saved:

County staff showed pictures like that one at the Dec 9th Commission meeting, saying the canopy was saved. Indeed, part of it was saved. But the children crying in the house nearby don’t agree that “the canopy was saved,” nor do the adjoining landowners. Why should county staff, who never paid attention to the canopy until recent months except as an impediment to their highway plan, and who wanted to tear it all down, be the judge of what saving the canopy means?

Suppose the Commissioners had told staff to save your house and they tore down your front porch and flattened your carport and then showed pictures of your house to the Commission saying “we saved the house!” Would you be satisfied?

Speaking of the carport, here’s what the south end of the north canopy now looks like:

The pile of trees on the far side used to be canopy, and the bare dirt on the near side used to be canopy.

Why did they tear down the ends of the canopy? For curves. Designed for 45 MPH. After county staff had told me they were probably going to set the speed limit at the canopies lower than that. After the owner of both sides of the road immediately north of this canopy offered them the ability to move the road over enough not to need to tear down the trees or his fence. Instead of getting back to him on that, they just went ahead and tore down the trees the same day. As that landowner, Shawn Vandemark, said:

“We were told one thing and another happened.”

What we have here is a communication problem between the county government and its citizens. It’s not as if concerns about the canopy weren’t known to the county well beforehand. Back in June county government people attended a neighborhood meeting where those concerns were expressed, and options between paving like a highway or leaving it dirt were requested. Hearing no response, I sent a letter to the county on Aug 7th detailing those and other concerns. Still no response. The first notification anyone living on the road got (as far as I know) was when I noticed a truck driving slow around the road and asked them what they were doing. “Looking to see what it will take to tear down all the trees on the right of way!” When I pointed out that we were told back in June that we would be notified 6 to 9 months before anything was done, the two guys in the truck said, laughing:

“That’s the county way!”

The county did also leave a significant part of the south canopy, and we do appreciate the Commissioners making that happen:

Although once again the county tore down the south end (not shown). Why? For a wide curve. That one I doubt is even for 45 MPH, given that it doesn’t look like they managed to acquire that much land back in the early 1990s. However, why did it even have to be 35MPH? This local rural neighborhood road doesn’t go anywhere!

The point here is that county staff did not do what the county Commission told them to do. The Commissioners left the fox in charge of the hen house, and quite a few chickens got eaten.

This has all been said directly to the county Commissioners and staff in their public meeting of Dec 9th. Some of the Commissioners had some difficulty understanding what we were complaining about. I’m spelling out this part of it here so as to make it more plain. Yes, the commissioners did go out of their way to save the canopies, and we do appreciate that. But what they said to do is not what happened. And it’s not the first time. If county staff had been taking care of business since June by communicating with residents of the road about the canopies, Commissioners wouldn’t have had any need to scurry around at the last minute. And if staff had done what the Commission told them to on Nov 10th, Commissioners wouldn’t have been listening to complaints about the canopy on Dec 9th.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. A small amount of dialog could have prevented this situation. Dialog between June and November. Dialog between county staff and the local landowner after Dec 10th. Staff could have said to him: “here’s what I understand your concerns to be and here’s what we’re going to do; how does that sound?” A few iterations like that between the county and him and other concerned parties and a result could have been arrived at that, while it may not have pleased everybody, wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem.

Here’s the newspaper version of that Dec 10th meeting. More on other topics from that meeting in another post.

If saying one thing and doing another is “the county way”, does that seem right to you?

How do we institute effective dialog between the county government and its citizens?

A Local Rural Road is Not a Collector

Quarterman Road is a local rural road through a rural neighborhood. Reclassifying it as collector and raising the speed limit would create a safety hazard.

The first map below is from the Lowndes County Thoroughfare Plan dated January 28, 2003; this is the version currently on the county’s public web pages. It plainly shows Quarterman Road (near the top center) as a local road.

The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) told me that it is possible to classify parts of a road differently, especially when the major source of traffic is (in GDOT’s example) a subdivision that is located closer to one end. This is confirmed by the second map, from the South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC), Continue reading →

Slower is Safer

The public plan for paving Quarterman Road includes a 45 MPH speed limit. That’s too fast for a rural local road.

Even the already-paved part of Quarterman Road currently has a posted speed limit of 35 MPH (shown at right). That’s the part the subdivision uses to go to work. I have never heard anyone complain that speed limit is too low. Why, then, would anyone need a faster speed limit on the rest of Quarterman Road, which has less traffic?

As mentioned in the previous post, I understand that county staff and commissioners are concerned about their certifications, liability, and even, as we heard at the public commission meeting, about getting telephone calls in the night. Here is evidence that turning Quarterman Road into a wider, faster, collector road would not reduce any of those risks to county staff or commissioners, rather, by decreasing the safety of the road and its residents, such changes would increase risks to staff and commissioners.

First note that AASHTO itself carefully distinguishes residential neighborhoods from highways: Continue reading →

Wider is Not Safer

Wider is not safer. Wider encourages drivers to go faster, which causes more accidents. On a highway, where the point is to go faster, wider is a good idea. In a neighborhood such as Quarterman Road with small children catching the schoolbus, teenagers visiting among themselves, bicyclists, farm equipment, dogs, and horses, faster is less safe, and wider is less safe.

“Over approximately the last 60 years, the design of streets has gone from those designed to accommodate a mix of transportation options, to that designed to carry the maximum number of automobiles as fast as possible. However, not all street types serve the same purposes. Highways, freeways and the Interstate Highway System are designed for the sole purpose of maximizing the speed of travel and convenience of automobile use. Residential design must be different to accommodate the character of the street. Unfortunately, streets in residential neighborhoods are now being designed using similar standards, yielding a situation that is not only inconvenient and inefficient, but also very dangerous. Streets must be designed to maximize overall safety.
“Municipal decision makers need to take responsibility for the overall safety of the streets in their community. According to the House Committee on Public Works (U.S. Congress) (as found in A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets: 2001 by AASHTO):”
—The Relationship between Street Width and Safety Essay

Now quoting from that last cited source: Continue reading →

Partial Win: Canopies May Be Saved

As you may have seen on the front page of the VDT, the county commission did make concessions to saving the canopies on Quarterman Road:

The County overcame some objections to the project by agreeing to install curbs and gutters along the canopy sections of the road instead of the original plan that would have required clearing a wider area prior to paving. County Commissioner Richard Lee said the Quarterman Road paving project had “garnered more communication than any other project I can remember except maybe one.” Lee continued, “The commissioners have bent over backwards to try and accommodate that major concern [the tree canopies] that many of you have.” Lee went on to say, “The only final solution for making this road safe, sound and accessible consistently is for it to be paved.”

For some reason that “final solution” has an unfortunate historical ring to some of us in the path of “progress”. However, at least the commission did decide to do something about the canopies, which is good.

There’s more in the VDT story. Pictured to the right here is the current classification of Quarterman Road by the county and state, as functional classification 9, “local roads rural”. The South Georgia Regional Development Center (SGRDC, a state agency) classifies it in two parts, divided at the subdivision entrance, both as local rural road. More on that later.

County Commission Votes Tonight: Save Our Canopy Road

In a front page story in the Valdosta Daily Times, Matt Flumerfelt writes:

VALDOSTA — The Lowndes County Board of Commissioners will vote today concerning the proposed paving of Quarterman Road, located off Hambrick Tree Farm Road.
The road is already partially paved, but some community members are concerned about the trees that line a section of the road that will have to be removed in order to complete the paving project.

There’s more. He ends with:

The commission will meet tonight at 5:30 p.m. at the County Commission Building on Savannah Avenue.

If you’re heading south down Patterson Street, turn right just before the overpass. That’s Savannah Avenue. Several blocks down you’ll see the water tower, and the commission office is on the left just before you get to the tower. If the parking lot is full, you can park across the street in the county fire station lot.

We’ll see if the county will consider the idea of treating canopy roads throughout the canopy as the benefit they are to the environment, beauty, and tourism.

Open Letter to Commisioner Lee

To: Richard C. Lee, District 2
Cc: Rodney N. Casey, Chairman
Cc: J. Edgar Roberts, District 1
Cc: G. Robert Carter, District 3
Cc: Jason Davenport, County Planner
Lowndes County Board of Commissioners
325 West Savannah Avenue
Valdosta, GA 31601

From: John S. Quarterman
residence 6565 Quarterman Road
3338 Country Club Rd. #L336
Valdosta, GA 31605
229-242-0102
10 November 2008

Commissioner Lee,

Thank you for meeting with us Friday. That was a good beginning to a conversation, much like I had hoped we would have after you attended our neighborhood meeting of June 5 in which we requested further options and my letter of August 7 in which I also requested further options regarding Quarterman Road. Now we’re talking!

I understand that there has been some confusion as to who wants to do what with Quarterman Road. This is why we have clarified neighborhood opinion with the petition of 26 October showing that a majority of households on the road and the owners of a majority of the road frontage do not want the road paved, at least not using the current plan the county is pursuing of clearing a 60 foot right of way and tearing down the tree canopy.

Apparently there has also been some confusion as to what the state requires the county to do. I hear that some time in the past the county was planning to use state money to improve Quarterman Road. If so, I see how that money could have come with requirements from the state. That would explain why the current county paving plan, which was originally drawn up many years ago, looks more like a state highway than a rural local county road. However, as I am sure you are aware, SPLOST VI is a local tax, not state money, so there are no such requirements along with it. I confirmed this with the District Engineer with GDOT. He tells me that the state makes no requirements on the county as to what to do with Quarterman Road, which the state classifies as functional class 9, a rural local road. Continue reading →

Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Outside the city; off the main roads.