In the two weeks since a major Greenwood intersection closed, a nearby shopping center has become a highly trafficked spot, and at one point had hundreds of vehicles driving through daily.
Unfortunately, business owners said those vehicles are not coming to their shops and restaurants, and are instead using the center as a detour to get around the construction at Madison Avenue and Smith Valley Road.
Now, drivers can expect to get a ticket if they cut through the Wilgro Shopping Center as a detour, and an officer is stationed at the property daily to watch for drivers breaking the law.
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Construction of a new roundabout at the intersection of Smith Valley Road and Madison Avenue is requiring drivers to use a different route to get around the busy area. The detour is supposed to be along Main Street and U.S. 31, with semis detoured to U.S. 31, County Line Road and Worthsville Road.
But drivers have been using the parking lot of the strip mall at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and Smith Valley Road as a shortcut.
“Cars were going everywhere in the parking lot,” Greenwood Police Chief John Laut said. “You’d have semis coming through there, and I’ve seen a bus as well.”
Police had suspected that might be an issue initially as drivers worked to find the best ways to navigate the construction, but had expected that to drop off once drivers became familiar with the new traffic patterns, Laut said.
The owner of the property put up signs and temporary speed bumps, with the hope of reducing or at least slowing traffic, but safety was becoming a concern.
The police department felt it had to step in because the situation was getting dangerous, he said. A parking lot is private property and driving through it solely as a shortcut between roads is against city rules, even if the shortcut is one local drivers have occasionally used in the past without repercussion, Laut said.
“Ticketing was the last tool we wanted to pull out of the tool box, but we had to do something before someone got hurt there,” Laut said.
The closure is impacting businesses in the area, who said the amount of customers coming in has dropped since the work began, and also frustrating residents who live in the area.
Customers at Lotus Garden, a restaurant south of the shopping center, have complained about the tickets, owner Jeff Tam said.
The construction has also resulted in a large drop in the number of people stopping by for lunch, as customers looking for a quick meal want to avoid the hassle of traffic, Tam said.
James Staley, who lives in the neighborhood east of the strip mall, is glad that the police department is working to stem the flow of extra traffic through the area, he said.
The added traffic made it much more difficult for him to get out of the neighborhood, he said.
But another resident of the neighborhood wishes that officers would let them continue using that shortcut. Residents are trapped in because of the construction, and they should be allowed to exit north onto Smith Valley Road, resident Rexan Ballard said.
Residents’ only option is to take Mercator Drive to Madison Avenue to U.S. 31.
For Staley, crossing U.S. 31 to get to his part-time job can take up to 10 minutes as he waits at the intersection of Madison Avenue and U.S. 31. Getting back into the neighborhood is also a challenge, as drivers headed south on U.S. 31 aren’t able to turn left onto Madison Avenue. That means he has to drive past the intersection and find another spot to turn around and go north when he is returning home, he said.
That’s been the same experience for Marlene Barrett, a resident who said she’s narrowly avoided getting into a couple of crashes while driving in and out of the neighborhood since work on the roundabout began.
But despite the inconvenience, Barrett is hopeful that the project will make the area much easier to navigate once the work is complete, she said.
Staley isn’t optimistic that the traffic will improve once the roundabout is complete, he said.
“This is the worst thing Greenwood has ever done,” Staley said. “It will be a traffic jam.”
