It feels like Woodford roads have always brought heartache
By Scott White
Wooodford Sun Staff
On Friday evening, around 7 p.m., I was on my way to Midway to meet my wife, along with her brother and sister-in-law visiting from Franklin, Tennessee, for dinner. It was the start of an annual spring weekend visit, when they come up for Keeneland, good food and family stories.
But something awful and tragic intervened.
My wife was driving north on Pisgah, having just crossed the railroad tracks, when she encountered stopped traffic and saw billowing, dark smoke and flames. What she soon learned is that yet another person was killed in a wreck on a Woodford County rural road.
This was the fifth vehicle fatality in Woodford County this year – from a man getting struck walking to Midway from his farm on Leestown Pike, to other single vehicle wrecks on Old Frankfort and Troy Pike. Deaths on Woodford roads, despite this recent uptick, is, sadly, not rare.
In the fall of my senior year in high school, right after a miraculous victory over Henry Clay in the first football game of the season, my classmate Joe Pyzik and friend Bruce McGill died in a car accident later that night on Parkers Mill Road. Often when I drive by Versailles Cemetery, I think of Joe and the fun times we had living in Sycamore Estates. I also think of the loss of a world deprived of such an amazing young man and the devastation his family experienced then and now.
There are many reasons why rural Woodford County roads can prove treacherous.
Road edges are unforgiving, often bordered by mature trees or stone walls, or have had so many layers of asphalt piled up over the years, without first milling, that it is like falling off a cliff if the car slips off the side of the road. (Pisgah, Troy and McCracken pikes are prime offenders.)
Speed limits of 55 mph and 45 mph, often mandated by state and federal rules, lull drivers into erroneously believing those are safe speeds. A prime example of this is Midway Road, which runs nearly straight from Leestown Pike to Frankfort Road, and, other than the town itself, the limit is 55. Midway has become so risky for me that I have taken to driving to Midway from Versailles using the far less traveled Big Sink Road and then hooking up with Old Frankfort Pike a few miles east of Midway’s city limits.
Other factors are pretty obvious: distracted drivers having conversations on their phones, either using a hands-free setting or holding their phone, or even taking photographs, reading or trying to follow maps; the increase in tourism, which puts more drivers on rural roads on which distilleries and horse farms are located, sometimes after “tasting” the wares offered on the tours; not all are on tour vans or buses; the ongoing problem of tractor-trailers using roads simply not designed for their use; and, drivers unaccustomed to encountering heavy farm machinery who depend on these roads, despite regular warnings from Woodford County Magistrate Darrell Varner.
Though there certainly must be studies around the corrective measures governments, road designers and engineers can take to address some of these issues, those of us who grew up or live in a rural county inherently understand the heightened dangers and do not require science to tell us to slow down, be careful or to anticipate the poor driving of other drivers.
One positive recent response has been the creation of a dedicated traffic enforcement unit in the Versailles Police Department by VPD Chief Rob Young. It is reasonable, or even a fabulist expectation, to think that more police patrols or stationary speeding detection by an officer parked in their vehicle is the answer. There simply are not enough officers and way too many miles of rural roadway in the county to be the primary solution—the reality is that we are a small county and, from a fiscal responsibility perspective, cannot sustain a force size that could make a substantial impact using increased policing.
That said, this new allocation of resources by Young will certainly have a deterrent effect and increase citations to put muscle behind that deterrence policy. This is one of the reasons we at the Sun have written on this subject so much – to get the news out that the VPD is focusing on traffic enforcement with new, creative resources.
It would be a bow to cynicism to throw up our hands and say highway deaths are just an unfortunate consequence of living in a rural county. Maybe so.
But we can, as a community, continue to support and encourage the city councils and fiscal court to continue to fully fund the VPD as it enters a new budget year, with negotiations for a new interlocal agreement setting the percentages of how much of the police budget the county and two cities will need to contribute get underway. We need to also support VPD and our elected officials, as they conceive of and try out new approaches. We must also demand that those elected officials and candidates themselves set a good example and obey our traffic safety laws. So, as a heads up to all candidates this year, we will be pulling and publishing your driver’s records over the past five years.
But, at the end of the day, it is up to us to be good, safe and defensive drivers, and to educate our guests who visit us or our businesses about the dangers. They need to know Church Street is not a drag strip. That Midway Road is not the Bonneville Salt Flats. And, Huntertown Road is not a grand prix course.
Be safe out there, people.