Most people in Suffolk have probably heard about the school bus that overturned on Cypress Chapel Road on October 16th with twelve children on board. According to news sources, the bus driver and 12 children were taken to an area hospital and at least one child underwent emergency surgery. While the cause of the accident is still unknown right now, we do know that this is a narrow, rural road. School bus drivers brave these kinds of roads everyday in our city and this situation highlights the risk involved.
When the rezoning application, Lake Kilby Road rezoning request (RZN2021-018), came before the city earlier this year, Care4Suffolk opposed this rezoning on the basis of over-crowded schools and unsafe roads. During this rezoning, the topic of school bus safety on rural roads came up. We wrote about this in a March post.
The developer offered to widen the road in front of this proposed development, but only to 20 feet (from 16 feet) by extending pavement right to the edge of the existing ditches. The lawyer for the developer, Grady Palmer, stated at the Planning Commission, “We understand, that’s not standard. We wish we could do standard, but we can’t do standard. But 20 feet, and the way I think about this as a lawyer, can two school buses pass each other safely on 20 feet of pavement. I think the answer to that question is yes.” (Source: Planning Commission Meeting video mark 2:39:34-2:39:55)
This Suffolk school bus was measured from its widest points: side mirror to side mirror. The bus measures almost 9 feet 7 inches.
During the City Council Meeting on August 16, Council Member Fawcett called a city employee to the podium to ask him questions in an effort to discredit our research. The city employee stated that school buses are about 8 ½ feet wide and that he did not know of any incidents involving school buses on our roads during the school year. In actuality, Suffolk school buses measure 9 feet 7 inches from mirror to mirror, the widest points. The city employee may not have known of any accidents involving buses, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been any, it just means the city didn’t bother to investigate these issues.
We filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the city and found that there were, in fact, over 56 incidents involving school buses throughout Suffolk last school year. There were sixteen incidents of buses being struck by other vehicles and eight incidents of a bus in a ditch. Accidents can happen anywhere for a variety of reasons. Collisions with other vehicles and buses flipping into a ditch are far more likely to lead to injuries. Narrow roads, with no shoulders, and steep ditches along the sides leave no room for error when something unexpected happens.
The information sheet below was provided to the city in opposition to the Lake Kilby rezoning application. It states the basic standard requirements from the City of Suffolk’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), the legal codes set forth by the city. The sheet below demonstrates the standards that the city is ignoring regarding road width and design standards for the amount of current and future traffic.
The diagram below demonstrates the road updates the developer was proffering. Developers improving roads below standards does not fix the problem of having lanes that are too narrow and ditches directly adjacent to the road.
The city may not have the funds to widen all of Suffolk’s many narrow, country roads, but it is well within their power to prevent large developments on these types of roads. That new development on Lake Kilby that just passed will be adding 200 homes and 2,000 more vehicle trips per day. Many tractor trailers already use this road as a cut-through, and many more are coming to our vicinity with new warehouses recently built and in works.
More vehicles equals more chances for accidents. If the City can’t fix the roads, for the safety of its citizens, it has two other options: require proffers from developers that will actually bring the roads up to standards or do NOT approve rezonings on these roads. The City of Suffolk needs to think of safety first; the safety of its citizens and the safety of our children.