road safety – Care4Suffolk

Mayor Duman Claims Developers are Listening

Care4Suffolk — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:25:47 +0000

During the November 2025 City Council meeting, after the Manning Road Rezoning Public Hearing, Mayor Duman stated:

“It’s quite evident that the developers are listening. We are listening.” Then he goes on to talk about how “we have done exactly what we need to do” and how the developer is doing what he can do “to the extent that he is capable of doing what he can do and still be able to move his project forward.”

Is Mayor Duman seriously saying that this is the best we can expect from developers in Suffolk? Let’s review the Manning Road issues to see what we can expect from the city and the developer:

In 2022 the developer, Bob Arnette, provided a traffic study for Manning Bridge Rd instead of Manning Rd. The analysis stated:

And this:

If you are familiar with the site location on Manning Road, you know how ludicrous this statement is. This would mean all cars head south from the site on Manning Road and go the long way (about 4 miles!) to catch Holland Road 3 miles WEST of the Manning Rd/Holland Rd intersection.

This was approved by city staff!!

By 2024, he provided a new traffic study, but this one is also NOT for Manning Road. Instead, the developer used existing city data for the Grove Ave/Holland Rd intersection.

The developer has NEVER done a traffic study on Manning Road. Yet this traffic study was also accepted by the city.

He did have an engineer go out there and measure the road and it shows the same thing we have been saying for 3 years – the road is narrow! The lanes are well below the state standard and the developer’s plan is to slap some asphalt on the narrow shoulder, adding inches and in some cases a couple feet of asphalt. The road will still below the state standard. This will not expand the road space itself. It will just pave from ditch to ditch and guardrail to guardrail. There is no engineering report that actually states if that will make the road safer or if it is even feasible. Why is City Council even considering allowing a developer to make substandard improvements in exchange for a large development.

I guess this is the ‘listening’ that the mayor is talking about?

The school proffers have decreased by $1.2 million. In 2022, the developer was offering $1.9 million for Kilby Shores Elementary and $1.2 million for Forest Glen Middle Schools.

Now he is only offering $1.9 million for Kilby Shores and nothing for Forest Glen.

The City has recently come up with a ‘new method’ of determining school proffers – developers no longer need to count ‘uncommitted’ developments, which is any development that doesn’t have a submitted site plan.

Uncommitted houses have gone through the rezoning process, so they can be built by-right at any time just by submitting a site plan. These houses will be built at some point AND will impact our schools and roads, but by NOT counting them, the developer gets to save a lot of money. He is off the hook for the extra proffers, but that money will have to come from somewhere. It will be passed on to taxpayers.

Maybe THAT is the listening the Mayor is referring to?

This developer does NOT have a right to rezone this property. He took a risk and engaged in speculative development, which has the potential to make him a lot of money. If this doesn’t get passed, he can just sell his land like everyone else does when they no longer want the property they own. Sometimes when you speculate, you lose.

If this passes, everyone that lives on or off of Manning Road will be subjected to the tripling of traffic which will greatly increase the chance of a serious accident. It is already a dangerous road that has seen fatalities. Adding more traffic means there will be more accidents and more risk to the safety and lives for our family, friends, and neighbors, not to mention the 300 new families that will be added.

City Council can say NO to this project. It is perfectly reasonable for them to say that they value the rights of the current property owners to safely enjoy and live in their homes, and that the desire, not right, of the developer to make a profit is not a good trade-off for the city and its citizens. They represent us, not him.

If the developer, the city and City Council are actually listening then they will know that what we are opposing is a development that will predictably DECREASE the SAFETY of the current residents. If City Council truly represent the people, they will put our safety above the profits of the developer.

Suffolk’s Most Dangerous Road

Care4Suffolk — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:12:20 +0000

It isn’t an exaggeration to state that Manning Road is one of the most dangerous and deadliest roads in the City of Suffolk.

The number of accidents, injuries, and fatalities are tracked and the data is available on TREDS (Traffic Records Electronic Data System), one of Virginia’s most effective and innovative information technology tools in the nation to identify and address road safety concerns. The Virginia Office of Data Governance and Analytics has ADT (Average Daily Trip) data available on the Virginia Open Data Portal (most recent data for Suffolk is from 2022).

Below is a chart that shows the comparison of accidents on various roads in Suffolk.

Click on Image of Chart to Enlarge

Manning Road is the location of the proposed Lake Pointe development that will add 300 single family homes and an estimated 2,772 vehicle trips per day. This will bring the ADT from 1,600 to 4,372 trips per day, nearly tripling the amount of traffic.

The chart includes a comparison with Grove Ave because Grove Ave is the location of the traffic study that the developer used instead of conducting one for Manning Road. The developer, with the agreement from city staff, has stated that it is a reasonable substitution. The Grove Ave accident data is from Grove Ave, Northbrooke Ave, and all side streets within that neighborhood combined.

It is expected that busier roads will experience more accidents. Busy roads have much more traffic. To give us a better idea of the safety of a road, we can divide the average number of accidents per year by the average number of vehicle trips per year. This gives us a rate, in this case a very small number because fortunately most drives do not end in an accident. This rate allows us to compare busy main roads to more rural roads and to neighborhood roads. It is similar to how in baseball, they use a batting average instead of the number of hits a batter has had. The batting average is the number of hits divided by the total number of times the player has been up to bat. In this case, the comparison is the number of accidents in a year divided by the total number of vehicle trips.

If you want to know how much more likely it is to get into an accident on Manning Road versus Grove Avenue, you can take the Manning Road Accident Rate and divide it by the Grove Avenue Accident Rate:

Manning Road Accident Rate / Grove Avenue Accident Rate = Likelihood of Accident

0.0000223347 / 0.0000008934 = 25.0

A trip down Manning Road is 25 times more likely to experience an accident than a drive on Grove Avenue. Below is a Comparison Chart that compares the likelihood of an incident to occur on Manning Road compared to other selected roads in Suffolk.

Click on Image of Chart to Enlarge

What this data is telling us is that if you are a driver in Suffolk, you are more than twice as likely to get in an accident while on Manning Road than when you turn onto Holland Road. That seems counterintuitive because there are far more accidents on Holland Road than Manning Road, but there are also thousands more cars traveling on Holland Road every day. For every 1 driver on Manning Road, there are 20 drivers on Holland Road.

Manning Road is one of the most dangerous and deadliest roads in Suffolk. When you turn down Manning Road from Holland Road, you have just increased your chance of dying in a car accident by 20 times. You are 17 times more likely to die on Manning Road than Main Street and 11 times more likely than when driving down Bridge Road. Let that sink in.

When someone from the Manning Road neighborhood tells you that they live on a dangerous road – believe them. The facts support this. It is in fact one of the most dangerous roads in Suffolk.

When the Manning Road neighborhood tells you that this road is far too dangerous to add 300 houses which will almost triple the traffic – believe them. Approving this development is likely to result in more deaths.

There is no plan in the city’s CIP or 2045 Comprehensive Plan to make any improvements to Manning Road – nothing to make the road safer. This development would be about a mile south of the Holland Road/Manning Road intersection. That is a long way to go on one of the city’s deadliest roads. There are no sidewalks, no shoulders, and the lanes are narrow, too narrow to fit large vehicles. Until the city makes improvements to Manning Road to make it safer, no rezonings should even be considered, let alone approved.

This is about preserving lives. Residents of the Manning Road area already risk their lives driving this deadly road daily. The city must not compound this risk by tripling the traffic on Manning Road – one of Suffolk’s most dangerous roads.

Road Safety in Suffolk

Care4Suffolk — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 15:12:59 +0000

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.

Lake Kilby: More Hazards to Come with Development

Care4Suffolk — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 16:10:17 +0000

On March 23, 2023, this van ended up in the ditch on Lake Kilby Road blocking traffic. Lake Kilby is an example of the many narrow country roads in Suffolk that do not meet the minimum standards set forth by VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation).

Lake Kilby is a road with lanes that are 8′ wide and with no clear zone. A clear zone, defined by VDOT is “used to describe the unobstructed, traversable area provided beyond the edge of the through traveled way for the recovery of an errant vehicle.” Lake Kilby Road is designated as a minor collector road and should have a minimum of 11′ lanes, but recommended 12′ lanes where trucks or farm equipment use the road, and an 8′ clear zone. (Source: VDOT Road Design Manual)

This is right where a developer wants to put a 200+ housing development that was just recommended by the Suffolk Planning Department and the Suffolk Planning Commission. The developer is proffering to widen the road in front of this proposed new development, but only to 10′ lanes and no expanded clear zone. This doesn’t meet the minimum required by the state. The lawyer for the developer, Grady Palmer, stated last Tuesday 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)

The developer would only be widening Lake Kilby in front of the development, so it will still only be 8′ lanes in parts, but it will add about 100 new students. So these school buses which are about 8′ wide (source Virginia Public School Bus Specifications) still have to traverse these narrow lanes. Even in front of the development, with only 10′ lanes and not meeting minimum clear zones, should something unexpected happen (inclement weather, farm equipment, vehicle loses control, etc.) there is no place for the school bus to safely veer off. Instead of a Stanley Steamer van, that could be a school bus ending up in a ditch.

The city can NOT accept sub-standard improvements. The developer is in business to make money and making the roads wide enough to safely accommodate the traffic is not something they are willing to do. We as citizens should not be forced to accept road improvements that do not meet the minimum standards. If the developer will not fix them to the minimum standard, then they should not be allowed to develop there. Our safety and the safety of our children is not worth it.

This issue isn’t done yet!

This comes before City Council on April 19. Email City Council (email: council@suffolkva.us) and tell them you do not want this approved. We as citizens can come together and let them know what we want for our city.