Albany, Dougherty County receive grant for safer streets; community asked to provide input

ALBANY – On a Thursday afternoon, cars zip by Dajia Baker on Albany’s Pine Avenue as she pushes a large stroller carrying the 7-month-old she babysits. The baby’s 2-year-old sibling stands next to them, between Baker and her best friend – a barrier from zooming cars and trucks.

The 22-year-old peers cautiously at traffic, trying to cross the street to return home. The stroller teeters on the edge of a narrow sidewalk. On the side she’s trying to reach, there is no sidewalk. The group is returning from Riverfront Park, which Baker said she feels is the safest place to bring kids in Albany.

The walk to get there … not so much. 

“The sidewalks are really not perfect, and there’s not much space,” she said. “It’s sometimes really uncomfortable walking, especially longer distances.” 

Baker said she often has to push the stroller in the street because of a lack of sidewalks or because of the poor state of existing ones. She makes this journey about three times a week, nervous about speeding cars. If the city is addressing pedestrian and road safety needs, she said she’d like to see more sidewalks, more stop signs, more accountability when it comes to speeding cars, and more streetlights.

“It’s really scary to walk at a certain time at night because people really can’t see you,” Baker said. 

Albany and Dougherty County held the first Safe Streets & Roads public meeting March 11 as part of the Albany Dougherty County Comprehensive Safety Action Plan: Getting to Zero. The community received a Safe Streets for All (SS4A) grant, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that will fund more than a billion dollars of safety-related projects across the country. 

To qualify for this funding, the community must create a comprehensive safety action plan that combines safety-related crash data with public input to create a “high-injury network,” or an area to focus funding to reduce or eliminate traffic-related deaths or injuries. The local governments hired Foresite, an engineer, landscape architect and consulting group, to put together the plan.

One of the places the city plans to add extra sidewalks is along East Broad Avenue, where sidewalks crumble and turn into dirt for long stretches.

Robin Cailloux, the transportation project manager, said it is normally a 10-month process to design the safety action plan. However, to qualify for the next round of funding, the project must be completed and adopted by April. She said the decision to speed up the process comes from uncertainty at the federal level about whether these funds will still be available after the next round. 

“We are basically doing 10 months of work in 10 weeks,” she said. “For us to make sure the community, your community, has access to those federal funds, we need to get it done this round.”

Cailloux said the first step is to gather data. Where are the accidents happening? Why are they happening? Who is being injured or killed in these accidents – seniors, pedestrians or distracted drivers?

Cailloux said Foresite’s analysis shows the community is doing “OK,” but has room for improvement. The group identified high-injury network areas as well as top injury intersections and corridors.

Top Injury Intersections include:

• Dawson Rd @ Meredyth Dr
• Mobile Ave @ Moultrie Rd
• Moultrie Rd @County Line Rd
• N Westover Blvd @ Dawson Rd
• N Westover Blvd @ Old Dawson Rd
• Nelms Rd @ Liberty :Expwy
• Oglethorpe Blvd @ Cason St
• Oglethorpe Blvd @ Loftus Dr
• Oglethorpe Blvd @ Radium Springs Rd
• Pine Bluff Rd @ Sylvester Rd
• Radium Springs Rd @ E Oakridge Dr
• S Broadway St @ E Broad Ave
• S County Line Rd @ Sylvester Hwy
• S Harding St @ Cedar Ave 410
• S Madison St @ Oglethorpe Blvd
• Sundale Rd @ Rosebrier Ave
• Sylvester Hwy @ Hill Rd
• W Broad Ave @N Jefferson St
• W Gordon Ave @ Elm St
• W Oakridge Dr @ Martin Luther King Dr

Top Injury Corridors include:

• Dawson Rd from Pointe North Blvd to Slappey Blvd
• E Broad Ave from N Broadway St to Blaylock St
• E Oglethorpe Blvd from Radium Springs Dr to Sands Dr
• Eight Mile Rd from Walker Ducker Station Rd to Leary Rd
• Gillionville Rd from Flowing Well Rd to Springfield Dr
• Gravel Hill Rd from Nelms Rd to County boundary
• Liberty Expwy from N Jefferson to Nelms Rd
• Moultrie Rd from Wildflower Ln to Nelms Rd
• Moultrie Rd Slappey Blvd from W Oglethorpe Blvd to Oakridge Dr
• N Jefferson St from County line to Liberty Expwy
• N Westover Blvd from Nottingham Way to Westgate Dr Newton Rd from Vanderbilt Rd to Leary Rd
• Nottingham Way from Ledo Rd to Whispering Pines Rd from Radium Springs Rd from Oglethorpe Blvd
• Tarva Rd from Leary Rd to County boundary
• W Oglethorpe Blvd from S Madison St to Front S

From 2019 to 2023, Albany saw 15,143 car crashes, 57 of which were fatal, according to a GDOT database. This can be compared to Warner Robins, which has a similar population size but saw nearly 5,000 less car crashes and nearly half the number of fatal ones.

Next, the group is looking for community input. The next public meeting will be March 25 at 2:30 p.m. at the downtown Albany-Dougherty Government Center. Cailloux called this the “bread-and-butter” meeting. Following this meeting, the group will start posing physical infrastructure and/or policy recommendations. 

Grady O’Neal, a lifelong Albany resident and youth pastor at St. Stephens Baptist Church, was one of the first to show up at the March 11 open house. 

He said safety on the roads in Albany is a real concern, and sidewalks are important to give pedestrians an opportunity to be safe while walking.

“I think we’re getting better, but I think we have a long way to go as well, especially in some of the worse communities, especially the south side and east side of Albany,” O’Neal said. 

O’Neal brought up railroad tracks near Washington Street to the Foresite group as well. He said he worries for the large number of homeless people that walk throughout the area.

“There have been some accidents that have happened there that could have been prevented had we had sidewalks in the area,” O’Neal said. “We have to make sure that we also take care of the less fortunate by giving them safety while they’re walking.”

Some of the sidewalk discrepancy throughout the city of Albany can be explained by old and new development. Angel Gray, the deputy director for Planning & Zoning, told The Albany Herald during a July interview that zoning has a lot to do with sidewalk coverage.

“If you’re looking at corridors, the new developments … do have sidewalks,” Gray said. “If you’re looking at older communities or communities that are high-density residential, it may be older residential in nature and so there would not have been a requirement (that sidewalks be a part of the development).”

The city has some development requirements for apartment complexes or businesses to create connection sidewalks if put in next to a site that has an existing sidewalk. 

“That would be a part of our development requirements, as we move forward in seeing that in the future sidewalks are promoted,” Gray said. 

Tanner Anderson, a city transportation planner, used Dawson Road as an example. 

“It’s mixed between commercial and residential,” he said. “You run into the ordinance where you have a new development coming in, and they put a sidewalk in, and whatever is next door, that’s not developed and doesn’t have a sidewalk. It looks like sidewalks are sporadic, but it’s all part of the process.”

Anderson said pedestrian safety is a priority for the city of Albany, and the SS4A grant is a necessary step forward. 

“When you look at pedestrian safety, that means putting in sidewalks, crosswalks, anything to keep traffic and people away from each other,” he said. “Everybody’s goal at the end of the day is to make sure pedestrians are safe on the road.”

Albany, Dougherty residents can give input at https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/76fbad67411f47389015d2288f8a7166/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIgdUFleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHaz6PEvhi4yiaqIMjGq4Lww3DkWh7cCAuMdiylkacOhpSZUsBtEBrvRSmQ_aem_wX7kYSc3RsY26G2pKB0ARQ.