In Haines, you’re most likely to be involved in a car accident at Second Avenue and Main Street.
That’s according to accident reports compiled by the state Department of Transportation. The information was shared at Tuesday’s meeting of the Safe Routes to School task force by David Epstein, regional traffic and safety engineer for DOT.
Although Epstein couldn’t provide numbers, that intersection has seen enough accidents to exceed a state safety index based on numbers and types of accidents, he said. The tally at the spot includes rear-end collisions, vehicles hitting parked cars and “angle accidents” involving cars turning at the same time.
“That’s the intersection that exceeded our threshold for further consideration.”
Epstein checked out the four-way stop this week but won’t recommend engineering improvements, partly because there’s no clear pattern to the type of accidents that occur there. “A clear pattern would make a diagnosis easier,” he said.
“People may not be coming to a full stop there. If you do that, it negates a lot of the safety issues there,” Epstein said.
Volume of traffic there is too low to justify a traffic light. And it’s not inherently unsafe, he said. The two streets that meet there are sufficiently wide, there are good line-of-sight distances and the no-parking zones are properly situated, Epstein said.
Epstein wasn’t ready to say Main and Second was the valley’s “most dangerous” intersection. He pointed to Y-shaped intersections that are potentially more hazardous. “The town has a number of really skewed intersections.”
Second and Main became a four-way stop about a decade ago, at the urging of the City of Haines. It was previously a two-way stop on Second Avenue.