ST. GEORGE — Prompted by the city’s increasing growth and safety concerns for children walking to school, two new traffic lights have been installed on Washington Fields Road and are coming online just in time for the start of the school year.
One of new traffic signals is located at the intersection of 3090 South and Washington Fields Road adjacent to Majestic Fields Elementary School and were activated on Monday. The second set of traffic signals has been installed at the George Washington Boulevard (3650 South) intersection and was slated to be turned on sometime Wednesday afternoon or evening.
Washington County School District students return to school Thursday.
Going into August there’s usually an uptick in traffic accidents, Washington City Mayor Kress Staheli said in his monthly message to residents last week. This is often attributed to the start of the school year, new teenage drivers going to school and other factors.
“You’re going to see increased pedestrian traffic,” Staheli said. “Those on foot and those on bikes and scooters … You’re also going to see a little bit of change to those traffic patterns – George Washington Boulevard, formerly 3650 South, is open and Washington Dam Road is complete – but you’re also going to see the addition of signalized traffic lights on Washington Fields Road at George Washington Boulevard and 3090 South.”
Parents and crossing guards have voiced numerous concerns to the Washington City Council about the need for traffic signals in the area as it has become population by various schools and increasingly heavy traffic.
In addition to Majestic Fields Elementary, other schools in the area include nearby Crimson Cliffs Middle School, Crimson Cliffs Intermediate School and Crimson Cliffs High School.
Until last fall, conditions, or “warrants” needed to justify the installation of new traffic signals, hadn’t been met for the target intersections.
However, it was announced during a September 2021 meeting of the City Council that the conditions needed to install signals at 3090 South had been met. 3560 South, now George Washington Boulevard, was not far behind.
“We’ve done many warrant studies at this intersection,” Mike Shaw, the city’s public works director, told the council at the time. “This time it actually met the warrants.”
According to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, a warrant is “a threshold condition based upon average or normal conditions that, if found to be satisfied as part of an engineering study, shall result in analysis of other traffic conditions or factors to determine whether a traffic control device or other improvement is justified.”
There are nine warrants that go into qualifying an intersection for the traffic control signal, Shaw said.
A recent study at the 3090 South-Washington Fields Road intersection met three of those warrants and was on the verge of meeting a fourth.
The 3090 South traffic signals originally were slated to be installed earlier this year but were delayed due to supply chain issues, City Councilman Kurt Ivie said.
Despite the delay, the lights have been set up just in time.
“We’re very excited the light will be operational before the start of school,” he said.
A former public school teacher himself, Ivie said the city “takes the children’s safety very seriously” and wanted to be proactive in this regard with the installation of the new lights in the area.
In addition to the new traffic signals, Ivie said blinking lights used as traffic calming measure near schools now serviced by the traffic lights were being put by Washington Fields Intermediate School at the corner of 240 West and 3090 South.
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