In the past 3 weeks, several roads around the county have been restriped and had new reflectors installed. This includes Hillcrest Avenue, Skipper Road, Rocky Creek Road, Hunnicutt Road, Bloomfield Road, Colaparchee Plantation Drive, Castlegate Road, North Park Place, and Billingswood Drive. Here is a sampling of some of those streets.
This helps improve safety by making it easier to see the lanes, and is part of a larger effort to improve more miles of roads than have been done in years past.
In August, Macon-Bibb County – working through private contractors – began “Paving the Way,” its new road improvement project that will include repaving, patching, pothole filling, and restriping. This project is being funded with $14,095,050 from the general fund, Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST), and state Local Maintenance & Improvement Grants (LMIG).
“For too many years, a lack of funding meant our roads deteriorated faster than we could fix them,” said Mayor Lester Miller. “We are putting millions more into this work to begin catching up by focusing on our worst roads.”
Macon-Bibb hired RoadBotics to study every mile of county-owned roads and rated them from 1 (best) to 5 (worst) based on potholes, cracks, structural integrity, and other signs of damage and deterioration. The roads that will be focused on during this first round of Paving the Way are the ones rated 4 and 5.
“We are going to conduct another road study to create a list of the roads for the next round of this program, knowing that a road with a ranking of three will have deteriorated in the next two to three years,” says County Manager Dr. Keith Moffett.
The County has hired C.W. Matthews, Mid-States Striping, Professional Paving Services, and Reeves Construction to handle different aspects of this project.