Metro Council adopts road safety plan

Three roads make High Injury Network as county sets 2045 goal for eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries

2:23 p.m. Sept. 24, 2026

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

The Metro Council adopted a 48-page road-safety plan Monday, setting a goal of eliminating traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2045 and identifying three county-maintained roads for the closest attention.

The vote does not lower speed limits or order any road rebuilt. It also does not put a speed camera anywhere in Moore County. What it does is give the county a roadmap for where some of its road-safety problems are showing up, what might be done about them, and where federal money could eventually come into play.

At the center of the plan are Ridgeville Road, Goodbranch Road, and Chestnut Ridge Road. Together, they make up what the study calls Moore County’s High Injury Network.

The Transportation Safety Action Plan was prepared by Collier Engineering, a multidisciplinary consulting firm whose work includes transportation design and other public infrastructure projects. Collier worked with a local safety committee that included Mayor Sloan Stewart, Deputy Sheriff Shane Taylor, EMA Director Jason Deal, Highway Department Superintendent Shannon Cauble, and Highway Department office manager Charles Clark.

Council also adopted Vision Zero as the county’s guiding framework and committed to working toward eliminating roadway deaths and serious injuries by 2045.

• Transportation Safety Action Plan

What Vision Zero actually means

The name can sound more complicated than it is. Vision Zero does not mean Moore County expects to somehow stop every wreck. The idea is that people are going to make mistakes behind the wheel, and roads should be designed so those mistakes are less likely to kill somebody or leave them seriously hurt.

That idea runs through the Moore County plan. It is built around what the report calls the Safe System Approach – recognizing human error and vulnerability, sharing responsibility for preventing crashes, and putting more than one layer of protection into the transportation system.

Moore County’s resolution puts it plainly enough: fatalities and serious injuries are unacceptable, people make mistakes, and the road system should be built with that reality in mind.

Five years of crashes lead to three roads

The study dug through crashes from 2020 through 2024 and used those numbers to build the High Injury Network.

But there’s an important limit to what those three roads tell us. Ridgeville, Goodbranch, and Chestnut Ridge are not necessarily the three most dangerous roads of any kind in Moore County. For the HIN, the study looked specifically at county-maintained roads in unincorporated Moore County.

A road had to have at least one fatal or serious-injury crash during the five-year study period to make the cut, with overall crash frequency also weighing into the decision. Alcohol-related and animal-related crashes were left out of that particular analysis.

Ridgeville Road recorded 25 crashes, including one serious-injury crash and six involving minor injuries. Goodbranch Road had 22 crashes, one serious-injury crash, and nine involving minor injuries. Chestnut Ridge had 15 crashes, including the only fatal crash among the three.

Goodbranch carried the highest crash rate at 1.495 crashes per mile. Ridgeville came in at 1.190, while Chestnut Ridge stood at 0.887.

The numbers underneath those totals tell more of the story. On Ridgeville, 11 crashes happened while a vehicle was negotiating a curve. The crash records also show vehicles leaving the roadway and hitting trees, ditches, embankments, and other fixed objects.

Goodbranch has an even sharper pattern. Sixteen crashes involved a vehicle negotiating a curve, and 15 happened on wet pavement. Chestnut Ridge was the only HIN road with a fatality, and its crash data also show problems with lane departures, crossover crashes, and roadside hazards.

Across Moore County, the study analyzes 490 crashes from 2020-24. It reports 10 fatal crashes and 23 serious-injury crashes involving 26 seriously injured people. One table in the report contains figures that do not match those totals, an apparent discrepancy the report does not explain.

The plan points toward fixes – it does not order them

Nobody should expect road crews to roll out tomorrow because Council adopted the plan. There are no construction drawings or bid dates attached to Ridgeville, Goodbranch, or Chestnut Ridge, and the report does not put a price tag or construction schedule on the recommended work.

Instead, the study matches the problems it found with safety measures already used elsewhere.

For Ridgeville, that could mean better curve warnings and markings, rumble strips, wider edge lines, vegetation removal, guardrail work, and roadside improvements aimed at giving a driver a better chance to recover after leaving the pavement.

Goodbranch gets much of the same attention, but the wet-pavement numbers stand out. The plan recommends looking at pavement-friction improvements along with rumble strips and work around curves and roadside hazards.

On Chestnut Ridge, recommendations include rumble strips, better curve delineation, and work around trees, ditches, and embankments.

The study also estimates what some of those changes could do. Using federal crash-modification research, it estimates edge-line rumble strips could cut applicable crashes on Ridgeville and Goodbranch by about 32%. That is a modeling estimate, not a promise that crashes would fall by exactly that amount.

State highways carry some of the harder numbers

Those three county roads do not tell the whole story. In fact, some of the report’s harder numbers belong to the state highways running through Moore County.

The study counted 425 crashes in unincorporated Moore County during the five-year period. Of those, 252 happened on county-maintained roads and 173 on state routes.

State-maintained roads make up only about 14% of the centerline mileage studied, but they accounted for 41% of the reported crashes. Their share gets larger when the crashes get worse: 59% of the fatal and serious-injury crashes in unincorporated Moore County happened on state routes.

The report counted 16 fatal or serious-injury crashes on state routes, compared with 11 on county-maintained roads.

That is why the High Injury Network needs a little context. The three HIN roads are the county’s priorities under the study’s county-road methodology. They are not a countywide ranking that includes every state highway.

The report also identifies a longer list of roads to watch. Cobb Hollow, Pleasant Hill, Tanyard Hill, Cumberland Springs, Cashion, Griffin, Buckeye Loop, Hurricane Creek, Ledford Mill, Lost Creek, Louse Creek, and Goose Branch roads are identified as other areas of risk. Goodbranch Road at State Route 55 and Five Points Road at SR-55 are flagged separately as intersections of concern.

Plan opens door to future federal grants

The Moore County Highway Department received a $140,000 Safe Streets and Roads for All grant to develop the plan.

Council’s adoption matters because an eligible Action Plan is required before a local government can seek an SS4A Implementation Grant. Those grants can help pay for safety work identified in the plan.

That does not mean Moore County has another federal grant in hand. Monday’s vote did not approve a construction project, set a project cost, or put work on a schedule. It formally adopted the plan.

Those decisions – what to pursue, what it will cost, and whether federal money follows – come next.