ROGERS - Car after car, after car, after car - lines of vehicles were backed up all the way onto Interstate 540 from the New Hope Road exit.
And with those lines, car crashes - 32 of them from May 2007 to May 2008, according to data collected by the Rogers Police Department - gave the area the sixth-highest number of collisions of all intersections in the city.
But then the Promenade interchange opened. Just a hair south on I-540, motorists can now head straight to shopping, restaurants and the theater.
No longer do drivers have to turn off the interstate, onto Horsebarn Road, onto New Hope Road, onto Promenade Boulevard. No longer do they line up on I-540. No longer do they crash at those intersections.
On June 2, the interchange opened, and accidents at New Hope and I-540 have dramatically dropped, mostly because of a lack of traffic.
"With the new roads going through, people are using different access ways," Rogers Police Department Lt. Mike Johnson said.
Although not enough time has passed to establish a pattern of fewer accidents, police have noticed the impact of the reduced traffic, Johnson said.
"There's always going to be accidents, (but ) the amount of accidents is starting to lessen," Johnson said.
Meanwhile, the Promenade interchange has not made up for the lack of accidents at New Hope and I-540. Johnson said dispatchers have not noticed an inordinate amount of collisions at that intersection. The worst of Rogers The intersections that give Rogers police the most trouble, meanwhile, are just a short drive away, one to the east and one to the north.
While the New Hope Road and I-540 interchange was wracking up 32 collisions, the intersection of Eighth Street and New Hope saw 54 during that same time, according to police data, giving it an average of one per week and making it the most accident-likely spot in the city.
The No. 2 intersection for collisions was Walnut and 46 th streets, the entrance to Restaurant Row at the Scottsdale Center, which had 50 accidents over the course of the year. But the impact of the westernmost section of Walnut cannot be judged with only one intersection. The short stretch of that road between the interstate and 40 th Street saw more collisions in one year than any other area of the city. In that span, 109 crashes along that roadway were reported to Rogers police.
And that is not the full impact of the area. Johnson said Rogers' statistics do not include any crashes that occurred at Walton Boulevard and I-540 in Bentonville, separated from Rogers by only a bridge. The cause and solution Those areas of high-collision risk, Johnson said, are plagued with crashes simply because there are more vehicles in the area. Speed, he said, does not necessarily have an impact on the number of incidents, but can make the crashes that are there more likely to cause injuries.
Such is the case with Hudson and Water Tower roads. There were only 21 accidents at that intersection from May 2007 to May 2008, but Johnson said the faster speed limit makes those crashes more dangerous.
"The slower it is, the better it is for that location," Johnson said.
But slower speeds only reduce the injury severity, not the number of accidents. Drivers traveling slower, Johnson said, may have a tendency to take risks because they are in a hurry.
"I think sometimes motorists get impatient," he said. "They go and do things they wouldn't normally do."
That seems the case for intersections like Dixieland Road and Walnut, or Hudson Road and Second Street, areas where drivers try to skirt through the lights to shave some time off their commutes.
But between the two options, Johnson prefers the lowered speed limits.
"The slower it is, the better it is for that location," he said.
To prevent accidents, officers try to position themselves where there is a high likelihood of a crash.
"One way to alleviate that is to have officers out at those intersections," Johnson said.
But with officers positioned at those high-traffic areas, they can find themselves out of position to deal with incidents in other areas, Johnson said.
And then, sometimes, as with New Hope and I-540, the traffic patterns change, leaving officers to wonder where the new trouble spots may be. Johnson said it is a matter of paying attention and reacting to any new patterns that form.
"We're just basically going to have to watch and evaluate those intersections and see when and how those accidents occur," he said.
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