If you are a frequent traveler on Gray Highway, traffic is nothing new. According to a report by the Georgia Department of Transportation, Gray Highway is the busiest road in the city aside from the interstates.
Angie Sullivan manages a mattress store on Gray Highway, but she says the traffic is hurting her business. "Nobody wants to get out of traffic to pull in here because it's going to be ten times harder to get back out," says Sullivan.
Captain Eric Walker says the police department gets called to Gray Highway at least once a day, and he says most of last year's 170 wrecks happened when vehicles entered from side roads. "People just pull out in front of someone or someone will stop to pull into one of those side streets and the person behind them isn't paying attention or following to closely and they hit them from the back end," says Walker.
According to an accident report from 2011 the intersection at Shurling Drive and Gray Highway saw fifty accidents, Nigel Floyd Macon-Bibb's traffic engineer, says he's not surprised because Gray Highway is the busiest road in Macon.
"Given the traffic that's on Gray Highway which is about 42,000 vehicles a day I think 170 accidents is extremely mild," says Floyd.
According to a report by the Georgia Department of Transportation Gray Highway sees more vehicle traffic than I-75 at Arkwright Road.
Floyd says after receiving several complaints they sychronized the traffic lights. "Before you would bottleneck before Clinton Road now that's disappeared and traffic flows better now," says Floyd.
Sullivan says it hasn't fixed the problem and that's why she's moving. "We've heard a lot of feedback from our customers saying how hard it is to get in and out of this spot," says Sullivan.
She says they're moving their mattress store to South Houston Lake Road in Warner Robins.
Floyd says there aren't any plans to change Gray Highway at this time. He says because Gray Highway is a state route all changes would have to be approved by the Georgia Department of Transportaion. They did not return our phone calls.