These are the most crash-prone intersections in Woodbury

Behind the wheel of his Ford Focus ST, Alan Millard waited on Tamarack Road near the I-494 on-ramp for a left-turn arrow. What he didn’t know about the intersection — what most people don’t know — is that it’s one of the most crash-prone in Woodbury.

The arrow turned green, Millard started to turn, and an SUV heading in the opposite direction on Tamarack ignored a red light and slammed into Millard, shattering his car’s window and crunching its outer shell.

Everyone survived with minor injuries, but Millard’s cherished car was totaled.

“They just didn’t stop,” he said of the other driver.

These sorts of intersection crashes are a daily occurrence in Woodbury and across the metro, with hundreds of collisions every year. Police and traffic engineers point to a mix of suburban road design, speeds and driver behavior as factors that add up in fast-growing suburbs across the Twin Cities.

A Department of Public Safety database of Woodbury crashes from 2016 to 2022 shows 4,800 traffic accidents, with about a third occurring within or around a four-way intersection, five-way intersection, roundabout or other traffic circle. (That doesn’t include accidents along I-494 or I-94.)

Some of what’s going on out there should be obvious, said Woodbury City Engineer Tony Kutzke: “We see more crashes where the traffic volumes and speeds are higher on the roads.”

The Woodbury intersection with the highest crash rate is Hargis Parkway and Finley Road, with 1.2 crashes per million vehicles. Anything above a 1 is “a red flag,” said Washington County traffic engineer Joe Gustafson.

Crossing Hargis from Finley means darting across four lanes of traffic and a median without the assistance of a stop light or stop sign.

WCCO-TV reporter Reg Chapman was a passenger in a Jeep Grand Cherokee that crashed as the driver tried to cross Hargis.

“That intersection is screwed up! It’s like Frogger,” said Chapman, speaking about the accident recently. He said no one was seriously injured, but the Jeep was totaled.

The city’s next-worst intersection is the one that crunched Millard and his two passengers.

The top 10 intersections feature some of the city’s busiest roads, including Tamarack, Bailey, Radio Drive, and Valley Creek. Heavy traffic and a relatively high crash rate means the intersection of Radio Drive and Valley Creek Road often sees crashes, too.

Nearly a third of 2016-2022 intersection crashes in the city coincided with slick road conditions, but most did not have contributing road-condition factors. About 20% of them happened after dark.

An intersection that consistently rates among the worst for crashes will draw the attention of people like Gustafson and Kutzke. It also likely pops up on an annual Washington County report that grades the worst intersections.

At the top of the list right now? The Woodbury intersection of Valley Creek Road and Eagle Creek Lane. A study of Valley Creek Road is underway, Gustafson said.

The county addressed three Woodbury intersections in 2022, making them all-way stops for now. Two of those spots — Bailey Road and Settler’s Ridge Parkway and Radio Drive at Dale Road — will get roundabouts. The third intersection, Valley Creek Road at Dancing Waters Parkway, is still being studied.

Tweaking the roadway can make a big difference: The intersection of Woodbury Drive and Tamarack Road was the top spot for crashes from 2018 to 2022, but it fell to No. 37 after the roadway was altered in 2020.

The city of Woodbury has also identified problems with four-lane divided roadways, like the stretch of Woodlane Drive from Wooddale Drive to Newbury Road.

That section will be converted to three lanes sometime next year, said Kutzke. A three-lane road with a middle lane devoted to left turns will let traffic flow more smoothly, he added.

Other four-lane roads targeted for a three-lane conversion include Lake Road from Tahoe Road to Devonshire Drive, Queens Drive from Currell Boulevard to Guider Drive and Currell Boulevard from Queens Drive to Bielenberg Drive.

The city wants to reduce the number of crashes where drivers hit each other broadside at high speeds, Kutzke added. Nearly 40% of Woodbury intersection crashes involved reported injuries.

Converting an intersection to a roundabout slows everyone down and prevents the kind of T-bone crashes that are so dangerous, Kutzke said.

In addition to the two roundabouts coming at county intersections, roundabouts are being discussed for the intersections of Bailey Road and Manning Avenue, and Valley Creek Road and Settler’s Ridge Parkway, Kutzke said.

The city can also narrow the road to slow people down.

Roads built before 2000 were typically 32 feet wide and didn’t have a sidewalk, Kutzke said. Roads built after 2000 are typically 28 feet wide with a sidewalk on at least one side, and the narrower roads see average traffic speeds drop by 4 mph.

Some drivers assume that traffic lights will make an intersection safer, but that’s not necessarily true, said traffic engineers.

The lights define right-of-way and who is at fault in a crash, but traffic signals aren’t considered a safety feature in part because red light-running and failing to yield are so common.

Gustafson noted something else: follow-the-leader behavior. If one driver continues through an intersection or makes a turn, the next driver might do that, too, without first checking that it’s safe.

“Drivers are definitely heavily influenced by what the car in front of them does,” he said.

And that’s the heart of the problem, Woodbury Police Patrol Commander Tom Ehrenberg said. Distracted driving on city streets occurs “more so than ever,” he said. Speed is a common factor in crashes as well, he added.

The bottom line — even the safest road design can’t fix bad drivers.