Safety on rural roads is a constant issue but with a new program in place local officials hope to open drivers' eyes and cut down on serious accidents.

Mason County Judge-Executive James "Buddy" Gallenstein and the Mason County Road Department have partnered with the University of Kentucky Safety Circuit Rider Program, the Buffalo Trace Area Development District and the Federal Highway Administration to implement safety awareness, particularly for one specific type of accident.

The number one cause of fatal vehicle crashes in the state of Kentucky is single-vehicle, run-off-the-road collisions with fixed objects. This specific accident accounts for 39 percent of all fatal vehicle crashes.

In order to improve driver awareness in Mason County, two roads were pinpointed as danger zones: Day Pike and Clarks Run Road. According to crash data, these two areas were the two most accident-prone areas in the county over the last five years.

Also, Clift Pike, located on the outskirts of May's Lick, recently had a new bridge installed around a treacherous curve on the rural road. The area on both sides of the bridge was widened to better accommodate two lanes of traffic, as well as farm machinery that frequents this road, said Jerry Arthur, road supervisor at the Mason County Road Department.

"That was just a safety thing that the Mason County Fiscal Court instituted," he said. "It was a narrow road and a real narrow bridge, we widened the road out and Freddie (Goble, director of the UK Safety Circuit Rider Program) really liked the idea that we — the fiscal court and road department — did it ourselves."

The UK Safety Circuit Rider Program focuses on run-off-the-road collisions with fixed objects and two other major causes of fatal crashes: crashes at intersections and crashes involving pedestrians. According to Goble, the program is fairly new, but has improved a lot of dangerous areas in the state.

"It started Feb. 1, 2005 (as) a one-year pilot program that is funded by a grant from the Federal Highway Administration, Office of Safety," he said. "We started by selecting six counties with the highest critical crash numbers. Then, we completed the work on low-cost safety improvements in those six counties by about June of 2005 … Mason County was in the second six of the focus counties that were selected."

The data that Goble refers to has been collected by the University of Kentucky from Jan. 1, 2000, to June 30, 2005. This is what was used to determine which roads in each particular county were chosen for improvements. Also, according to the director, workshops were utilized, where local officials received training to help the area here.

"As part of this program, we furnished workshops called "low cost safety improvements for rural roads" for all the judge-executives, county road supervisors, the transportation cabinets and departments… anyone that has anything to do with roads and transportation," said Goble. "On July 22, we had one at Blue Licks. Buddy Gallenstein and Jerry Arthur were there, so they had this training."

The fixed objects he program identifies as dangerous includes bridges, trees and buildings, all of which were addressed recently on Day Pike, Clarks Run Road and Clift Pike, according to Arthur.

"Trees, we put a special reflector on those, like on Clarks Run … (and) we have marked 90 percent of all our bridges with object markers," he said, referring to the yellow and black diagonal-striped signage that indicates hazard, usually on both sides of a bridge.

Each improvement in safety is another step towards saving lives and, according to Goble, that is the point of the program.

"We're real proud of the program and hope to save some lives, that's the bottom line," he said.

Contact Jonathan Fraysure at jonathan.fraysure@lee.net, or call 606-564-9091, ext. 276.