After Hurricane Helene, the new roundabout at the intersection of Harville Road and Langston Chapel Road didn’t quite make the Georgia DOT’s predicted Oct. 6 opening date, but it is expected to open Tuesday, Oct. 22, Bulloch County’s engineers said this week.
That’s still more than a month before the contract completion deadline of Nov. 30. County Engineer Brad Deal and Assistant County Engineer Ron Nelson included information on the $3.75 million, Georgia Department of Transportation designed and directed, federally funded project in an Oct. 22 special report on county, state and federal roadways for the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners.
To be clear, Deal and Nelson are county government staff members, not current employees of the state DOT. But Nelson, who retired from the GDOT after 28 years before being hired by the county, led the presentation. It included a slide show aimed in part at sorting out county from state responsibilities for road projects in view of the public.
Commissioner Timmy Rushing explained why some of the commissioners had asked for such an overview.
“I’m one of the ones that requested this,” he said, “and some of the main questions you get asked are about the roundabout at Harville Road and a redlight at Josh Deal Road, and I had a lady call me wondering when we were going to cut the grass – she couldn’t hardly get to her mailbox – and of course I knew who she was and I asked if she still lived on 301.”
As Rushing noted, the state, not the county, is responsible for mowing the right of ways of U.S. Highway 301, which is also State Route 73. Nelson commented that it would be possible for the county to mow along state highways through a contract arrangement, but he added that the county government definitely would not want to take this on for all of the state routes in the county.
“I think the confusion is what Bulloch County’s job is and what the state’s job is,” Rushing said, “and just like (putting) a red light at Josh Deal Road, the state’s got to make that decision; we cannot. We can request it, y’all can request it,” he said to the county’s engineers, “but at the end it’s their (the GDOT’s) decision.”
Some citizens have also asked commissioners why they moved the opening date for the Harville-Langston Chapel roundabout back, Rushing added. When asked by the same lady on the phone, he had noted that the roundabout was a state project but also explained that Hurricane Helene had been the cause of the delay.
“A lot of people don’t understand that that’s a DOT project, and other than a little piece of dirt road by the church down there that y’all had to do, it was in total control of the DOT,” Rushing said.
Roundabout ready
With slides specifically about the Harville-Langston Chapel Roundabout, Nelson noted how close it was to completion. One slide included a “preconstruction” or “before” photo of the intersection taken in summer 2023, and an “progress” shot from October 2024 of the roundabout looking almost complete.
“The roundabout feature, it’s actually constructed. It’s going through an inspection with the state this morning,” Nelson said Oct. 15, one week before the now scheduled opening date.
He and Deal were to take part in a separate safety inspection this week. “There’s very few items left to complete, just some striping, a few signs” said Nelson. “The lighting and everything is done.”
10+ years to plan,
4 months to build
Although construction of the roundabout began in early July 2024 with J.A. Long Concrete Paving of Fortson, Georgia, as contractor, the planning and rationale behind the project go back more than a decade. Nelson said he thought the intersection had qualified for improvements under the federal High-Risk Rural Road Program in 2012 or 2013, and County Manager Tom Couch said he believes this actually occurred earlier.
“But then it just took a good long while for this to actually move through the preliminary engineering, primarily the environmental process, especially being a federally funded project,” Nelson said. “I mean it took almost 10 years just to get to this point.”
Before the roundabout’s construction, traffic controls at the intersection consisted of stop signs on Langston Chapel Road and on previously unpaved Bethel Church Road, which now also joins the roundabout. Harville Road previously passed through unimpeded, curving sharply where it met Langston Chapel Road.
Planning for the roundabout as such “originated from the need to address a total of 25 crashes that were reported between 2012 and 2016,” the Georgia DOT stated in a 2021 report. Seven of those crashes resulted in at least one person being injured, but no deaths were reported from crashes at the intersection during the four-year period analyzed.
The roundabout consists of a 20-foot-wide circulatory roadway, with an elliptical island in the middle surrounded by a truck apron, a slightly raised surface that large trucks can run over to negotiate the turns.
As at other roundabouts, there would be no signal lights, only signs. These include yield signs and roundabout signs, with three arrows in a circle and an indication of 25 mph as the safe speed inside the roundabout, dropping from 45 mph and 35 mph on the various approaches.
The opening of the roundabout will bring the end of detours around its construction.
Bethel Church Road
The “piece of dirt road by the church” that Rushing spoke of was Bethel Church Road. It’s now a paved and, at least temporarily, striped road intersecting the roundabout and for almost 900 feet beyond it.
Bethel Church Road was also paved by the J.A. Long company, but under a separate $199,372 county contract funded with Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or T-SPLOST revenue. The contract was awarded May 7, also with a Nov. 30 completion deadline.
But it too appears finished, as shown in before and after photos in the slide show.
Josh Deal signal
Meanwhile, citizens have expressed interest in having traffic signals installed at the Georgia Highway 67 and Josh Deal Road intersection. But traffic studies completed Jan. 28, 2021 and June 21, 2023 did not show the “warrants” or required levels of need, reported County Engineer Brad Deal.
“Those (studies) were required by the county of developers that were building subdivisions in the area,” Deal said. “The results of those traffic studies did not meet the traffic signal warrants that GDOT uses, which is a federal guideline.”
As more homes are built in the area around the intersection, the county can do further studies to take note of changing traffic patterns, he suggested.
“And once that gets approved, then it becomes a question of is the county going to contribute funds to it or wait for the state to fund it completely,” Deal said.
Partial county funding – possible in this case because Josh Deal Road is a county road – could help move a traffic signal project to completion, he suggested.
But for now, without a traffic study showing a sufficient safety benefit in relation to state and federal guidelines, that project is not moving forward.
1,779 miles of roads
Bulloch County contains 1,779 miles of public roads, according to the engineers.
The first slide Nelson presented showed two maps of the county. The map on the lefthand side traced the relatively few state routes through the county, including all that are officially highways. U.S. Highways, such as 25, 301 and 80, also have state route numbers and are maintained at state and federal expense. But the state (including federal) routes within Bulloch County extend just 179 miles.
Shown in a separate map on the right of the slide for comparison, Bulloch County’s dense spiderweb of county-maintained roads totals 1,129 miles, including 650 miles of dirt roads and 569 miles of paved roads. Bulloch, Georgia’s eighth largest county by land area, has the most unpaved road miles of any county in the state.