Time to end the confusion

By Staff
October 12, 2003
Many visitors and quite a few residents have complained over the years that driving in Meridian can be a befuddling, frustrating experience. While downtown is mentioned most, other parts of the city are also riddled with one-way streets, cross streets that do not line up, streets named one thing on one side of an intersection and something else on the other, stop signs in the oddest of places and five-point intersections. It's no wonder confusion is so rampant.
It's time to end as much of the confusion as possible and perhaps an on-going downtown traffic flow study by the Mississippi Department of Transportation will offer some solutions. It may be ready sometime next year.
In the meantime, people like Ann Maynor, manager of the Once and Again Hope Village Thrift Store on Front Street, have a real problem today. Her problem involves a three-block section of Front Street where traffic flows three different ways. She says customers are not only having trouble finding her place of business but are getting irate.
Maynor and three other residents petitioned the Meridian City Council last week, asking that the three-block section return to two-way traffic, the way it was before changes were made in the early 1990s.
Some officials now agree that the traffic flow is confusing and should never have been changed. It will cost some money to go back.
Hopefully, MDOT will propose that all streets in downtown Meridian be returned to a two-way flow, making it easier not more difficult for people to get around.