HOLLY, Mich. – A car smashed into a home following a collision at the intersection of Hickory Ridge and Rose Center Roads on Wednesday morning.
It’s an intersection with a history of crashes and area homes and businesses have been demanding changes for years.
“We’re terrified for the people. We’re terrified for ourselves,” Lindsay Copeland, the manager of the Marathon Gas Station on the intersection, said Wednesday. “We just don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”
She has been the manager at the gas station for nine years and has seen a lot of crashes and near misses in the intersection. She has wanted something done about it for years.
“So, if you’re not paying attention and you’re driving down Hickory Ridge and somebody is not paying attention on Rose Center, you’ll get hit,” she said.
The intersection is along a stretch of road between US-23 and M-59, about 15 miles south of Flint, near the border of Oakland and Genesee counties. It only has stop signs along Rose Center Road, none on Hickory Ridge, and a single blinking yellow traffic signal overhead.
“If you look down the road, there’s a hill coming the other way,” Copeland said. “You can’t see anybody trying to turn until you’re on it.
The speed limit along Hickory Ridge is 50 mph, but cars were consistently traveling through the intersection at high rates of speed, and it has a history of crashes dating back decades.
The latest crash happened around 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 19.
A car was riding along Hickory Ridge when it stopped at the intersection. A driver behind them honked their horn, causing the driver to panic and drive into the intersection.
The car proceeded to hit an SUV that was coming through the intersection, sending it straight into the house. Copeland knows the woman who owns the home and says this intersection constantly has her on pins and needles.
“Every time something happens, she’s a nervous wreck because it happens so often,” Copeland said. “You can’t sit in the living room without having to worry that there’s a car coming through.”
Earlier this year, a rollover crash in the intersection sent a car tumbling precariously close to the gas pumps. Another T-bone collision in July left two cars totaled.
“I’ve called the [Oakland County] Road Commission, I called the township, I called the State Police, it’s always under review,’” she said. “It’s always some kind of run around.”
“I just want a four-way stop,” she said. “That’s the easiest thing to do to fix the problem, and it would cause people to slow down a little bit. That’s all we need.”
Local 4 reached out to the Road Commission, and they said that getting a four-way stop or traffic signal in the intersection is a complex process.
“We would have to determine if the intersection meets warrants, which are the state requirements, for either of those options,” Craig Bryson, the Commission’s senior communications manager, said. “One crash, which is likely the result of operator error, is not likely to meet those warrants.
“But again, we would have to look at the crash history, which we will do,” he added. “What we want to avoid is a knee-jerk reaction that ends up being more dangerous and is not data-driven.”