A recent traffic study about Scottsville Road is prompting local and state agencies to form a formal partnership to address the road’s future development.

The City-County Planning Commission of Warren County will present a Memorandum of Understanding at its Thursday night meeting at City Hall.

The document forms an agreement among the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Warren County, the city of Bowling Green and the Bowling Green-Warren County Metropolitan Planning Organization. The planning commission is part of the agreement as well.

The agencies will work as a unified front with assigned responsibilities as a result of the Interstate 65/U.S. 231 Interchange Study completed in March, according to planning commission staff engineer Mac Yowell.

Yowell said previous coordination of the way Scottsville Road was managed was informal and on an as-needed basis, but because of the bureaucratic complexities involved, a more formal strategy was necessary.

“It’s just overcrowded. If citizens wanted to expedite the traffic on Scottsville Road, it just takes dollars and dynamite. But it can be done if that’s the desire,” Yowell said.

The study points out that injury and fatal crashes on the Scottsville Road interchange pushes the corridor into the top 5 percent of all roadways in Kentucky with crashes of that level of severity.

Other findings show:

• Scottsville Road carries between 26,000 to 39,200 vehicles per day;

• The closeness of the Cumberland Trace/Mel Browning Street intersection to the northbound ramps of I-65 is a major contributing factor to the congestion experienced there;

• The number of access points along some parts of the road exceed recommended conditions;

• As traffic volumes change with further development, additional concerns will arise regarding safety on U.S 231.

Most people won’t see the difference the agreement will make on their current driving experience, but developers will, Yowell said.

“For someone developing on Scottsville Road, it will come to play as far as them trying to get an access point on the road,” Yowell said.

The agreement also pushes the area toward more long-range planning efforts that will pin-point ways to re-route traffic as well, according to Yowell.

Greenwood Lane, which Gander Mountain built, is a perfect example of such efforts, Yowell said, since traffic will be rerouted to Cherry Farms, which has a traffic signal.

The goal is to pull major traffic from interchanges or areas near interstate ramps into less busy and controlled areas, Yowell said.

Yowell said the hope is that the future cooperation and coordination will spur the forming of an “SPUI” – a single point urban interchange, that pulls the space in an interchange in tighter so that more space is between the end of the ramp and crossroads.

“Obviously land use is going to impact road ways. That’s kind of a given situation,” long-range planner Jonathan Britt said.