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Fix Your Commute: Hwy 71 and Southwest Parkway

Updated: Thursday, November 1 2012, 01:42 PM CDT

When we asked for Austin’s traffic hot spots, you responded. Most of them were complaints about highways, but one of them stood out. It was the intersection of Highway 71 and Southwest Parkway.

It’s a busy stretch of road and a busy intersection that doesn't have a stop light. The complaint we heard was that it was dangerous and it needed a signal. Unfortunately we found out that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

The reason there is no plan to add a stop light is because there’s a blind hill on Hwy 71.

“If you have traffic stacked up to where somebody coming over the hill runs into a line of traffic and causes accidents, you've created the problem you were trying to avoid,” Texas Department of Transportation spokesperson Christopher Bishop said.

Bishop said even with a beacon warning drivers of the stop light, it would still be too dangerous to install one. Short of spending well more than a million dollars to cut out the hill, he says drivers who use that intersection regularly need to be aware that it’s a blind hill and to drive defensively and at posted speeds when you go through it.

But there is a construction project taking place there right now that will add an acceleration lane from Southwest Parkway headed west and extend the left turn lane on eastbound Hwy 71 to Southwest Parkway. The $5.6 million project kicked off in January and is expected to last about a year.

Since 2007 there have been 57 wrecks at that intersection, five of them were deadly.

To get all of Erica’s traffic updates, follow her on Twitter twitter.com/ericaharpold or like her on Facebook facebook.com/ericaharpoldkeyetv.
Fix Your Commute: Hwy 71 and Southwest Parkway