Road Comm.: Centreville-Constantine/Lutz roundabout to make intersection safer
By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
CENTREVILLE — Since its creation, Centreville-Constantine Road has been a heavily-traveled thoroughfare in St. Joseph County, running diagonal from, fittingly, Centreville to just east of Constantine.
However, that diagonal layout, intersecting with another heavily-traveled road, Lutz Road, has brought on plenty of challenges, including crashes and sightline issues, that the St. Joseph County Road Commission is tackling with a major change to the intersection itself.
Beginning Monday, July 21, the intersection of Centreville-Constantine Road and Lutz Road will undergo a nearly $500,000 project to construct a single-lane roundabout intersection to replace the current four-way stop. Construction is currently expected to wrap up by the end of September.
The roundabout will be 135 feet in diameter from outside curb to outside curb, just slightly bigger than the roundabout at Colon Road and Farrand Road in Colon Township, with a concrete area on the inside of the intersection that is designed to be driven on by semi-trucks, farm equipment and other large commercial vehicles. The asphalt lanes for passenger vehicles will be 20 feet wide, with the concrete area adding between 15 to 17 feet of additional area for use by those larger implements.
It will be the third roundabout in the county, after the Colon/Farrand roundabout and the East Lafayette Street/North Franks Avenue roundabout in Sturgis.
The roundabout will also have brand-new lighting at the intersection, which will cost nearly $50,000.
Talks about having a roundabout at the intersection have gone on for a few years now, according to Road Commission Manager John Lindsey, with concerns about the safety of the intersection being the main reason Road Commission officials cited for why the roundabout will be going in.
“Safety would be the main goal of the whole project,” Lindsey said. “That’s what we’re concerned with.”
One of the main concerns has to do with the angles of the intersection and the sight distances on either side, Road Commission Engineer Garrett Myland said.
“When you pull up to the intersection and you try to see the other legs of the intersection, you pretty much have to crank your head around to see if there are any vehicles coming. Some people can’t make that movement in their car,” Myland said. “With a roundabout, you’re only looking left because that’s where all the traffic is coming from, so sight distance is a lot easier.”
Other factors, such as the number of crashes that occurred at the intersection and the potential for more severe crashes, led the Road Commission to taking on what would be just the second such roundabout intersection in the county.
“I believe that at these strange-angled intersections, roundabouts work very well just to try to keep traffic moving, and it takes out the chances of angled crashes,” Myland said. “With a roundabout, you don’t get those angled crashes anymore, you get the low-speed crashes that are kind of a glancing blow if there’s going to be, because you’re both going in the same direction. If there’s an accident, it’s more of a sideswipe than a hard impact with a turning motion crash.”
According to agency statistics, there have been seven crashes at the intersection in the past five years, from 2020-2024, with one crash causing an incapacitating injury, one crash causing possible injury, and five where property damage was the only thing reported. Three of the crashes were the result of a vehicle not stopping, one with both vehicles stopping and proceeding, two rear-end crashes and one where a vehicle backed into another vehicle.
The number of crashes in that time period was 10th-highest among county-controlled intersections. According to a presentation Myland gave during a public hearing in 2023, from 2017-21, the time period used in the application for grant funding, there were nine total crashes at the intersection, which ranked fourth among intersections serviced by the county.
During planning, there were concerns brought up by residents and agency officials about other intersections along Lutz Road that have had higher crash rates, in particular Lutz Road and Featherstone Road, which has had significantly higher crash rates than Centreville/Constantine and Lutz. To address that particular intersection, Myland said they are planning on moving the flashing stop signs currently at the Centreville-Constantine/Lutz intersection to the intersection at Featherstone and Lutz to turn it into a four-way stop.
“When we go to detour the project, everybody will be essentially stopping at Featherstone and going around the detour. That’s the perfect time to convert Featherstone and Lutz to a four-way stop,” Myland said. “Everybody’s going to get used to stopping there and going around the detour, so that’s where we’re going to be moving those signs.”
Funding for the project comes from the High Risk Rural Road program, and is distributed via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The federal government will be paying 90 percent of the project costs, while the Road Commission is paying the remaining 10 percent as well as design costs and engineering. Myland estimated that the agency received funding for the project in 2022, and was supposed to be done in 2024, but was delayed due to property acquisition issues that were resolved earlier this year.
Roundabouts are still generally a new concept in St. Joseph County, with the 2020 installation of the Colon/Farrand roundabout generating some controversy when it was first introduced. However, Lindsey said he’s hopeful that the Centreville-Constantine/Lutz roundabout will help keep drivers safe, citing just one crash occurring at the Colon/Farrand roundabout since its installation.
“We’ve had a lot of good reviews from the Colon roundabout when it was done, even by people who opposed it in the beginning. It flows traffic, does a nice job, we’ve got that,” Lindsey said. “We hope to see a reduction in accidents for sure. And any ones that are there would be minor compared to other more serious ones.”
Detour routes for the project are twofold: Those coming from the north on Lutz Road are asked to detour via Banker Street, Constantine Road and Featherstone Road, and those coming from the couth are asked to detour via Featherstone Road, Sevison Road and Banker Street in order to take one half of traffic one direction and the other half of traffic the other direction.
Overall, Myland reiterated that the goal for the roundabout project is simple: the safety of drivers in the county.
“Our goal is to make Lutz Road in general a safer corridor in St. Joseph County,” Myland said.
Robert Tomlinson can be reached at 279-7488 or robert@wilcoxnewspapers.com.
I thought there was another round a bout just north east of Sturgis!!
You are correct; I have clarified that information in an edit to the story.