Efforts underway to tone down Arrow Drive path lights

By Randy Bell

     After complaints that there’s too much glare, the City of Clinton is looking for a cost-effective solution to prevent the lights along the Arrow Drive multi-use path from blinding and confusing drivers.  A plan to install new globes outfitted with louvers to illuminate the path while not shining so much in the eyes of passing motorists has been deemed to be too expensive.

     Ever since the seventy bollard lights were placed along the path from Pinehaven Drive to the western edge of the Clinton High School (CHS) campus, some nearby residents have expressed concerns that the glare was creating a traffic safety hazard.

     Kenya Rafferty lives in the Gardens of Indian Trails neighborhood off Arrow Drive.

     “My twenty-year-old daughter comes home from work late at night, and she frequently says she has trouble telling if the lights are from a car or not,” Rafferty wrote in an email.  “This is the same when I pull out of [my neighborhood] early in the morning to go to the gym.  It’s very hard to tell whether the lights are headlights or not, and, a few times, I have pulled out in front of a car, because I couldn’t clearly see their lights.”

     Rafferty says she lives far enough away from the path so that the lights don’t shine directly into her home, but she sympathizes with Arrow Drive residents who are close to the bright lights.

     “I can only imagine the frustration there would be if [the lights] were shining in a small child’s bedroom or my own!”

     Mayor Phil Fisher had been hoping that adding the louvers would help to solve the problem.

     “None of us are light experts,” he says.  “But, deflecting [the light] down should go a long way toward correcting it.”

     Unfortunately, that fix may be cost prohibitive—at about $550 per globe.

     According to Fisher, “It’s going to run about $40,000.  I’m in shock at that price.  That’s ridiculous.”

     Consulting City Engineer Bill Owen says, “We are looking at other alternatives that might be available.”

     Plans are in the works to extend the pathway lights all the way to Traceway Park.  A $640,000 MDOT grant and a $180,000 City match will pay for an additional one hundred forty lights to be installed in front of the CHS campus, past the Northside/Eastside Elementary campus and on toward the park.

     Natchez Trace Parkway officials have refused to allow any pathway lights on their right of way where the Trace crosses Arrow Drive.

     The thirty-three lights that would have been installed along that segment of the path are being moved to the walking trail along Cynthia Drive at Traceway.

     Owen says the project to add more lights is expected to go out for bids in November.

     “It will likely be sometime after the first of the year before that work begins,” he says.