Another change has come to Bangor’s most dangerous intersection, but it’s unclear whether the updates are making the road any safer.
The stretch of Stillwater Avenue near the Kohl’s shopping center where I-95 connects at Exit 186 has gone through multiple iterations since the early 2000s as both traffic levels and the number of businesses around it grew.
So far this year, that intersection has seen 48 crashes that caused 11 injuries, according to data from the Maine Department of Transportation. In 2023, 55 crashes with 13 injuries happened in the intersection — an uptick from the 44 crashes and 12 injuries that happened there in 2022.
As recently as this summer, the city has tweaked the traffic layout and nearby road markings in an attempt to make the area safer and easier to navigate. But years of incremental changes haven’t slowed the dozens of crashes that happened in the intersection.
In June, the city painted new squiggly arrows on the road and hung matching road signs on the southbound side of Stillwater Avenue near Aspen Dental. The new markings are to tell drivers they’ll need to slightly bear right to continue straight through the upcoming intersection, according to Aaron Huotari, Bangor’s public works director.
“That bright white paint showing the lanes that curve to the right continue straight through, in my mind, is the reason things have worked so much better this year,” Huotari said. “I think people are starting to get it.”
Since June 1, however, there have been another five crashes in the intersection, Maine DOT data show, and an area resident wrote a letter to the editor in the Bangor Daily News saying that the change has only made the area worse.
“It seems more like a fix about to cause an accident,” the letter to the editor reads. “Put it back the way it was.”
Houtari said he thought the new arrows helped drivers, until he saw the letter to the editor stating the opposite.
The intersection saw another significant change about four years ago, Huotari said. That’s when the number of lanes that continue straight through the intersection near Kohl’s on the southbound side grew from one to two.
Previously, the rightmost lane forced drivers into the shopping center, but two lanes to the right now continue straight on Stillwater before merging into one near Buffalo Wild Wings.
The change was made to get more people through the intersection while the light was green and minimize traffic backup, Huotari siad.
“We knew the need was to get more cars through because there were cars piling up all the way back to Home Depot,” he said. “We had to get that fixed somehow.”
Some drivers never liked that change, Huotari said, and asked the city for years to reverse it.
“People are creatures of habit and resistant to change,” he said.
The layout of the intersection changed again following a 2015 study by the Maine DOT and the city.
When Exit 186 was built in 2001 to connect Stillwater Avenue and I-95, vehicles coming off the highway could only turn right to head north or cut straight through the intersection to the shopping center.
However, many drivers taking Exit 186 would turn left on Stillwater Avenue illegally or cut through the shopping center to head south toward Broadway. In fact, roughly 160 vehicles made an illegal left turn onto Stillwater Avenue during a 12-hour span, the study found.
The ban on left turns was ultimately lifted, since drivers were doing it anyway.
