Columbus and Franklin County officials are working to fix safety problems on Roberts Road on the city's West Side after a string of fatal and serious injury crashes.
There have been three fatal crashes on Roberts Road in the past year,including an Aug. 28 crash that left 19-year-old Aaden Owen Elswick dead and two people injured. After that crash, Columbus Councilmember Nancy Day-Achauer, who represents the city's Northwest Side, decried the corridor's safety issues at an Aug. 31 council meeting.
"I cannot shake the feeling that if the community's concerns about unsafe driving conditions on Roberts Road had been addressed, perhaps Aaden would still be with
us today. Aaden's tragic crash is not the first on this section of road, and it won't be the last until the necessary action is taken to prevent these needless tragedies," she said.
After her statement, the city's Department of Public Service agreed to meet with community members to discuss potential safety improvements, such as removing some left-turn options, Day-Achauer said in an interview with The Dispatch. The department previously met with community members in April, but no changes to the road were made, she said.
Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther has touted a safety initiative, dubbed Vision Zero, that looks to end crash-related fatalities and serious injuries on the city's streets. Two segments of Roberts Road are on Columbus' Vision Zero High Injury Network, meaning they have had the greatest number of fatal, serious injury and/or vulnerable user crashes (pedestrians, motorcyclists or bicyclists) out of other city road segments in recent years.
One of these segments is on Roberts Road just west of its intersection with Hilliard Rome Road, which has seen two motor vehicle crashes, one motorcycle crash, and one pedestrian crash from 2020 to 2024. Three of those four crashes resulted in serious injuries.
Roberts Road near the intersection with Interstate 270 also saw several crashes from 2020 to 2024. There was one fatal crash, two serious injury crashes, and two other crashes during that time frame, according to high-injury network data. There have also been several individual crashes on Roberts Road outside the high-injury network segments.
Roberts Road had far fewer serious crashes than the city's major thoroughfares, like High Street, Broad Street or Livingston Avenue, according to the data.
Sharon Rastatter, chair of Columbus' Far West Side Area Commission, said speeding is the biggest problem on Roberts Road, which is wide with long, flat stretches and very few traffic lights or other stopping points that would force drivers to slow down. The commission discussed adding tree islands that make the road visually narrower, crosswalks or turn signals, Rastatter said.
The Far West Side Area Commission has been working on Roberts Road's issues for years, but the city has yet to make major changes, Rastatter said.
"When residents are like, 'There needs to be a traffic study,' and of course the city doesn't want to do one because it costs money. And it's just, it's frustrating when we see Vision Zero touting all the things that they've done, that that initiative has done, and yet our area seems to be ignored and we've had these fatalities," Rastatter said.
Franklin County has also taken notice of Roberts Road. The Franklin County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved a resolution Sept. 8 asking the Ohio Department of Transportation to reduce the speed limit to 45 miles per hour from 55 miles per hour on Roberts Road between Walker Road and Olde Roberts Road in Brown Township.
The resolution resulted from a county speed study on the road, which was sparked by a citizen inquiry about the speed limit, according to a Franklin County Engineer's Office spokesperson. ODOT can either concur with the speed study's findings or make alternative recommendations, according to Ohio law.
Reporter Nathan Hart can be reached at NHart@dispatch.com, @NathanRHart on X and nathanhart.dispatch.com on Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus, Franklin County working on safety issues on Roberts Road
