On the afternoon of June 9, a little after 2:30, 21-year-old Ashley Ray of Lafayette was killed in a crash at the intersection of the new U.S. 231 and Veterans Memorial Parkway. Four days earlier, another person died in a head-on collision with a semi on U.S. 231 north of State Road 28. Two deaths, one highway, one week.
I review infrastructure for a living, and I ride a bicycle to my office most mornings, so I read traffic news the way some people read the weather — with a knot in my stomach and a professional eye I cannot switch off. And what that eye keeps snagging on is the word "new."
Roads are designed, not fated
Here is something my profession believes, almost as a creed: when the same place keeps producing the same kind of crash, the road is trying to tell you something. A single collision can be pure misfortune — a bad second, a wet lane, a moment's inattention. But a corridor is a system. Sightlines, signal timing, the angle of a turn, the speed people actually drive versus the speed posted, the way a motorcycle can vanish into a blind spot at a particular merge. These are not acts of God. They are choices, made on paper, years before anyone gets in a car.
I want to be careful here, because Ashley Ray's family is grieving and rumor is cheap. I do not know that the design of that intersection is at fault. That is precisely the point: none of us knows yet, and on a stretch of road this new, with two fatalities this close together, "we don't know" is not a reason to look away. It is the reason to look.
So here is a modest ask, addressed to INDOT and to our county officials: commission a real safety audit of the new 231 corridor and the Veterans Memorial Parkway intersection — crash data, speeds, sightlines, turn movements, the works — and publish it where residents can read it. If the road checks out, we will all breathe easier. If it does not, we fix it, the way you fix a bridge before it fails and not after.
Ashley Ray was twenty-one years old. We cannot give her back to the people who loved her. But we can refuse to file her death under "accident," shrug, and merge on. A road is one of the few dangerous things a community builds entirely on purpose. That means we can make it safer on purpose, too.