Major change is coming to one local interstate to keep you safer while you’re driving.
The state is making the change to prevent fatal crashes.
On one stretch of Interstate 275 in Northern Kentucky, there is no shortage of memorials to those who have died in car accidents.
The carnage is all too familiar to Boone County Deputy Tom Scheben.
"Not only do you have that kind of damage to the vehicles, you also have that kind of damage to the human beings inside, and whether they're wearing their seat belts, or even nowadays with the airbags, sometimes they just don't help," says Scheben.
Up to 130,000 vehicles a day drive this 19-mile section straddling I-75.
There is nothing to stop drivers who lose control from crossing over into oncoming traffic.
The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet plans to fix that with something like this: a woven steel cable barrier.
“They are more giving, absorb a lot of the impact of the vehicle and and it will try to redirect the vehicle back on and keep it back on the roadway instead of allowing it crossing over into oncoming traffic."
While Ohio and Louisville, Ky. have been using the cables with good success, they haven't been tried in Northern Kentucky until now.
So why not the more familiar concrete barriers like these on I-71?
"The cable barriers are a lot more cost effective,” said Nancy Wood, of the Ky. Transportation Cabinet. “They only cost about $130,000 to install per mile, so they're more effective where as concrete is a lot more expensive and entails a lot more."
It will still cost the state just shy of $3 million to install the cables. That's a bargain, according to Tom Scheben.
"Anything that's going to keep that car on the proper side of the road is worth its weight in gold,” he says.
