BURLINGTON, Ky. -- There's a lot to recommend the community that lines Kentucky Route-237 to visitors, Belinda Sipple said Wednesday, but the road itself -- a long stretch of hard curves known to cause car crashes in poor weather -- is dangerous.
"It's a bad road," she said simply. "Almost every time it rains, there's an accident within this one-mile stretch here."
The Commonwealth of Kentucky will spend $22 million in 2018 to fix that. The road between Valley View Drive and Rogers Lane will be widened from a single shoulderless lane to four, its sharp turns softened and its hills and valleys leveled out.
"(The changes) should make the drive a whole lot better. Those people who live on the road will have a better ingress and egress to their homes," Kentucky Transportation Cabiner chief engineer Bob Yeager said.
Yeager admitted the two-year construction period could become a headache for people who regularly drive through, but re-emphasized the added safety and convenience that waited at the end of the renovations.
Sipple, who has lived along Route 237 her entire life and runs the cozy roadside restaurant Granny's Garden, said it might sting to see some of her family's ancestral buildings be knocked down and paved over to make room for the expanded road. Still, she's doing her best to view it as an opportunity.
Granny's Garden will move to a new, larger location to accommodate the construction, she said. It will be able to welcome more customers, but continue to serve the classic dishes its regulars already love: Blackberry pie, pumpkin bread, spaghetti casserole and more.
"It's all in God's plan," Sipple said. "We realize that for us to keep going and for the neighbors to be safe when they're out on the roads, changes have to be made. We've accepted that, and we're willing to go about the changes."
