The report studied the current infrastructure on 5th Street from Brown Chapel Road to Mississippi Avenue and aims to improve traffic flow, but residents disagree with the city over the proposed changes the study suggests.

“I don’t know where the common sense is,” said St. Cloud resident Larry Carpenter who argues the proposed changes do not take into consideration the safety of a nearby school and pedestrians that are not used to seeing a lot of cars in the area.

“This is a residential street; we have an elementary school down there...somebody is going to get hurt,” Carpenter said.

The city is proposing adding more stop signs to certain intersections and building traffic circles in a two-phase project to help mitigate traffic and decrease existing travel times by an average of four minutes.

Yet residents in the area argue additional signage won’t do much as several drivers passing through the neighborhood speed and ignore current stop signs.

“To add additional stop signs, what makes us think that as residents here that they are going to do any better than they are now?” Carpenter said.

The report in part reads, “The purpose of this study was to evaluate the 5th Street corridor from Brown Chapel Road to Mississippi Avenue and determine if modifying the existing control types could improve operations and safety on the corridor.”

According to the study, traffic circles are recommended to be built at 5th Street’s intersections with Georgia Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, Wisconsin Avenue, and Ohio Avenue. The changes would come in the second phase of the project.

“What is a roundabout going to do in a residential neighborhood?” Carpenter asked while expressing his frustration over the study, which he believes was designed in the interests of attracting more residents and not helping current ones.

According to U.S. Census Data, the city of St. Cloud has grown by over 2% in the last two years.