BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – As early voting continues on a Bryan ballot measure that could force removal of the raised medians on Texas Avenue, a new independent analysis looks at how they have reduced crashes by 17%.
Andrew Moodie, a Bryan resident who works in academia, spent part of his free time digging through eight years of state crash records to answer a central question: are the medians making Texas Avenue safer?
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Moodie moved to Bryan-College Station in 2023, right as the medians were being installed, and said he was struck by how passionate the debate was.
“It kind of fascinated me how passionate the debate was around what to me seemed like sort of a boring piece of infrastructure in the city,” Moodie said.
Using crash records from TxDOT’s public Crash Records Information System, Moodie compared data from 2017 through 2026 along Texas Avenue between Highway 21 and Highway 6, excluding 2023 (the installation year) and partial 2026 data.
The headline finding: total crashes are down roughly 17% since the medians went in, about 80 fewer per year. The drop is driven mostly by fewer rear-end collisions — a result that surprised Moodie, who expected a bigger effect on left-turn crashes instead.
However, data for the most serious crashes were harder to read.
“I also looked at the number of pedestrian-involved collisions and fatalities along the corridor,” Moodie said. “The numbers of those events are really just very small, and so there’s no discernible change… there’s just no detectable change there.”
Moodie said pedestrian crash numbers looked slightly higher in recent years, but that didn’t hold up statistically. “It’s not a significant result,” he said.
He was candid about his analysis’ limits, noting only two full years of data exist since installation. “It’s difficult to know for sure whether the trends that we see are a result of the medians,” Moodie said. Still, he said the overall drop matters: “Public safety appears to be improved, and I think that’s important.”
Moodie notes his analysis doesn’t address two of opponents’ biggest concerns: emergency response times and business impacts. Crashes are down, but whether that makes the corridor safer in the ways that matter most to voters is still unclear.
RELATED: Bryan releases confidential legal opinion, warns majority vote does not guarantee removal
Early voting runs through Oct. 30. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.
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