Pio Nono at Eisenhower: What GDOT’s Own Data Says About This Intersection

By Ben Sessions on September 17th, 2026 in Car / Auto Accident, Personal Injury

If you were hit at Pio Nono Avenue and Eisenhower Parkway, the other driver’s insurance adjuster is going to treat your crash as an isolated event — one driver, one mistake, one afternoon. Georgia Department of Transportation data tells a different story about that intersection, and it is worth knowing what the State’s own engineers have written down.

The numbers, from GDOT’s corridor study

GDOT published a corridor study of State Route 247 — Pio Nono Avenue — analyzing five years of crash data from 2014 through 2018. Across the whole corridor it counted 630 crashes: 207 injury crashes, 423 property-damage-only, six pedestrian crashes, and one bicycle crash.

Three intersections accounted for a startling share of that total.

Pio Nono at Eisenhower Parkway (SR 22): 243 crashes over five years — 48.6 per year — including 60 injury crashes. Rear-end collisions dominated, at 130 crashes, or 53% of the total. GDOT’s own assessment was that the crash rate here is “over ten times higher than intersections with similar characteristics.”
Pio Nono at Mercer University Drive (SR 74): 163 crashes, 32.6 per year, 61 of them injury crashes — a 37% injury rate. Again rear-end dominant, at 91 crashes.
Pio Nono at Anthony Road: 86 crashes, 17.2 per year, 36 injury crashes. Here the mix shifts: 40 rear-end and 30 angle crashes.

Read those together and a pattern emerges. This is a corridor where drivers are repeatedly surprised by stopped traffic, and where the intersection design and signal timing are producing that surprise at a rate the State itself flags as an outlier.

Why “over ten times higher” is a phrase worth holding onto

In a typical rear-end case, the defense position writes itself: the following driver should have been paying attention, the crash was avoidable, and the claim is worth whatever a soft-tissue claim is worth.

Documented corridor-level crash history complicates that. It does not hand you the case — the driver behind you is still responsible for driving with due care and for keeping a safe following distance — but it does three useful things:

It reframes the crash. A location that generates 48.6 crashes a year is not producing them by coincidence.
It can implicate other parties. Where a roadway condition, sight-distance problem, or signal-timing issue contributes, the responsible party may not be only the driver. Claims touching GDOT or Macon-Bibb County run into sovereign immunity and strict notice deadlines — including, for the county, a written notice we treat as due within six months — so these have to be identified early or not at all.
It supports the severity of the impact. Adjusters routinely argue that a low-speed rear-end crash cannot cause a real injury. On an arterial where posted speeds and approach speeds are what they are on Pio Nono and Eisenhower, that argument gets much weaker.

The rear-end problem specifically

Georgia has no rule and no presumption making the rear driver automatically at fault. Negligence, diligence, and proximate cause are questions for the jury. What plaintiffs have is a strong practical inference drawn from the duties every driver owes — and that inference can be answered with evidence of a sudden unexplained stop, a non-functioning brake light, a third vehicle, or a driver who cut in. On a corridor generating this much rear-end volume, defense lawyers raise these arguments routinely, and the evidence that rebuts them is largely gone within days.

What survives, if someone goes and gets it:

The crash report from the responding agency — in the city, the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office; on the interstate, Georgia State Patrol.
Signal timing and any GDOT maintenance or complaint records for the intersection.
Business surveillance video from the commercial properties along both roads, which is typically overwritten in somewhere between 72 hours and 30 days.
Vehicle event data, which tells you speed and braking in the seconds before impact — and which disappears when the car is repaired or sold for salvage.

That last one matters more than most people realize. The moment your vehicle is totaled and hauled off, the data in it is out of your control.

What to do if you were hurt there

Get evaluated. Rear-end crashes at arterial speeds produce cervical and lumbar injuries that do not present fully for a day or two, and a gap in treatment is the first thing an adjuster will point to.

Get the crash report from the correct agency, and read it. Diagrams and narratives at high-volume intersections are frequently wrong about lane position and sequence, and a correction is far easier in week one than in month eight.

Say very little to the other driver’s insurer. You are not required to give them a recorded statement, and on a rear-end claim they are largely looking for a sentence they can use to argue you stopped suddenly.

Where to go from here

Our Macon office is at 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319, a few minutes from the courthouse. If you were hurt at Pio Nono and Eisenhower, or anywhere on that corridor, the consultation is free and there is no fee unless we recover for you. (470) 225-7710.

Sessions & Fleischman, LLC — Macon office: 544 Mulberry Street, Suite 319, Macon, GA 31201 | (470) 225-7710
Responsible attorney for the content of this page: Ben Sessions, Georgia Bar No. 141280.

This article is general information about Georgia law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different and past results do not predict future outcomes.

Contingent attorneys’ fees refers only to those fees charged by attorneys for their legal services. Such fees are not permitted in all types of cases. Court costs and other additional expenses of legal action usually must be paid by the client.