WAXHAW, N.C. -- Development near a busy intersection in Waxhaw has made a bad situation worse, but progress is being made to avoid a crash like the one on York Road that claimed three lives.

Waxhaw Town Engineer Greg Mahar showed Eyewitness News reporter Kara Lusk why he thinks a traffic light is needed at the intersection of Waxhaw-Marvin Road and Kensington Drive. “There’s a lot of traffic that comes through here, parents taking their children to school, and there’s two new schools opening on Cuthbertson Road and there’s going to be a lot of teenagers traveling down this road,” he said.

Plans for the light were on the books for two years, but came to a halt when the area developer, Virginia-based Sandler Corp., went bankrupt. BB&T took over the project in March and is now footing the bill.

According to the Waxhaw Police Department, there have been more than a dozen accidents at the intersection, several of them serious. “They’ve had to airlift a couple people out of here because of the severity of the crashes,” Mahar said.

Mahar said the York Road crash increased the push for the light to be installed. “That was something that was awful, and we don’t want to have that happen here,” he said.

The state Department of Transportation expects a temporary traffic light to be installed at the intersection in the next several weeks. The goal is to have it up and running when school starts this fall.

Eventually, the intersection will be widened and a permanent signal with steel posts will go up. However, the timeline is still unknown because of the problems with the original developer.