Jonesboro, AR – Jonesboro Right Now – Shovels hit the dirt Wednesday morning as city officials broke ground on the expansion of Caraway Road.

The project will expand Caraway Road to five lanes from I-155 to Latourette Drive, before transitioning to three lanes to Glenn Place. In addition, around 1.5 miles of side path will be built to improve and accommodate pedestrian safety and mobility. With additional vehicle capacity, officials said the expansion will reduce southbound congestion on Caraway Road.

“Just a few weeks ago, this was a two-lane road with 15,000 cars going down it each day. You had pedestrian pathways that were beaten down by foot, walking just a mere inches from cars going 40 and 45 miles an hour,” city’s chief administrative officer Brian Richardson told JRN.

The project will be completed in two construction sessions, one this year, and the other starting next summer. Richardson said an exact competition date is not yet known, but the city will know more when officials evaluate the progress made before winter hits.

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The roughly $5.5 million road expansion is part of a larger series of projects aimed to improve public safety and infrastructure in the city, funded through a $17.5 million revenue bond the Jonesboro City Council approved in June 2025. The bonds also fund the city’s upcoming E911/Real Time Crime Center, which officials broke ground on in early July, and several new pedestrian- and bike-friendly trails across the city.

These projects are part of the city’s Destination 100K, a plan to improve city infrastructure and resources as Jonesboro’s population nears 100,000. The revenue bonds themselves represent no tax increase to the public and are supported through franchise fees primarily paid to the city by utility companies using city rights-of-way.

During the ceremony, officials said they hoped the expansion would not only expand future development in the area but also provide a safer access to Nettleton’s Fox Meadow School campuses.

“There’s a lot of multi-family housing that’s right here around this area, and a lot of kids that are having to take back roads in and out to school, and we’ve also got The Learning Center and stuff that’s also down here, down to the south,” city councilmember Brian Emison told JRN. “Focusing on anything that we can do to make the City of Jonesboro’s infrastructure safer for not just for pedestrians, but also for motorists, that’s the direction that we’re trying to go.”

As the project continues, Richardson said the city would continue to evaluate other potential pedestrian safety infrastructures in the area. He said the city will listen to public feedback and if the need for such infrastructure develops the city will entertain it.

In a news release sent earlier this week, city officials said this project had been discussed for over a decade before funding became available.

“It’s hard to explain these moments. It comes with a lot of hard work. It comes with a lot of dedication. It comes with listening to our community, it comes to prioritizing the needs of our community,” Mayor Harold Copenhaver said during the ceremony. “This project brings together all the attributes of what we need in this community: safety for our pedestrians, our schools, [and] the ability for transportation opportunity to provide for our businesses for our community [and] make it a better community.”

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