Motorists soon may be able to travel a bit faster on MacArthur Boulevard without risking a ticket.

The city is working on plans to raise the speed limit on the road between Wabash Avenue and Interstate 72 from a maximum of 40 mph to 45 mph. There has been no shortage of speeding citations written since the stretch of road opened seven years ago. Since 2010, Springfield police have issued more than 1,340 speeding tickets on the thoroughfare.

“The majority of the tickets, 99 percent were probably 12 mph over the posted limit,” says deputy chief Dennis Arnold.

The tickets haven’t resulted in a noticeable slowdown. Sgt. Charles Kean says that he gets one or two calls a week about speeders on MacArthur south of Wabash.

“It’s a race track,” Kean says. “The perception out there is, it looks like an interstate.”

The department’s traffic division targets roads based on patterns that include high accident rates, and MacArthur hasn’t made the list, Arnold says. Enforcement will continue to be on a random basis on the roadway.

“A lot of it is left to officer discretion,” Arnold said.

Police department records show 56 accidents on the road since 2010, most minor that resulted in no injuries. There have been at least four collisions with deer that ambled onto the road. A handful of serious accidents includes one this year in which a northbound driver traveling as fast as 70 mph clipped another vehicle.

The accident prompted police to conduct a traffic survey, which found that less than 9 percent of vehicles were traveling at or below the posted speed limit, which ranges from 40 mph on the southern stretch of MacArthur to 30 mph at the northern end as the roadway approaches Wabash. The average speed was 49 mph.

Lori Williams, city traffic engineer, said that she last week recommended to public works director Mark Mahoney that the speed limit be raised to 45 mph. The speed limit should be even higher, given that 85 percent of drivers on that stretch of road are traveling at 53 mph or slower, and speed limits are typically based on that 85 th percentile speed, Williams said. However, 45 mph is the maximum speed limit for a road equipped with curbs and gutters, which can cause serious damage when struck, she said.

Before the road was built, planners figured that it would convey more than 25,000 cars a day, but with fewer than 8,000 cars per day now using the road, the city has shut off traffic lights at deadend intersections to reduce maintenance costs and save on electricity. A decade ago, planners debated whether to build three lanes in each direction instead of two for the project that cost $47 million, including the expense of a new interchange at Interstate 72.

“When you punch MacArthur Boulevard down to I-72, that’s going to be gold,” predicted Mike Farmer, then director of the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development in a State Journal-Register story published in 2007.

Construction money came from a mix of state, federal and local funds, with politicians predicting that economic development enabled by the new road would make it worthwhile. Scheels was supposed to anchor a thriving so-called “lifestyle center” of outlet stores for such famed brands as Banana Republic that would be built in a pedestrian-friendly manner to evoke the feeling of a town square. But the outlet stores haven’t materialized. Neither has a sports complex nor a hotel, both of which had been proposed.

Taxes from a 1-percent surcharge on sales in the area, which is dominated by the Scheels sporting goods store that opened in 2011, have failed to cover debt service for $15 million in bonds sold to cover the developer’s portion of infrastructure costs, city records show. Property taxes were raised three years ago to service the debt, says William McCarty, city budget director.

The city wouldn’t be on the hook in the event there’s a bond default, McCarty said.

“There are obviously folks who assumed there’d be a bustling development out there,” McCarty said.

Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.