Clay Street and Mission 66 make the second-busiest intersection for traffic in Vicksburg, but it appears to be right on the coattails of No. 1, Halls Ferry Road and Pemberton Square/South Frontage Road.

The most recently published Mississippi Department of Transportation traffic-count numbers from the locations closest to that intersection and the traditional traffic leader, Halls Ferry Road and South Frontage Road/Pemberton Square Boulevard, show that the two even, each with 16,000 vehicles a day.

That’s a swing of 3,000 vehicles a day from counts in the same locations four years earlier, when the Clay-Mission count was 15,000 and the Halls Ferry-Pemberton count was 18,000.

The manager of the McDonald’s at Clay Street and Mission 66 since 2004, Clarence Griffin, said the 1,000-vehicle-a-day rise in traffic at the intersection reflected in the MDOT numbers sounded plausible but that he hadn’t seen a noticeable increase in customer counts until after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, on Aug. 29.

&#8220From my understanding it’s always been the second-busiest intersection in town,” Griffin said, adding that the restaurant’s customer count has increased since Katrina.

A manager of a retail establishment near the Halls Ferry-Pemberton count location, Barry Bingham of Fred’s Super Dollar Store, said he grew up across the road from the store and that there’s a lot more traffic near there now than there was 30 years ago.

&#8220I don’t think the traffic’s dropped off at all,” Bingham said. &#8220If anything, it’s increased. You can’t pull out of here sometimes.”

Bingham said he remembered riding his bicycle with his friends and walking to the former Halls Ferry Elementary School in the early 1970s.

&#8220I wouldn’t dare send a child out here now,” he said.

The MDOT collects traffic-count data for 48 locations around Vicksburg and other places in Warren County.

&#8220The counts are made to obtain statewide vehicle-miles-traveled using statistics,” the MDOT Web site notes, adding a caution to users of the numbers that &#8220data may not be exact because of the methods used.”

An MDOT transportation planner, Monica Ramsey, said the counts are used mainly to determine overall traffic levels for each of the state’s cities and counties and for the state as a whole.

Vicksburg planning director Wayne Mansfield said he’s not sure the MDOT data provides much useful information for gauging trends in traffic patterns within the city.

Mansfield and Vicksburg public works director James &#8220Bubba” Rainer said the overall volume of traffic in Vicksburg has been stable over at least the past decade or so and that the city’s major traffic arteries were designed with some excess capacity. Officials were uncertain whether construction of the first casinos here, in the early 1990s, would lead to traffic congestion but that did not happen, Rainer said.

&#8220There’s nothing that’s jumped out or indicated that we’re having any problems,” Rainer said.

Except for the former Vicksburg Chemical site along the Mississippi River in southern Vicksburg, where some development is planned, there are no large tracts of land in the city limits left to develop, Mansfield said.

For example, &#8220There’s not going to be any more residential development along Mission 66,” Mansfield said.

Rainer said engineers order that traffic counts be done prior to construction of major planned projects, such as The Home Depot, 1300 S. Frontage Road, which opened in May 2003.

By their nature such counts are more reliable than those published on the MDOT maps, but the MDOT numbers are &#8220still a pretty good indication of what’s out there on the major thoroughfares,” Rainer said.

The largest non-interstate increase shown by the numbers is of 3,000 vehicles a day, at East Clay Street at the I-20 off-ramp. A manager of a restaurant near there, Colin Clark of McAlister’s Deli, also said he had seen increases in traffic and business, but mainly since Katrina.

An in-town stretch of thoroughfare showing an increase of 1,000, Mission 66 between East and Indiana avenues, has had its only restaurant, Toney’s, open along it during the past year. Its owner, Charles Toney, said he thinks traffic there is steady and increasing but that his selection of the location was based more on the location itself than the traffic that flows by it.

&#8220There are two clinics next door, another accountant’s office and another building going up,” Toney said. &#8220When you add all that up, it puts a lot of people together in one stretch.”

Despite the now-equal counts at the locations nearest the city’s two busiest intersections, Bingham said he thinks the intersection at Halls Ferry and Pemberton remains &#8220the crossroads” of Vicksburg.

&#8220If you think about it, that’s really the center of town now, in my view,” he said.