MOULTRIE, Ga. — Colquitt County farmers have been getting late-night knocks on their doors from weary drivers, but it’s no traveling salesman seeking shelter or eyeing the farmer’s daughter, it’s people who want to know: “Where the heck am I?”

With GPS systems routing drivers traveling between the Tallahassee and Atlanta areas on the county-maintained Thigpen Trail, traffic has increased, county officials say. But the drivers often find that the less-traveled road wasn’t all that poet Robert Frost made it out to be.

“(GPS) is taking them up Thigpen Trail until they hit (Highway) 270 and GPS melts down,” Colquitt County Commissioner Paul Nagy said. “They’re stuck four miles outside Doerun looking for (Interstate) 75.”

While there is comedy in the situation, people who live near that intersection aren’t laughing.

Nagy, whose District 5 includes Thigpen Trail, said that lost drivers are knocking on doors after dark trying to find out where they are and the quickest way to get out of it.

“It’s a privacy issue,” he said. “It’s a matter of privacy, (because) they have so many people stopping.”

Hamilton Elementary School, located at the point where Highway 202 becomes Thigpen Trail, sometimes has several drivers stopping in a day asking to use the restroom, for directions or both, Nagy said.

On Wednesday, Nagy, Commissioner Mark DeMott, and Sheriff Rod Howell were among a group meeting with Georgia Department of Transportation officials.

The focus was on safety, mainly dealing with Thigpen Trail at its intersections with Highways 37, 270 and 111.

At all three of those, traffic on the county roadway have stop signs while the traffic on the state routes do not.

The problem seems to be that the people routed along Thigpen Trail are not familiar with the roadway and many simply are oblivious to the stop signs and cross busy Highway 37 without stopping, officials said.

In several recent accidents there, including one that killed an Atlanta woman riding with a driver from Tallahassee in December, there were no skid marks, indicating the drivers on Thigpen never tried to brake, Howell said.

Or “people stop and pull out in front of traffic,” he said. “The majority of wrecks there is people going north.”

If a driver stops and looks left, then right, before pulling into the intersection, traffic coming from the left can come from seemingly out of nowhere as there is a hill on 37 close to the intersection.

“It’s a simple fact people run the stop sign,” sheriff’s Capt. Julius Cox said. “On the weekends 75 to 80 percent of the tags (on Thigpen) are from north Florida or Atlanta. They punch in the shortest route from Atlanta to Tallahassee,” which takes drivers off I-75 in Cordele, then through Sylvester and Thomasville.

To address the safety issue, the county will look to place signs warning of a dangerous intersection on Thigpen at the three intersections. Flashing lights could be placed as a warning as well.

Randy Rathburn, the Department of Transportation’s district traffic engineer, told the group that an intersection control evaluation is being performed at 37 and Thigpen, with the results probably being ready around early summer.

“We explore different options,” he said. “We look at what will work and what’s most economically feasible.”

The Wednesday meeting was the third between state and county officials since November. Following a state traffic engineering report completed earlier this year larger stop signs, more reflective materials and a sign warning that cross traffic does not stop were added.

In that study, DOT reported average annual daily traffic recorded on Jan. 31, 2017, and Feb. 1, 2018, of 1,840 vehicles a day on Highway 37, and 820 per day on Thigpen Trail.

From January 2012 through February 2018 there were 18 reported crashes at the intersection, resulting in one fatality, according to the study.

With the amount of traffic on Thigpen Trail seeming to be growing — mostly attributable to out-of-town drivers — more needs to be done, Nagy said.

“It’s a matter of time before we have a bad accident there,” he said during an interview following the meeting. “The volume of traffic has changed.”