Hopkinsville, Ky. ? Most days in Christian County, Amish horse-drawn buggies clip-clop through simple country scenes: cornfields framed with picket fences, farmland dotted with cattle, homes with smoke billowing from their chimneys and clotheslines fluttering in the wind.

But Sundays involve quite another scene: To get to church, the Amish families pull their traditional black buggies onto Highway 41, where large fluorescent-yellow road signs framed with flashing solar-powered lights guide their way.

Isaac Stoltzfus, a 28-year-old Amish dairy farmer, calls the signs “eye-catching.” Usually, this would not be a compliment from Stoltzfus, who tends to disapprove of garish displays – especially when they involve modern technology. Yet he urged transportation officials to install these signs to alert motorists to the presence of horse-drawn buggies on the highway.

Last year, an automobile ran into the back of Stoltzfus’ fiberglass buggy, throwing his family out of the carriage. His 2-year-old daughter, Barbara, was killed.

“It’s not a good feeling when a car drives past you at more than 55 miles an hour, especially if you’ve had an accident,” Stoltzfus said. “But it’s something we’ve had to get used to.”

Collisions are increasingly common on this four-lane highway between the Fort Campbell military base and Hopkinsville, the county seat. Every day, more than 22,000 vehicles whiz along this five-mile stretch, which has seen at least four crashes involving horse-drawn buggies in the past five years.

Throughout the country, transportation officials are introducing measures to prevent automobiles from crashing into horse-drawn buggies on roadways near Amish communities. They are widening roads and adding shoulders, designing road-safety manuals for buggy owners, building gravel pull-offs and interchanges that allow buggies to ride under and over expressways, and even establishing alternative buggy routes.

At the same time, many Amish families are refurbishing their buggies with modern technology – flashing LED taillights, Thermopane windows, windscreen wipers, rearview mirrors, all-wheel brake systems – in an effort to improve buggy safety.

But such modern attitudes toward buggies are not accepted by all members of the Amish community. Of the 220,000 Amish in North America, there are more than 24 subgroups, with widely different opinions on road safety.

In 2002, the Swartzentruber sect of the Old Order Amish won a legal battle against the Pennsylvania law that all slow-moving vehicles be marked with a reflective red triangle on the back to make them more visible to passing motorists. The group’s leaders successfully argued that the reflectors violated their belief in plain personal belongings. Instead, they outline the back of their buggies with gray reflective tape.

“We can’t really tell the Amish what to do; we can only make recommendations,” said Fritzi Schreffler, safety press officer for the Pennsylvania district that includes Lancaster County, which is home to one of the nation’s largest Amish settlements. There have been 146 crashes between buggies and vehicles in Lancaster County in the past five years, resulting in 205 injuries and seven deaths.

Though some Amish families still use kerosene lanterns and adorn their buggies with only the minimum of signs and lights required under state law, others put strobe lights on the top of their carriages and strings of lights along the reins of their horses. “They’re lit up like Christmas trees,” Schreffler said.