If ever there was a spot in Lawrence where spending $500,000 in state money for road improvements would be easy, you’d think it would be on 23rd Street.

But so far it hasn’t been.

City leaders this week are moving forward on a new project aimed at reducing the number of driveways along the busy east-west stretch of road.

“These projects are taking a lot of time,” said Chuck Soules, the city’s director of public works. “It takes a lot of hand-holding, a lot of meetings with businesses.”

Since 2005, the city has had about a half million dollars in state funding to offer as an incentive for businesses to voluntarily give up a driveway and instead share a driveway with a neighboring business.

Commissioners next week are poised to take bids on the latest effort in that program: an $80,000 project to build a new shared driveway for the University Book Shop and O’Reilly Auto Parts in the 1100 block of West 23rd Street.

But the project is only the third that the city has been able to undertake since receiving the state money. Even after this project is done, the city will still have more than $400,000 in state money, and about $300,000 in city money set aside for the 23rd Street efforts.

Under the details of the program, the state and the city will pay for 75 percent of the costs of building a new driveway for a business. The projects often include ancillary benefits to businesses such as new sidewalks and improvements to adjacent parking areas, the costs of which also are largely picked up by the city and the state. In this case, the businesses are paying a total of $16,000. The state is expected to pay about $50,000 and the city is expected to pay about $15,000.

The idea behind the program is that if the number of access points along the congested stretch of road can be reduced, the likelihood of rear-end or left-turn accidents also will decline.

But asking businesses to change their access points is tricky business. Brad Heins, manager of the University Book Shop, said businesses are always worried about asking customers to relearn how to access their business. Plus, most business owners aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of having construction going on in front of their stores.

“It is hard to pull the trigger on a project that potentially could make it more difficult for customers to get to you for a while,” Heins said. “But if you can weather the storm, it probably makes good sense for the long term.”

Heins said he ultimately ended up being in favor of the idea because the project will make his parking lot more efficient.

Soules said he thinks the project will improve traffic flow on 23rd Street by removing one driveway.

The city previously has done two other projects as part of the program. In 2006, they consolidated two driveways into one for the Long John Silver’s and Mongolian BBQ restaurants; and in 2007, three driveways were consolidated into one to serve the CVS drugstore and the El Mezcal Mexican restaurant.

Soules hopes that as more driveway consolidation projects occur, other businesses will see that the stores weren’t hurt by sharing a driveway.

He thinks if enough businesses participate, noticeable improvements to traffic flow will occur. Plus, he said he thinks consolidating driveways is a more palatable way to improve traffic flow than adding a median to the road.

“I’m not saying it would happen tomorrow, but if years down the road we’re having lots of accidents and increased traffic, the way we’ll probably have to deal with that is a big median,” Soules said. “And nobody wants that.”