By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com
Sanford’s city council has joined Broadway and Lee County by voting to approve the forwarding of a list that ranks the highest priority transportation projects within the county during the next ten years to the Central Pines Rural Planning Organization.
The list was developed in June by the Lee County Transportation Committee and contains a proposed priority ranking of essential transportation support systems planners project will be needed by the county by 2034. The compiled list is used to help determine priorities for state Department of Transportation funding through its Strategic Transportation Investments Prioritization program and does not include the need for improvements along major highways since these are covered by a different source of funding.
The Central Pines RPO uses a data-driven process to determine local needs, but it is also designed to be responsive to what leaders at the local level see as essential for the county’s future. CPRPO serves all of Lee County, along with portions of Moore, Chatham, and Orange counties that do not exist within a metropolitan area.
Once the projects on the lists submitted by each of the four counties have been assigned a numeric score, the CPRPO staff compiles a priority listing of projects for all four counties. Each county is guaranteed to have at least two projects appearing on the final list, and the three next-highest scoring projects on the list are also added to the final tabulation, regardless of which county they come from.
There are drawbacks, however, to the process. Its design looks at current transportation needs instead of trying to anticipate what the county’s needs will look like in the future, and no one is more frustrated with it than Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon.
“I have spoken with DOT about it, because we find it frustrating, and all of our local partners do,” she said. “We know that as we plan things, where there are going to be major hang ups in growth where we see a major industrial development or a residential development is planned, and the DOT does not allow for that to be incorporated into their planning. For us to be trying to make good forward-planning decisions while they are just taking on-the-ground numbers of ‘this is how many accidents you have had’ and ‘this is what your congestion ratio is today’ and that’s all the points you get, even though we can say to them that by the time you finish this project, those numbers are going to be dramatically higher, they just say, ‘okay.’ So, it’s very frustrating.”
Another issue with the scoring system is that the numbers assigned to each project by DOT carry much greater weight than any that are attached at the regional or district level, meaning it’s very difficult for a county or a city, or even a group of them, to move a project higher up the priority list than the score already assigned to it.
Even so, local leaders like the city council, as well as Broadway’s town board and the Lee County Board of Commissioners, are grateful to have some say in where the money goes and how it gets spent.
The top five
Here’s a look at the top five projects recommended by the Lee County Transportation Committee and which have now been submitted to CPRPO:
#1 – Widening of Colon Road between U.S. 1 and Deep River Road to multi-lanes and extending the road as two lanes on the four-lane right-of-way on a new location from Deep River Road to U.S. 15-501. This project is the highest priority for economic development purposes, with the Central Carolina Enterprise Park nearing capacity, a possible new industrial park off Deep River Road, and the continuing development of the 1,000-homes subdivision of Galvin’s Ridge.
#2 – Site development for the Phase 2 expansion of the corporate hangar apron at the Raleigh Executive Jetport off Farrell Road in Sanford. With industrial sites for Kyowa Kirin and VinFast just minutes away, this project is the highest priority for the Jetport during the next several years.
#3 – Improve bike and pedestrian access from downtown to O.T. Sloan Park, the Lee County Library, Lee County High School, and Central Carolina Community College.
#4 – Construction of sidewalks and installation of median refuge islands at six intersections along Seventh Street from Weatherspoon Street to Bragg Street, improving pedestrian access in a neighborhood that has a high population of residents without personal vehicles.
#5 – Improve safety at the N.C. 87 intersection in front of Carolina Trace with “reduced conflict” design, due to severe crashes. The reduced conflict intersection design is increasingly used by DOT to reduce the potential for serious accidents in high traffic locations. A number of these were installed when the G.B. Alford Highway, or Highway 55 bypass, was upgraded in Holly Springs a few years ago.
The Sanford City Council agreed with the rankings as developed by the Lee County Transportation Committee and they will now be forwarded to CPRPO.
Personally, I would like to see bike lanes on Wicker St. between Legion Drive and Carthage Street. That stretch of road is very dangerous for cyclists trying to get to Kiwanis Park or the beginning of the bike lane between Kiwanis Park and Carthage Street from Legion Drive.
Number 5 makes little sense to me. You want people turning in a U turn at the bottom of a steep hill in an area that was rezoned to include a quarry which means heavy and loaded truck traffic? You have a new residential community just rezoned above that intersection. Makes no sense when you could substitute traffic enforcement and perhaps lower speed limits as density increases. Or just delay the turn and through traffic lights coming out of Trace to assure that traffic coming from the south has really time to get stopped. Those items could be done for 10% of what is proposed.
Thinking about #5 again:
1. Post no turn on red signs for Frank Wicker and Traceway.
2. Delay the green light 5 seconds after 87’s red to allow vehicles coming down the hills on 87 that can’t stop and plow through the intersection to clear.
3. Enforcement.
I suspect you could fund another Sheriff for several years for the cost of the expansion, u-turn lanes and traffic lights that are required by the #5 proposal. And I suspect the u-turn lanes will just move the location of the accidents.