Opinion: Why no interchange at Stadium/Jenkins?

Like many of you I signed up to hear what the North Carolina Department of Transportation officials had to say about the plans to reduce traffic congestion and speed traffic on Capital Boulevard. Like many of you I agree that the current congestion and rapid increase in northern Wake population make a plan like the current one more than necessary and needed yesterday.

What I could not agree with was the plan for a flyover bridge with service roads at the Stadium/Jenkins intersection. Why is it the red-headed orphan?

That intersection has one of the largest if not the largest shopping and services center in the area, it has a large amount of the school traffic – buses and personal cars – at Wake Forest High School and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and it has increasing traffic from the wealth of residential subdivisions to the west. Why does it not need the same interchange needed at Durant/Perry Road, Burlington Mills and Harris/Purnell? Harris and Purnell definitely do not have the same amount of traffic that we see at Stadium and Jenkins.

Somebody ought to stand up and tell us why Stadium/Jenkins is treated like this – and it dates back to the first days of the plan. I am being assured that Wake Forest officials have been loud and long all the time pressing for a full interchange with no result.

NCDOT is not always right. All you have to do is look at the traffic snarl the NC 98 Bypass creates on South Main Street. Rather than extending the bridge over the CSX Rail line, NCDOT chose the solution that was cheaper at the time – making an intersection with traffic signals after raising the level of South Main to meet the Bypass. What has it cost in lives lost, in untold injuries, in property loss because of collisions and of thousands of hours of the time of Wake Forest Police officers, Wake Forest Firemen and Wake County EMS paramedics, to say nothing about the time lost by motorists daily, waiting for a light to change? That has to be counted against the much less it would have cost to make it a grade-separated interchange where traffic in all directions could flow smoothly.

NCDOT plans now are going to affect land use in the future, no more so than the several acres of the former Schrader-Bellows-Parker Hannifin land along Wake Union Church Road. With no interchange planned there, with Wake Union Church Road likely to be extended as a service road, the current plan means there will never be a shopping center or much commercial use of the land.

The answer about Stadium/Jenkins cannot come from the project manager, who had a portfolio of soothing answers for everything. At least we could hear him; many of the DOT responders were so garbled no one could figure out what they said. Somehow I would have thought DOT would have planned a way around that problem, like more microphones?

I do not want to see Circle Drive paved over. I am not sure the possibilities offered for the Gresham Lake intersection will solve all problems. Why no bus lanes? We definitely need two bridges for the service roads over the Neuse River. These questions/problems can be or may be ironed out as the planning proceeds, but we have to tackle the Stadium/Jenkins problem right away.

Was it just financial? Did someone say back around 2003, “Geez guys, this is getting expensive and we have to find a way to cut costs. How about just a flyover on Stadium/Jenkins?” Or was it political, and if it was, who did it benefit? Or is there another answer?

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