Crossing signals on dead-end street ‘data error’
The $113,000 worth of crossing signals and gates where Friendship Chapel Road crosses the CSX railroad tracks was “a data error,” Drew Thomas, the crossing safety engineering manager in the state Department of Transportation, said this week.
The signals and gates were installed as part of the Safe Roads for Safe Schools program to improve safety at railroad crossings around the state with a significant amount of school traffic. Julia Hegele, a spokesman for DOT, told a News & Observer reporter in March that eight Wake County school buses carrying 250 children pass through the Friendship Chapel Road crossing every day.
Friendship Chapel Road is a dead end. The one house left has been abandoned. A landscape contracting firm operating from the old Holding Farm buildings, Friendship Chapel Baptist Church and the Town of Wake Forest Public Works Center are the only occupants on the road.
There was an error, perhaps a mix-up between Friendship and East Holding Avenue to the north which does have bus traffic, Thomas said. The school system’s data base may have confused the two streets. Or, Thomas said, someone looking at the size of the new Friendship Chapel Baptist Church may have concluded there was a school operating there.
But, Thomas said, the new signals and gates would have been built anyway. “It does fit in with other aspects of our safety program,” he said.
Friendship was slated to have signals and gates as part of the Wake Forest Traffic Separation Study, Thomas said. That study also called for closing the Forestville Road and East Sycamore Avenue crossings, which has been done.
Thomas said money for the Safe Roads for Safe Schools program and other crossing safety programs “all come from the same pot.” Ninety percent of the $113,000 was paid with federal funds, and the state DOT paid the rest. DOT and CSX Transportation will split the cost of maintaining the signals.
Thomas said the new gates and signals will provide additional safety from the four daily freight trains for church-goers and town employees.
Friendship Chapel Road, which had been a dirt farm road, was paved in 1993 by the state after the town bought the land for the public works center.
On East Holding, the automated gates and signals were installed in the fall of 1997, three years after a Wake Forest man was killed at the crossing. At the time, DOT said a backlog of requests had delayed the construction. There are 4,381 public railroad-street crossings in North Carolina, and about half have automated gates and signals.
With the installation on Friendship, all railroad crossings in Wake Forest are protected – East Holding, East Elm and Brick Street. A private crossing off South Main Street is protected by a gate. An unprotected crossing at East Juniper was closed at least 20 years ago.
Tommy Piper, the assistant superintendent for auxiliary services for the Franklin County Public School System, said last week that all crossings with school bus traffic in the county are now protected by automated gates and signals. One of the most recent installations was on Bert Winston Road.
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