Opinion: Change needed for DOT’s bridge at Stadium and Jenkins

The North Carolina Department of Transportation will soon reschedule the local meetings for the proposed conversion of Capital Boulevard/U.S. 1 to a freeway, and local people should look carefully at the plan to build a bridge over the freeway to connect Stadium Drive and Jenkins Road.

This is a bad plan. It does not take into consideration the thousand or so students and their parents at Wake Forest High School, the necessity for the Jenkins Road fire station trucks to access Capital easily or the fact that there will be no access from Capital for the Wake Forest Crossing shopping center.

There should be a full-access interchange at that location.

Please go to the meeting when it is rescheduled and tell the DOT representatives how a bridge will not serve all the people who travel that intersection daily. The plans need to be redrawn.

Do not be swayed by DOT’s claims that it would be too expensive to change the plans at this point. DOT used the “we don’t have the money” excuse when it came to the intersection of the N.C. 98 Bypass (The Calvin Jones Highway) and South Main Street in Wake Forest and  built it as an at-grade intersection rather than extending the railroad bridge and adding off-on ramps to allow traffic on both roads to flow unimpeded. The result has been accidents, wasted time and gasoline and sometimes fuming drivers.

DOT plans a full interchange at Harris Road/Purnell Road where there is much less traffic than at Stadium Drive/Jenkins Road. Since the Stadium/Jenkins intersection will be in the fourth segment of construction – everything north of Durham Road to Harris/Purnell – and could not be built until 2024 at the earliest, there is ample time to plan for the full interchange at Stadium and Jenkins.

And remember there was an easement for an interchange on the Wakefield side of the Capital Boulevard and South Main Street/Falls of the Neuse intersection that lapsed because DOT did not want to put in an interchange that would have relieved the same problems we see a couple miles farther north every day.

We need a freeway that provides as much safety as possible for drivers combined with the access necessary for emergency vehicles, traffic of all types and commercial enterprises.