Taken from the archives: The Wake Forest Gazette August 20, 2003, Volume 1, #15
Wake County’s plan to improve roads
Can you imagine Forestville Road with four lanes, a landscaped median and sidewalks on both sides?
You might also try to conjure up U.S. 401 from Ligon Mill Road up to Louisburg at four lanes with a median and sidewalks, and N.C. 98 from Wake Forest to the county lines rebuilt to the same specifications.
This is the vision of Wake County’s roads by 2025 as plotted by the county planning department and its consultant, Kimley-Horn.
By that year or shortly thereafter, houses, businesses and roads will stand on all the available buildable land in the county. “It will be totally built out in 2030,” Wake planner Timothy W. Clark said.
By a much closer date, 2010, Wake County will have the largest population of all 100 counties in the state. In the next 20 years, the state projects Wake’s population will grow from 658,490 (July 2001 figure) to 1.12 million, a 70 percent increase.
We will need more roads.
Although North Carolina’s counties like Wake have no part in constructing or maintaining roads and streets, the state Department of Transportation handed over the local planning function to Wake 10 years ago, Clark said during an open house at Wake Forest Town Hall Thursday night.
Complete with large maps and a slide show, the open house was part of a county-wide introduction to the transportation plan adopted by the Wake commissioners in April. The transportation plan complements the county’s growth management plan, which will be the subject of a joint town and planning board session Wednesday, Aug. 20, at 6:30 p.m. in town hall.
The county’s plan was initially just to identify and help connect local streets, but it grew to include thoroughfares, public transportation, bicycle paths, greenways and sidewalks. The plan did not include any streets or highways within existing town boundaries or zoning areas.
It ranges from very detailed to broad concepts. For instance, the plan has specific recommendations to improve the U.S. 401-N.C.96 intersection, and it will submit those recommendations to DOT for intersection-safety funding. Altogether, 59 of those spots were identified across the county.
Almost every street in the plan has sidewalks on both sides, and every street with more than two lanes includes a median lined with trees. People will drive slower on the median streets, Stephen M. Stansbery, one of the Kimley-Horn associates, said, making them safer.
The thrust of Stansbery’s slide show was the importance of interconnecting streets to save money, time and headaches.
In an interconnected network of streets, motorists have a variety of routes available to reach any destination. The interconnections reduce the pressure on major collectors and thoroughfares and disperse traffic through the web. One of Stansbery’s illustrations was the Fan District in Richmond, Va.
Where there are no interconnections, where cul-de-sac neighborhoods open only onto collector streets or thoroughfares, as in Los Angeles, trips to a neighbor may involve a round-about route along those collectors or thoroughfares.
But, Commissioner David Camacho said, people always object when we want to connect their streets to another neighborhood or street. They say their children ride their bikes or skate in the street.
First, Stansbery said, you can tell them the interconnection, along with a convenience for them to reach their destinations, is for safety. In the event of a storm, fallen trees could block a street. The second entrance allows emergency personnel to reach a scene.
“These are public streets,” Stansbery said, emphasizing the “public.” They are designed for everyone or anyone to drive on, not as playgrounds.
“Streets are the most important public spaces in a community,” Stansbery said.
The only visitors during the first hour of the open house were Mayor Vivian Jones and Commissioners Rob Bridges and Camacho.
The Wake County planning staff on hand were Melinda Clark, Kim Lartson and Melanie Wilson.
For more information about the transportation plan, you can call Clark at 856-6320. Also, I have a copy of the summary and a CD with the entire plan. If you want to borrow it, call me at 556-3409.
(To the editor’s knowledge, this was the only time the plan was mentioned in Wake Forest because it surely crashed into the reality of the limited funds for NCDOT. Don’t you wish it had become real?)
