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(Road
roundup is a standing feature of the
Gazette, designed to keep people
informed about the progress of the
various street and road projects in
town. New projects or updated projects
will appear at the top of each week’s
column in blue.)
Drivers on South Main Street (U.S.
1-A) will have a break this
summer; there will be no construction.
However, drivers on South Franklin
Street need to be aware there will be
disruption later this year (see below).
The town is collecting
survey data for the widening of South
Main between Forbes and Forestville
roads to three lanes – two travel lanes
and a turn lane. In May the
commissioners approved a contract with
Kimley-Horn Associates for $196,774 for
the engineering and design.
Deputy Town Manager Roe
O’Donnell has said the project will cost
between $1.1 and $1.3 million because
“very little right-of-way acquisition”
will be necessary. The money will come
from the $9.5 million bond issue
approved in the spring of 2005. At that
time, $1 million was earmarked to widen
South Main from Rogers Road to Forbes
Road, but last fall residents
overwhelmingly disapproved the town’s
plan for four travel lanes divided by a
4-foot concrete median that would have
prevented left turns.
Construction is planned for
next spring for the widening.
* * * *
The South Franklin
Street project – two
roundabouts, a median between East
Holding and East Elm avenues and gateway
signs – will go out for bids in July
with construction planned for this fall.
The engineers, Kimley-Horn, project the
cost at $3.8 million.
The plan, according to
Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell, is
for a 17-foot median with trees and
shrubs and 17-foot travel lanes. On each
side of the redesigned roadway will be
6-foot sidewalks separated from the
street by 6 feet of grass and trees.
The work will be paid for by
the $9.5 million street and sidewalk
bonds town voters approved in May of
2005. At that time, the commissioners
projected the Franklin Street project –
two roundabouts and the treed median –
would cost $2.4 million.
South Franklin Street will
become a major gateway to the historic
South White Street downtown.
* * * *
Wake Forest Director of
Engineering Eric Keravuori said this
week his office is still reviewing the
draft traffic study for Star Road,
a study that has gained new complexity
because the owners of the quarry on the
west side of Capital Boulevard,
Benchmark Carolina Aggregates (formerly
Nello Teer), want input.
The quarry, which plans to
double in size in the future, has 350
trucks entering and leaving each day,
Keravuori said.
Along with all the
developments underway, planned or
possible along deadend Star Road, the
town must also take into account the
plans to make Capital Boulevard a
limited-access freeway and the Wake
Forest transportation plan, which calls
for a new road linking Star Road with
Ligon Mill Road. Star Road runs from
South Main Street and ends near where
the CSX rail line goes under Capital
Boulevard.
Dan Caster, who owns A-1
Storage on Star Road, has purchased the
former Starlite Motel and Pawn Shop
acting as Wake Forest Gateway Center. He
has a sign up offering to build to suit,
and a restaurant is reportedly
interested.
Daryl Cady of Cady
Construction has purchased land
immediately to the north of Living Word
Family Church from Allen Massey and Jeff
Looper and is grading for the five-lot
commercial subdivision they gained
zoning approval for.
That subdivision may become
part of the larger LaScala Uptown, a mix
of retail space and offices, that Cady
is planning.
One reason the town
contracted for the study with Kimley-Horn
Associates, the costs of which will be
charged back to developers, is the
limited access to the road. A median in
South Main Street restricts movement to
only right in, right out. There are two
crossover access points to the road from
Capital.
“Everything can’t just dump
out onto Capital Boulevard,” Keravuori
said.
Another aspect of the study
is a possible link to Ligon Mill Road.
There is such a link with no firm
alignment on the town’s transportation
plan. The link would give fire trucks
from Station #2 on Ligon Mill Road much
easier access to Star Road, but the road
would have to avoid the historic
Hartsfield house and be west of the CSX
rail line.
* * * *
Now that the Wake Forest
commissioners have approved the Alexan
at Ligon Mill, a 288-unit apartment
complex just north of Wal-Mart and east
of The Shoppes at Caveness Farm, the
town is pretty much assured Ligon
Mill Road will be extended from
South Main Street to the N.C. 98 bypass
within the foreseeable future.
The Alexan developers,
Trammell Crow Residential, will remove
the sewer pump station in the road’s
right-of-way, build two of the four
future road lanes and grade for the
remaining two travel lanes and median.
Their section of the road will go from
the current end near Wal-Mart to
Caveness Farm Avenue.
Also Parker & Orleans of
Cary, the firm building Reynolds Mill
subdivision on Forbes Road, must build
the eastern two lanes of the road up to
the bypass before the seventy-fifth
building permit is issued.
The third leg of the
assurance is that the master plan for
The Shoppes at Caveness Farm included a
requirement to complete Ligon Mill to
the bypass. Weingarten Realty Investors
which is developing The Shoppes with Bob
Hughes Associates has announced
Steinmart will be one of the stores at
the center.
Building Ligon Mill north of
bypass will depend on the development of
that area. The town’s transportation
plan does call for it to extend to N.C.
98 (Durham Road) in the vicinity of the
Wake Forest Business Park and McDonald’s
and then go northward. Some of the
future alignment depends on the plans
for the Capital Boulevard (U.S. 1)
corridor plan.
* * * *
The Town of Wake Forest had a traffic
study done for the Gateway Commons
shopping center on Jones Dairy, the
bypass, the future Friendship Chapel and
the future Heritage Lake Road, and it
includes some major changes on Jones
Dairy Road.
The study talks about the
two bridge replacements on Jones Dairy
that are planned for 2009 and recommends
the connection of Friendship Chapel to
Jones Dairy be done in that same year
when traffic will be minimal. The
bridges will be replaced sequentially,
one at a time, because there are homes
between them. The bridge just south of
Friendship Chapel will have a 79-foot
cross-section, large enough for two
travel lanes and a northbound left-turn
lane. “This width is also sufficient to
handle a five-lane section and a
sidewalk in the future in the event
Jones Dairy Road is widened to a
four-lane facility.”
At the intersection of Jones
Dairy and Chalk Road, the study
recommends left- and right-turn lanes on
Jones Dairy and Chalk Road and
monitoring traffic volumes to see if a
signal is needed.
The study does not include
anything about the town’s plan to
re-align Chalk Road to meet the entrance
of Bowling Green subdivision, a move
which would put it farther from the
bridge and stream.
There will also be turn
lanes in both directions on Jones Dairy
at its intersection with Friendship
Chapel. Again, the traffic volumes will
be monitored to determine when a traffic
signal should be installed.
* * * *
This column had told readers
they could find information about road
projects at the town’s web site, but
that is no longer true. The list of
street projects has not been updated
since last fall.
* * * *
Did it take this long to
build a pyramid? Recently CAMPO Senior
Transportation Planner Kenneth Withrow
said it will take 20 to 30 years and
$487 million to make Capital Boulevard
into an eight-lane limited access
thoroughfare. The cost estimate is in
2006 dollars so we can be assured the
amount will continue to rise.
The preferred alternative
has three regular travel lanes and an
HOV lane on each side, a raised median
and access roads in front and in back of
homes and businesses along the highway.
There would be 10 interchanges where
traffic could get on or off intersecting
roads and nine grade-separated
crossings. One of those fly-overs is
planned at Stadium Road.
In the short term, Withrow
said, CAMPO (Capital Area Metropolitan
Planning Organization) plans bus service
in and around Wake Forest that will go
to Raleigh and the Research Triangle
Park.
Also, Wake Forest Planning
Director Chip Russell said two weeks ago
CAMPO will try to place two of the
interchanges on the state’s
Transportation Improvement Plan – those
at South Main-New Falls of Neuse and
Durant-Perry Creek.
The next step is for the
affected governments to adopt a
memorandum of understanding for the
project. The changes would reach from
the I-540 interchange to U.S. 1-A north
of Youngsville.
You can see the study area
at
http://www.ncdot.org/~us1study.
* * * *
When the Bowling Green
subdivision was approved in 2004 – 283
single-family homes and 94 townhouses –
the plan included an entrance/exit on
Wait Avenue (N.C. 98) that was offset
from the Bishop’s Grant entrance across
the street by 200 or so feet, depending
on who measured. The state Department of
Transportation and the Town of Wake
Forest said the entrances/exits should
line up, a safety measure on a
heavily-traveled road in an area with
five driveways within half a mile. DOT
and the town had agreed to a Bowling
Green entrance on Jones Dairy Road at
the Chalk Road intersection.
Many of the residents along
Wait were concerned, too, and urged the
entrances be aligned.
When the plan was approved,
the town specified the interior street
from Jones Dairy Road to Wait Avenue be
completed before Jan. 1, 2006, because
DOT planned to close the northern
portion of Jones Dairy Road early in
2006 to rebuild two bridges.
“The Bowling Green
connection (to Wait Avenue) has finally
cleared DWQ and we have the construction
plans in-house now,” Director of
Engineering Eric Keravuori said last
week. “It will get started as soon as it
gets approved by the town within a month
or so.” (DWQ is the state Division of
Water Quality.)
The entrance will be aligned
with the Bishop’s Grant entrance.
As for the bridges,
Keravuori said DOT had delayed the
reconstructions, which are now scheduled
for 2009.
For a full account of the
issues about the driveway, see the March
9 and March 16, 2005, issues of the
Gazette in the archives.
* * * *
Within the next year, the
town and DOT will evaluate the impact of
the N.C. 98 bypass on local traffic and
make some changes. One would be to
revisit the idea of a large roundabout
around the campus with traffic flowing
counter-clockwise, allowing for right
turns only.
The analysis could also
affect truck traffic. The state is
supposedly contemplating marking a truck
route through town, and the residents
along North Main Street are adamant that
through truck traffic be banned from
their street.
The construction contract
for the third leg of the bypass –
Section A from Capital Boulevard to N.C.
98 near Thompson Mill Road – will not be
awarded until next year, 2008. The
project will include re-aligning Falls
of the Neuse Road to connect with
Thompson Mill Road.
* * * *
In the future, there will be
at least 12 sets of traffic signals on
the 4.8-mile N.C. 98 bypass.
We already have those at
Jones Dairy Road and business N.C. 98
(Wait Avenue), those at South Main
Street and the four sets at Capital
Boulevard.
Between Jones Dairy and
South Main, there may be signals where
Heritage Lake Road intersects but does
not cross the bypass, and it is certain
there will be signals at the
intersection when Franklin Street is
extended into Heritage.
To the west of South Main,
there will certainly be signals when
Ligon Mill Road is built to meet or
cross the bypass.
In the third section, we can
count on at least one set of signals in
Wakefield, another at the realigned
Falls of the Neuse Road, and a third at
Thompson Mill Road.
Depending on the development
of the land and whether the northern and
southern portions of Siena Drive are
connected, there could be another set of
signals.
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