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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.)
The Wake Forest Town Board has approved
a contract with Narron Construction for
$3.08 million to build roundabouts,
medians, sidewalks and gateways on
South Franklin Street from
East Holding Avenue to Wait Avenue.
Construction will take about 16 months
and should be complete late in 2009. The
work, which will provide an entrance to
the historic downtown, is part of the
town’s work on the Renaissance Plan.
With landscaping (to be bid separately),
design, engineering, land acquisition
and lighting, the project is estimated
to cost $5.2 million and will be paid by
the $9.5 million street and sidewalk
bonds voters approved in the spring of
2005.
* * * *
Heritage Lake Road
now almost meets the N.C. 98 bypass.
Just recently it received its first coat
of asphalt, but that ends maybe 500 feet
short of the bypass. Heritage developer
Andy Ammons said there is no date yet to
connect the two, “but it should be this
year.” People on the east side of town
are anxious for the connection as it
will give them easy access to the
interior of Heritage, stores such as
Harris-Teeter and the two Heritage
schools.
“It (the intersection with
bypass) will be full movement with turn
lanes and signals,” Ammons said. As
discussed during the public hearing for
Gateway Commons Shopping Center, planned
for the southwest corner of the
bypass/Jones Dairy Road intersection,
Heritage Lake Road will also give access
to those stores and businesses.
That leads to the second
road from Heritage accessing Gateway
Commons – Friendship Chapel Road.
“We have completed our responsibilities
for Friendship Chapel,” Ammons said.
“The connection to Jones Dairy will be
made when the commercial projects on
Jones Dairy do their improvements. They
wanted us to stop 10 feet short.”
* * * *
A crew from the state
Department of Transportation’s Wake
County maintenance office has painted
the center line and road edges on
North White Street. The road has
been patched and crews have laid down
BST – bituminous surface treatment – in
anticipation of total resurfacing later
this summer or early fall. County
Maintenance Engineer Jason Holmes said
the BST needs to sit and cure to prevent
later crumbling.
* * * *
Drivers on South Main Street (U.S.
1-A) will have a break this
summer; there will be no construction.
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.
* * * *
Wake Forest Director of
Engineering Eric Keravuori said recently
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 dead-end 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.
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 a bit shaky since
Weingarten Realty Investors is
reportedly seeking to sell The Shoppes
at Caveness Farm shopping center despite
having named Steinmart as one of the
tenants.
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.
* * * *
Did it take this long to build a
pyramid? Earlier in 2007 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 has said 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.
* * * *
The Town of Wake Forest is
talking with DOT about changing the
timing of the traffic signals at the
N.C. 98 bypass intersection
with South Main Street to alleviate some
of the congestion on the street. Also,
there will be some improvements when
construction of Holding Village gets
underway.
* * * *
The construction contract
for the final leg of the N.C. 98
bypass – from Capital Boulevard
to N.C. 98 near Thompson Mill Road – is
scheduled to be awarded in 2008. It will
be a large project because it involves
re-aligning Falls of the Neuse Road to
connect with Thompson Mill, closing a
portion of N.C. 98, and building a new
connection to Thompson Mill from N.C.
98.
* * * *
DOT is supposed to mark a
truck route through town at some point,
and the residents along North Main
Street are adamant that through
truck traffic be banned from their
street.
* * * *
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 Galaxy
Drive, Capital Boulevard and Retail
Drive.
Between Jones Dairy and
South Main, there will be signals where
Heritage Lake Road meets the bypass in a
full movement intersection, and it is
certain there will be signals at the
intersection when South Franklin Street
is extended into Holding Village and
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. |
