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Road Roundup
Update: A reader
asked why Heritage Lake Road is still not connected to the N.C. 98
bypass. “It seems someone has been dragging their feet in getting this completed.
I was part of a Heritage Homeowners Association meeting three years ago in
which it was announced that Heritage Lake would be opening within a year. Each
year since then, an announcement seems to come out about this time of year
saying it will be open sometime the following year. It just drags on and on.”
Heritage developer Andy Ammons shares
the sentiments. “There never seems to be an end point. They (the N.C.
Department of Transportation) just keep coming up with little deals,” Ammons
said last week.
He read an e-mail from one person in
DOT in early November saying the permit would be issued very shortly. Then,
Ammons said, someone from another section of DOT – pavement, stoplight, highway
encroachment, etc. – will want another small change or improvement. Ammons said
each person is very nice and the change is usually an improvement, but there is
no straight-forward system to go through. “We’ve answered everything they’ve
said. It’s just real frustrating.”
When built, the T intersection will have
a full set of traffic signals, allowing right and left turns from and onto each
road. Heritage Lake now ends about 500 feet from the bypass.
So, the answer is that there is no
answer but there will be one. Just stay tuned; the Gazette will try to get an
answer when there is one.
* * * *
The total cost for the N.C.
98 bypass will be $85 million, the state Department of Transportation
says, if the construction cost for the third and final section is not more than
the current estimate of $17,150,000.
The bid for that final section will be
let Thursday, Jan. 15.
The first section built, from Jones
Dairy Road to South Main Street (U.S. 1-A) cost $18.8 million, of which
$6,239,895 was to purchase the right-of-way and $12,522,666 was for the
construction. That section opened to traffic on Dec. 31, 2004.
The second section, from South Main
Street to Capital Boulevard, opened on June 15, 2006, and cost $38.8 million.
That cost breaks down to $14,537,755 for right-of-way acquisition and
$24,306,618 for construction.
The right-of-way for the third
section, from Capital Boulevard to Thompson Mill Road, has been purchased and
cost $8,702,857.
There is also a wetland mitigation
cost of $1,512,961 for the project as a whole.
After the bids are opened on Jan. 15 and
the apparent low bidder is known, it will be at least six to eight weeks before
construction can begin.
This final section
of the bypass will be built from Retail Drive to Thompson Mill Road to meet
N.C. 98. If you want to see the future road configuration in the area, there is
a large-scale map at the Wake Forest Planning Department building on Brooks
Street, and DOT plans to put a map of the road alignments on the internet in
the near future.
* * * *
Kimley-Horn
Associates, the engineering firm the town contracted with for a study of Star
Road, has completed its work. (The study cost will be billed back to
future developers.)
“It
basically said that without signals any future development is limited. The
Town, DOT, CAMPO, etc., are opposed to any traditional signals on Capital
Blvd.,” Director of Engineering Eric Keravuori wrote in an e-mail response to a
question from the Gazette. “Daryl Cady has hired Krista Green to develop some
creative solutions to help with the problem. Stay tuned.”
Star
Road is a dead-end road parallel to Capital Boulevard and probably was the site
for the original north-south road in the area. On the north, a concrete median
in South Main Street prevents left turns in and out of the road; on the south,
it ends just short of the Capital Boulevard bridge over the CSX rail line.
Businesses
along the road include Chris Leith’s Dodge-Chevrolet dealership, Luck Stone,
AUTP and A-1 Personal Storage. Dan Caster, who owns the storage business, has
purchased the former Starlite Motel and Pawn Shop. He is offering to build to
suit.
Cady,
who has town approval for the first phase of his La Scala project – a hotel,
office building and ballroom/convention center just north of Living Word Family
Church – wants a full intersection with signals at the present unsignalized
cross-over from Capital that accesses Star Road.
Cady
plans four phases for La Scala that include 239,200 square feet of office
space, 375,250 square feet of retail space and another hotel on 85.5 acres.
Planners
would like another connection to South Main Street from the southern end of
Star Road, and the town’s transportation plan calls for a link between Star
Road and Ligon Mill Road.
Another
consideration about traffic in the area is the quarry on the west side of Capital
Boulevard. Benchmark Carolina Aggregates plan to double in size in the near
future. There are already 350 trucks entering and leaving each day.
* * * *
Chalk Road will be re-aligned to
meet Jones Dairy Road at Green Mountain Drive, the entrance to the Bowling
Green subdivision. In October, the Wake Forest commissioners approved a
contract with Wetherill Engineering of Raleigh for $141,212.15 for the
preliminary design and surveying. Construction will be scheduled at the same
time the state Department of Transportation replaces the bridges on Jones Dairy
over Smith Creek and Austin Creek, which will begin in late 2009 or early 2010.
* * * *
Think there are traffic signals that
should be improved? Call Steve Johnson, the Division 5 traffic engineer, at 220-4600,
the new number for the Division 5 Durham office.
* * * *
Along with Heritage Lake Road (see this
week’s update, another road serving the Heritage area and Gateway Commons
Shopping Center at the corner of the N.C. 98 bypass and Jones Dairy Road is Friendship
Chapel Road, which intersects with Heritage Lake Road south of the
bypass. It has been completed nearly to but not connected to Jones Dairy Road. “The
connection to Jones Dairy will be made when the commercial projects on Jones
Dairy do their improvements. They wanted us to stop ten feet short,” Ammons
said.
Until there is development on the
Dameron tract, a part of the former Holding dairy farm, Friendship Chapel Road
will be in two sections. One on the west connects to South Main Street and now
dead-ends into the old dairy farm. The planned traditional neighborhood
development Holding Village will extend the street east to the western edge of
the Dameron tract. On the east, the road runs through Heritage North to Jones
Dairy.
* * * *
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.
* * * *
A year ago 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 www.ncdot.org.
* * * *
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.
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