The North Carolina Department of Transportation has put forward a proposal to make a significant change to Broad Street, which runs behind the house and is a major north-south thoroughfare on the west side of downtown. The two alternatives to tie Broad Street in with the heavily-traveled Peters Creek Parkway have been put forward for public comment. What I submitted as part of this public review is posted below.
I write in opposition to both of the alternatives that have been proposed for Project U-6063: The Broad Street Connector.
A downtown neighborhood understandably deals with the dual challenge of connecting with the vibrant life of a city’s center while also perhaps seeking reasonable insularity from it. Having lived in the Holly Avenue Neighborhood longer than most who are here now, I strongly advocate for maintenance of a traditional city grid system and for vehicular and pedestrian connectivity to all that surrounds us. One of the trade-offs residential dwellers must, of necessity, accept is that central living requires surrendering the option of a cocoon.
Creating dead-end streets to close off portions of my neighborhood is highly objectionable to me. I do not think my neighbors and I are better off if we are surrounded by a heavily-trafficked moat of thoroughfares because of the elimination of various routes for those needing to drive into OR through the Holly Avenue Neighborhood. Further, no-outlet streets that end in, say, park space can create a potentially desirable situation; those that are merely barricaded from a rushing thoroughfare (such as Broad Street) are likely to diminish property values, increase loitering, and lead to dumping and neglect. We see this clearly on the south end of the 100 block of South Poplar Street, or somewhat less so at the north end of the 300 block of South Spring Street.
I make no claims to understand traffic engineering or the modeling that planners use to predict and anticipate traffic volumes in a painfully unpredictable future. However, I would argue that the engineers have depended on models for daily traffic volumes for First and Second Streets east of Broad that defy logic and don’t pass the smell test. Once First and Second Streets undergo conversions from one-way to two-way traffic, the planners believe there will be a roughly 350% increase in traffic on First, and they suggest that the volume on Second Street will diminish by roughly 60%. The engineers and consultants behind the two proposed alternatives never questioned these figures as they developed the proposals that depended on them. How do I know? Because I asked them and it took weeks to get answers about the seriousness and credibility of the projections. The radical proposals to dead end or close-loop both Brookstown Avenue and Second Street would have seemed crazy without these depressed and unrealistic projections for the volumes on these streets. The engineers and consultants failed to be convincing to me, at least, but the implications of their dependence on that shaky ground will have a serious and long-lasting impact on both Holly Avenue Neighborhood and this portion of downtown.
All indications are that we have top-notch staff in the Division 9 office of the North Carolina Department of Transportation, led by Division Engineer Pat Ivey who is a terrific public face and by all appearances a commendable public servant. But my gut reaction when I viewed the two proposed Broad Street Connector alternatives was that I wasn’t sure where to place them on a scale between comically inept and criminally idiotic. Imagine, wildly, that these two alternatives were a low-level task unseriously assigned to the last-hired engineer (who also wasn’t a top-tier candidate for the job), who forgot about it until the morning it was due. Or that these proposals were those submitted for extra credit by two Forsyth Tech students in an introductory traffic planning class taught by a moonlighting NCDOT staff engineer. We would laugh those out of the room, of course. But I’m not sure I can see any distinguishing differences between those absurd and imagined sources and those that were actually proposed. The Broad Street Connector ought to be a compelling and convincing proposal that inspires us with confidence that its design is both smart and right. From reviewing the alternatives and multiple interactions with those behind them, no such compelling case is being made for them.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the proposals to create this Connector are evidence that the implications of closing the Broad Street ramps to the US 421/Salem Parkway were not anticipated well or were glossed over. By dumping so much downtown and northside traffic onto the wildly curvy Peters Creek Parkway’s north end, we are now having to figure out what to do with 20,000 cars trying to turn left every day. This connector project would throw good money after bad and be a neighborhood-diminishing solution to a problem that, one might argue, has been created by a lack of sufficient foresight and good planning. I’m sorry that our transportation planners and traffic engineers either didn’t see this coming or failed to incorporate a whole-cloth solution to the ill-fated Broad Street ramp closure decision. I do not want my neighborhood to pay an even greater price for these earlier and unfortunate decisions.
Finally, the doubts I immediately had as a neighbor to this ill-advised traffic monster have certainly been exacerbated by how I’ve seen the public input process play out. The engineers and consultants struggled to provide answers and insights to questions that focused on key elements of the proposals’ designs. When a plan has been well-examined and studied while it is being developed and reviewed, its crafters can talk easily and convincingly about its key features and can seamlessly describe the promises and pitfalls of the alternatives. That was not how the designers handled themselves when subjected to a small bit of scrutiny. The proposed alternatives might look foolish because they are, in fact, foolish. I encourage a rejection of both of them.
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