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To give a difference between Cary & Morrisville: Cary is well organised! Sorry Morrisville. Most resident services are well handled with towns staff and they have good resources. For example, Cary is starting a community garden, which will be be completely run by town staff, like insurance, etc etc are all handled by town staff, whereas in Morrisville, I heard it took couple of years for some folks to get the approval for a community garden and the town just gave the land and washed their hands off...
I think a lot of this can be explained by the growth in Morrisville over the past 30 years compared to the growth in Cary over the same time period.
Prior to 1980, Cary had been growing 100% + since the 60's, while Morrisville had been growing very, very slowly up until 1980s, even experiencing a negative growth rate in some decades.
Then, from 1980 - 1990, Cary's population grew 101.5% (which was actually down from the previous decade) while Morrisville grew 307.2% - while the previous decade they only saw 20% growth.
From 1990-2000, Cary's growth was 115% and Morrisville's was 409%. Then from 2000-2010, Cary only grew 43% while Morrisville 256%. Both still lower than the years before, but still, that's quite a lot!!
My point is that Cary's been growing at a rate of doubling-ish it's population every decade for the past 50 or so years at a pretty steady clip while Morrisville has seen tripling or quadrupling of it's population every decade for only the past 20 or so. That's a lot of boom to keep up with from an infrastructure stand point, no matter how organized you are.
*All numbers come from the Historical Population figures on the town's respective Wikipedia pages, which are taken from US Census data.
I think that the locals have been known to refer to the entire Knightdale, Wendell, Zebulon area as "Zebudale" when describing where they live to a person in Raleigh.
That's a pretty solid name! There's a lot of rural land between Knightdale, Wendell, and Zebulon, whereas Cary and Morrisville are right on top of each other, or more like Cary is swallowing Morrisville up.
Without knowing the specific road it's hard to say for sure, but for many of the roads that matter, it's partly due to the railroad not allowing more lanes.
Also, going back maybe 20 years, development started coming here and the town grew from about 2000 people to about 15,000, then we had a period of time where we had a majority on the town council that were anti-development or at least they thought if development was limited in certain areas it would help traffic despite the fact that the vast majority of cars on the road here are not from town and therefore even if nothing was even built here, the traffic would still come anyway, we would just miss out on the tax base increase.
I also don't believe that we did an adequate job of getting the message that we needed road widening done to the DOT, which also had a pretty unfair formula for road finding that hurt the entire triangle for many years.
Couple that with the small size of the town (even after considerable growth we are only at 23,000 or so now) and it's not as if we have the money to widen every road in town. All the problem roads are DOT roads and most are pretty difficult and expensive to expand. We have spent money over the last few years to work on the intersection of 54 and Morrisville carpenter.
The town has changed a bit in the last few years and are in the process of widening Morrisville Carpenter to the extent the railroad will allow. At the same time, the DOT has modified their formulas and between better communication, etc quite a bit of DOT work is going to happen in the next several years, including widening of Aviation parkway from 40 to just past the railroad tracks at 54. There is actually an information session next Thursday about this project at town hall. The town has also joined forces with Cary to pay for a study so DOT will begin the process of widening highway 54 though both towns. Although DOT will probably ruin that pushing their super street agenda onto the area near Park West.
Morrisville-Carpenter was one that I was alluding to.
The undivided section of McCrimmon between Town Hall and Lake Grove as well.
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