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I wonder what Bo thinks but I'm all in favor of bringing back to Crabtree Valley Avenue exit (sorry Ridge Road residents.......this is way worse)
Yep. Hopefully this is enough to send Mendell and her neighborhood "listening" (whining, complaining) sessions packing.
The people's main beef that got them up in arms (and somehow was rewarded by giving them these crazy listening sessions) was some completely fabricated "breach of trust" by NCDOT where they claimed that NCDOT had already made up their mind to build it a particular way before coming to neighbors for input.
...Which NCDOT had categorically NOT done. They were just doing what they do quite often, showing up at a meeting with some drawings of one possible configuration of what the project *might* look like, in this case if it were designed according to the results of the 2012 study.
Stuff like this is par for the course at public meetings especially when dealing with rich, entitled, privileged people. What's different is how it was handled. Normally at this point, the DOT will take it back behind closed doors and do what they can to balance the demands with reality. This time, the Ridge Road neighbors were awarded a special, privileged seat at the negotiating table, and given everything they demanded and more - all while taking a big ol' dump on the rest of the city. *we* will pay the price - in terms of the hundreds of millions of dollars extra these crazy designs will cost, and in terms of the confusing layout and loss of connectivity.
I suspect DOT may have pushed these crazy designs on purpose. "You think it was bad before? Hold my slide rule and watch this...."
Due to cost, complexity, impacts, etc. it will probably end up getting whittled down to basically what was originally proposed, just with a few million extra dollars spent on all the extra intermediate designs.
I suspect DOT may have pushed these crazy designs on purpose. "You think it was bad before? Hold my slide rule and watch this...."
Due to cost, complexity, impacts, etc. it will probably end up getting whittled down to basically what was originally proposed, just with a few million extra dollars spent on all the extra intermediate designs.
I don't think it was done on purpose but it's not surprising that this is the result. The original plan was for some of the projected traffic to come to/from 440 onto a new exit onto Crabtree Valley Avenue providing better rear access to Crabtree Valley Mall so that some trips to/from the mall wouldn't need to utilize Glenwood Avenue.
That traffic doesn't just disappear once you remove the Crabtree Valley Avenue-440 connection so it all gets dumped onto Glenwood Avenue which already deals with a bunch of commuter traffic as it is today so there needs to insane ideas to deal with the now added traffic (that previous designs didn't need to worry about - not like it was already starting to get on the scale of potential craziness).
Note that the original idea wasn't even to connect Ridge Road with Crabtree Valley Avenue, the only thing that would have happened is that the off-ramp from 440 East to Crabtree Valley Avenue would have disturbed some trees adjacent to a Ridge Road property owner. So Ridge Road wouldn't have a major impact from a traffic standpoint (there's a "Save Ridge Road" group that claims the project would have increased cut-through traffic, speeding etc.... when that wouldn't have been the case)
I did. I was quite impressed by the explanations I received of the seven scenarios. All of them offer an improvement. I asked questions about traffic flows, lights at intersections, etc and got answers. What they don't really know is how the seven scenarios would rank in terms of likely construction cost. The approach seems to be either to choose a scenario or a hybrid of scenarios, then cost it, then cut to fit or delay until full funds are available.
For being passing through the area in a given direction, some scenarios will be more convenient than others. So it won't surprise me if the preferences given by attendees will be all over the map (pardon the pun).
Not sure how the Ridge Road neighborhood felt about the scenarios.
One comment on Twitter pointed out that NCDOT's process didn't take mass transit (bus) into account. That's true but I don't think it means the scenarios are without value.
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