The Alston Ave/Fayetteville Rd. trade: Er, what, Mayor Bell?

I'll confess to some significant head-scratching after reading Saturday's Herald-Sun article on the proposed Alston Ave. widening, and the Mayor's reaction to a proposal from staff to redirect funding from the road project to improving Fayetteville Rd. from Cornwallis south to Woodcroft Pkwy.

As we briefly mentioned in covering last Monday's City Council meeting, at this Thursday's work session the Council reviewed a draft proposal from transportation manager Mark Ahrendsen that would call for NCDOT to scrap the widening of much of Alston Ave. to a four-lane divided highway, a project that has drawn objections from Durham pundits (including some very well-expressed thoughts from Gary at Endangered Durham, who has an update at his place today) and to redirect the funds towards widening Fayetteville Rd. instead.

Ray Gronberg covers the subject well in his story today in the paper, including legitimate concerns from city manager Patrick Baker that led to the discussion being postponed until PAC1 and NECD constituencies are formally consulted on the idea -- a wise idea. But it's tough to figure out exactly what's driving Mayor Bell's thinking on the subject.

Ahrendsen's proposal faces an addition [of] another obstacle -- Mayor Bill Bell.    
 
Bell said that while he's no supporter of DOT's plan for the widening, he's not convinced it's wise to halt design negotiations with the agency.
 
"You spend a lot of time in trying to get these projects into the loop and trying to get them to the funding stage," the mayor said on Friday. "It's not a simple matter to pull them and say you're going to use the money somewhere else." 

Moreover, Bell thinks the proposal to switch the money to the Fayetteville Street project would be a public-relations minefield.
 
"To me, it sends the wrong message," he said. "It can look like we're taking money out of North-East Central Durham, one of our priority areas, and moving it south. We've put our priorities into those neighborhoods, and I want to make sure they don't get shortchanged."

OK, let me get this straight. The concern here is that it would look bad to pull road moneys out of NECD and redirect them to South Durham?

If it's purely question of the racial politics that bedevil Durham, oh, just about every day, it's worth keeping in mind that roads run both ways, and the Fayetteville Rd. widening would benefit folks in the neighborhoods around NCCU who want to get to retail in the NC 54/Southpoint corridor just as much as it would the Woodcrofters trying to commute north.

But more broadly put -- is the thought that any government infrastructure investment in NECD is too good to turn down?

Of course, there's lots of benefits to local residents from this project's current design. After all, it'd take the only grocery store in NECD and demolish it to the ground. It'd make the road more dangerous for bicyclists -- of which there are many in the area, from visual anecdotal evidence, and we ain't talking about Sunday leisure-bikers heading down to the ATT, but folks using them as a key mode of personal transportation. It'd bring more cut-through car and truck traffic to a community struggling to improve and grow.

I cannot fathom how the road project design that NCDOT has proposed, and stubbornly clung to even in the face of City staff objections, supports the "priorities" for NECD for which Bell and others on Council have advocated. (As I noted here last year, ultimately one of the benefits of projects like the East End Connector should be to relieve pressure on roads like Alston Ave., helping them to avoid the kind of widening and enlargement that can hurt urban communities.)

Of course, mine is a decidedly outsider's perspective, and in the end Baker is right to want to make sure there's more formal input from NECD and PAC1. And, hey, if I'm wrong and the community is aggressively calling for this widening, then so be it. Perhaps there's another road improvement in NECD that would make sense as a destination for NCDOT dollars... though it's not every day you see communities saying, "Hey, come build highways in my neighborhood!"

But right now, this one just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Comments

[Aidil]

As a resident that walks through that area regularly and has neighbors walking and biking the same strip of road to be widened, I can definitely say that widening the road would not be positive. Also, I have never experienced frustrating traffic along this corridor. There are so many ways to get around it if there are issues that it has never been on to me. For the record, they haven't asked for the two cents of anyone in my area of the neighborhood. In my opinion, I wish the Mayor would not act as if not allowing the widening would be perceived as a bad thing. No one that I have met wants the widening of Alston. If he wants to talk about throwing money in that area, then he should fix the real estate lining the corner of Angier and Alston to start. Mr. Bell's Used Fix-It Shop can use some fixin'.