Highway-Style Alston Avenue Rears its Ugly Head Again

Championed by Mayor Bell, the NCDOT design for the widening of Alston Avenue will be put on the city council work session agenda March 20th.(Edit: According to a comment on Bull City Rising from Patrick Baker, it has been pulled from the agenda.) According to several sources close to city government, Bell feels that he has at least 4 votes on council to get it passed.

There is a depressing desperation to this move - the sense that the $28 Million that NCDOT proposes to spend on converting ~12 blocks of a 3-lane urban street into a 4- to 6-lane thoroughfare-to-nowhere is money too good to pass up, no matter what it is buying.

Let me be clear - I have no desire to see Alston Avenue frozen in its current sad state (one which has a lot more to do with some depressing land uses than the width of the road) in perpetuity. I personally think road widening - whether it's on I-40 in Cary or Alston Avenue in East Durham, is a foolish waste of money bound inevitably to fail at its mission to alleviate congestion. This is quite different than building roads which provide new connectivity - such as the East End Connector.

But I do think it's possible to build a four-lane Alston Avenue that is an urban boulevard - one which meets the needs of car traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit users. Most importantly, it could be a street that people actually want to spend time on, rather than a place to blaze through at top speed on your way to - well, 2-lane Holloway Street. Woo.

I just don't think NCDOT is up to the task of building the street that East Durham needs. While there is a certain schadenfreude in watching much of NCDOT's mismanagement and incompetence laid bare publicly over the past few years, it's a very temporary pleasure, because we ultimately pay the price. The staff at NCDOT rarely changes - even if Lyndo Tippett eventually loses his job - and those staff have survived through toeing the 'company' line, avoiding internal controversy, and choosing the time-honored designs of decades past, rather than creative solutions. In my experience of doing consulting work with NCDOT staff, they respond to suggestions for (real) change with an aggressive skittishness. One division chief cut me off in mid-sentence, responding angrily to a presentation I gave - decrying how what I was suggesting would result in him "hav[ing] [his] wings clipped." Tough guy, eh?

NCDOT's plan calls for a continuation of the highway 55 widening that has occurred to our south, extending south from near Cornwallis road to 54, and from there south to Apex. If you want to see what a typical in-town Alston Avenue intersection would look like, I highly recommend a trip down to the NC55 intersection with Cornwallis, Martin Luther King, and further south. It will be the only time that I recommend such a trip. You will see 4 through lanes with a grass median, widening to 6 lane intersections.


Google Earth image of Alston (NC 55) and Main St.


Google Earth image of NC 55 and Carpenter Fletcher.

This is fine for a single function road. No argument from me that, for those 12 blocks, traffic would move marginally more quickly and freely than it does now (until you get to the next light 1-2 blocks away.) But Alston Avenue needs to be more than that if someone really thinks they want economic investment to occur on this corridor. And more than one person has said that the widening will bring economic investment.

No, no, no.

Okay, first, yes, new roads in rural areas can create economic investment in those areas, by providing new access to huge parcels of cheap (per acre) land, and easy access to somewhere people with disposable income want to be. DOTs, Chamber's of Commerce, and similar make the leap from this to assume that all road capacity increases will result in economic benefits. The fallacy arises from the fact that most road investments occur in wealthy areas, or areas where wealthy people want to make money, and the parcels in urban areas are too small for this kind of investment. So yes, if you plunge 540 through a bunch of cheap pine-covered land that happens to be near a well-to-do suburban area, developers can make a whole bunch of money by buying that land and developing it into McMansions. Those people and their wealth create a market for SuperTargets, etc.

The same cannot be said of impoverished areas. History is replete with examples of highway projects that were supposed to resuscitate moribund areas. We don't have to look far - how much economic investment did the Durham Freeway create? A 4-lane Elizabeth-Fayetteville Street? A five-lane-one-way Roxboro St. through downtown. How much economic development did they destroy/prevent? This is the same thinking that led to urban renewal - don't just widen the roads, but solve the too-small-parcel problem by condemning everything and combining parcels. We know how well that worked.

But I've never advocated to keep Alston Avenue at 3 lanes. I do think it's possible to build a great 4-lane boulevard - one that East Durham deserves. But NCDOT's design is terrible - the same suburban highway design that they've built all the way to Apex. On condition of anonymity, NCDOT staff involved in the contextual design part of the Alston Avenue project told me that they were aghast at what the engineers came up with for this urban setting; he/she said "that's not what we talked about in our meetings."

All I've ever advocated for is to make Alston Avenue a street that people and cars want to spend time on, by reducing the massive intersections, tightening the corners, striping bike lanes, eliminating cul-de-sacs, eliminating the big retaining walls/grade changes, adding street trees, and not demolishing the grocery store. Maybe it's a mistake to start with a compromise solution. I've always hated starting from an artificially extreme bargaining position in order to haggle one's way to the spot you wanted in the first place. In retrospect, maybe the effort should have been to destroy this project from the outset, rather than just talking about right turn lanes, turning radii, bike lanes, street trees, etc. - while allowing this thing to fester.

But the thing is, the city staff is in a agreement on this one. Mark Ahrendsen and the city transportation department agree that the design needs to change, and have pushed to have NCDOT make changes. The Office of Economic and Workforce Development feels that this is a bad design for the east side of downtown, when they are trying to make streetscape improvements to make some of our commercial streets more livable - not hostile.

And the city has shown that it can build good streets - look at the downtown streetscape. It took a long time, but the streets are a joy. And I haven't heard any developers running for the hills because no one will widen Main St. to 4 lanes. Quite the contrary. Building a great street is what will bring the kind of investors that want to redevelop at a scale appropriate for the neighborhood, and within the bounds of available parcels of land.

And this is what we can do. Although people seized on the "shift the money" thing publicized a few weeks ago as a way to manipulate the process, the suggestion was: shift the state money to Fayetteville St., and let NCDOT do their unitary suburban highway design down by Martin Luther King. Then shift the city money that would have been spent on Fayetteville to Alston - so that the city can design a better road. Combined with streetscape funds from the Office of Economic Development, we could build a functional and beautiful street that would be the envy of other parts of Durham.

But suddenly we have a rush to move forward, and because people would rather take money from the state to hang themselves than figure out the right thing to do, it's coming to a vote. Why have we adopted an ad-hoc committee of citizenry to examine, in detail, the future of the East End Connector, but have had nothing of the sort here? This widening would take more than twice as many buildings as the East End Connector. Does it deserve the same sort of care?

Bottom line, this will be a highway to nowhere. It will reduce the quality of life of people living in the neighborhoods adjacent to this highway: Edgemont/Morning Glory, Angier Avenue, Eastway Village, Cleveland-Holloway, and the entire new HOPE VI development. It will reduce the mobility and threaten the safety of vulnerable populations: children walking or biking to Eastway Elementary and elders and children walking from the HOPE VI project west of Alston to Long Meadow Park.

That's not to say it's a haven for safety now. It's bad. But if you are going to spend $28 Million , should it end up more dangerous? Should it be a more hostile barrier between neighborhoods, so that cars can get from the Freeway to Holloway St. a few seconds faster?

I don't know what else to say about this $28 Million mistake that I haven't already said again and again in many different forums. We have already made this mistake. People cry about the highways destroying their neighborhoods in the 1960s - and believe me, I am empathetic. But I'm not empathetic to repeating the same stupid plan that you know caused terrible repercussions the first time around, and didn't create all of the promised benefits.

Please contact your city council members and ask them to choose a better course, and a better design - as recommended by their own city staff - than the swath of neighborhood highway offered by NCDOT.