Alston Avenue Fixin' to Stay on Today's Council Agenda

It appears that the Alston Avenue morass will remain on today's City Council work session agenda at 4pm. At issue: pushing the council to continue to pressure NCDOT to make design changes to mitigate the road's most disastrous qualities. This has primarily come down to dedicated right turn lanes - many of the intersections on the Alston Avenue corridor have 6 lanes (comprised of 4 lanes + 2 lanes.) The dedicated right turn lanes add unnecessary width and present the greatest threat to pedestrians beginning their long slog across the intersection.

A group of East Durham stakeholders met last week to discuss the plan, including representatives from Uplift East Durham, NECD, PAC 1, Golden Belt Neighborhood Association, Cleveland-Holloway Neighborhood Asssociation, and Scientific Properties. The consensus of the group was to eliminate dedicated right turn lanes, stripe bike lanes, and that the road should "match design elements of other city street improvements." The group also was in agreement that the city should continue to pursue funding from NCDOT to rebuild a grocery store, as the the neighborhood grocery - Los Primos - is slated for demolition by the widening. The group was unable to reach unanimity on the addition of street parking.

At this point NCDOT has agreed to eliminate dedicated right turns at Holloway and Liberty, but they have refused at Main and Angier.

The notion - promulgated by a vocal few - that the community needs to 'compromise' from this position is ludicrous. Even entertaining these design changes is compromise- killing the road would be a lack of compromise. Unfortunately that vocal few seem to have captivated the attention of the Mayor and His Other Vote. While Howard Clement and Farad Ali seem a bit more on the fence about this, they too seem swept up in the erroneous notion that a giant road in the inner city will bring economic development.

To summarize the major East Durham stakeholders that oppose the current design of the road.

Uplift East Durham Neighborhood Assoc.
Cleveland-Holloway Neighborhood Assoc
Golden Belt Historic District/Neighborhood Group
The city's economic development staff
The city's transportation staff
Scientific Properties

Aidil Collins of Uplift East Durham will speak at the work session. If you have time, please come and support a better alternative. There is no good reason for NCDOT not to reduce the scale of this roadway by the requested amount - it's purely stubbornness, and counter to their own context-sensitive design guidelines. To be clear, it will still be a massive road without the dedicated rights ~ ~70 feet wide versus ~80 feet wide with the dedicated rights. The requested changes may seem like nothing more than a bit of lipstick on a pig of a road - but they stand a good chance of saving some lives down the line.