The Carrboro Town Council voted unanimously Tuesday to delay plans for a six-month pilot project that would have shut down East Weaver Street to vehicle traffic every weekend beginning in April.
“We’ve come this far with this idea, (but) we realized that we need to do a little more work, so we’re just going to take a pause,” said Mayor Barbara Foushee on Tuesday.
Town officials have been advancing the idea of converting East Weaver Street into a bike-and-pedestrian mall for more than a year — with the latest update on Jan. 20 seeing council members instruct Town Planner John Fussa to build out plans for beginning the pilot project this spring. The idea is to turn that central diagonal block into a welcoming community space, particularly in light of the town’s successful “Open Streets” events, where the block is shut down temporarily for public activities.
But the devil is in the details, and local residents and business owners raised numerous logistical concerns, ranging from parking to customer safety to the ripple effects on traffic. Business owners also had questions about where delivery trucks would go — producing further conversations about the issues that already exist on Main Street from delivery trucks parking in traffic lanes.
“I would also like us to take a look on East Main Street with delivery trucks…and how much of that is a problem and what we can do in the meantime,” said Council Member Eliazar Posada-Orozco.
The public feedback even led Mayor Foushee to question whether a future bike-and-pedestrian mall should even go on East Weaver Street at all.
“There are other options that we may want to look at as far as location,” she said Tuesday.
The pilot project would have started April 17, but the council voted 7-0 to postpone it by one year, pending further outreach to businesses and other affected residents.
But council members stressed that the work town staffers have already done on the project shouldn’t go to waste. Council Member Cristóbal Palmer specifically called out plans to re-engineer nearby stoplights to address existing traffic concerns.
And Council Member Catherine Fray added that the closure plan itself isn’t going away either.
“That execution plan isn’t going anywhere, and we still have that available to us when we’re ready to take this up again,” they said.
The full Carrboro Town Council meeting from Tuesday night can be watched on the town’s YouTube channel.
Featured photo via the Town of Carrboro.
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