When Betsy and I left a medical office appointment in Cary recently, we found ourselves heading home on I-40 just after 4 o’clock on Friday afternoon.

This is a punishment that only a mean spirited judge would use as a sentence.  It did take time, but eventually we made it back to Chapel Hill safely and stopped at the K&W Cafeteria for something to eat.

That put us on Estes Drive between 5 and 6 PM heading west.  That was an adventure.

You may wonder why in Chapel Hill, where we have essentially three main options for traveling east and west, the most the central one of these has two lanes, one in each direction, through its busiest stretches.

In this town, we can mow down trees, we can scar our once beautiful landscape, we can build ugly tall structures.  But, we can’t manage to widen our most needed traffic ways.

We do beautify them, though.  Weaver Dairy Road now looks prettier than it once did.  It actually widens to four lanes for a short stretch.  South Columbia Street now looks prettier, too.  It remains two lanes.  Why?

But, I digress.

In our trip across Estes Drive, our line of cars waiting for the light at East Franklin was backed up to Willow Drive.  After several light changes, we finally made it across East Franklin and inched our way up the hill towards Estes Hills and Phillips schools.  Once that far, we could see the endless string of taillights all of the way to MLK Blvd.

Widening roads to four lanes isn’t simple.  It’s expensive and complicated by issues of right-of-way acquisition and so on.  But, it’s necessary  if we are to continue to grow.

Many of our Chapel Hill local leaders like to see the town grow.  We love to mow things down and build big, ugly buildings.  What we haven’t figured out, is that with all that growth comes traffic and it needs to get from one place to another.

When one of our most important main streets becomes a parking lot twice a day, we need to widen it and soon.

— Raleigh Mann

 

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