Competing visions for transportation in Durham collide on four-mile stretch of US 70

The organization that does transportation planning for Durham set new priorities last year, saying it would like to spend more money on cyclists, pedestrians and transit riders and less on building new highways and widening existing ones.

One of the projects The Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Metropolitan Planning Organization or MPO said it could no longer support was a long-standing plan by the N.C. Department of Transportation to turn U.S. 70 into a six-lane freeway in southeast Durham.

Now some area residents say they would prefer the freeway. They’ve found a voice in The Leesville Road Coalition, a community group that thinks the MPO’s vision of turning U.S. 70 into a boulevard, with sidewalks, bicycle paths and better intersections, won’t adequately address traffic and safety problems on the road.

The coalition is based in Carolina Arbors, a 1,300-home community for people 55 and older just north of U.S. 70. Resident Leslie Abel says she and her neighbors worry about the congestion on the highway that makes it difficult to travel to places such as Duke University Medical Center.

“It’s very important to get there quickly for people in this community,” Abel said. “And if your policy priorities are to encourage bicycles and pedestrian traffic over improving an artery that’s critical to state transportation, who sets those priorities and do we have a voice in that?”

Abel was speaking to Doug Plachcinski, executive director of the DCHC MPO, at a forum the coalition organized Monday evening in the Carolina Arbors community center. Before Plachcinski could answer, Javiera Caballero, a Durham City Council member who serves on the MPO board, stood up to defend the organization’s new approach. Caballero said city officials had long heard from people who want Durham to move away from large, fast freeway projects.

“That may be not what you all want in this room, and I completely understand that,” she said. “But that is not the only view in Durham.”

Caballero said many residents, just as loud and organized but also younger, are pushing the city in another direction.

“They want multimodal, and they are expecting it, and they are demanding it,” she said. “And they want a different future for their children and their grandchildren.”

Stephen Knill, a co-founder of The Leesville Road Coalition, countered that the city’s transportation priorities aren’t reflected in its land-use policies.

“It seems a little incongruous to me, the fact that for the last two years we’ve just approved almost 10,000 new homes out here in developments where people literally have to drive to get anywhere,” Knill said. “Every one of these developments is set up to be car-centric in this area.”

MPO working on a boulevard plan now

The disagreement over what to do with U.S. 70 focuses on a four-mile stretch between Raleigh’s Brier Creek and the new Interstate 885 East End Connector freeway in Durham. Much of the road still looks like a rural four-lane divided highway, though it now runs through one of the fastest-growing areas in the Triangle.

Based on its new priorities, the DCHC MPO has launched an effort to plan the future of the road as a more urban four-lane boulevard. Plachcinski said the MPO hopes to present options and get public feedback next month.

When asked if NCDOT’s freeway plan would be one of the options, Plachcinski said no, and then ticked off the MPO board’s policy goals.

“Reducing vehicle miles traveled. Reducing expanding roadways that are very expensive, as we’ve seen, to rebuild and expand continuously. To improve safety. To improve the environmental effects of our highways and the damage they do to our communities and to reduce the lack of access,” he said. “Those were the kinds of performance measures we’ve asked our consultants to look at.”

NCDOT presented its plans for a U.S. 70 freeway between Raleigh and Durham in 2018 and hoped to begin construction in 2021. Financial challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic and most recently rising costs for construction, have forced the department to delay the project indefinitely, Brandon Jones, NCDOT’s regional engineer, told those at the forum.

NCDOT owns U.S. 70 and will need to agree to build what the MPO planners come up with. Jones said the department will want to see that the road can handle traffic now and in the future.

“It has to prove to us, data-driven, that it’s going to work,” he said. “U.S. 70 is a regionally important corridor, not just a locally important corridor. What happens on U.S. 70 in this area impacts how I-40 functions. It impacts how transportation around the region functions. So it’s important for us to get this right.”

Meanwhile, NCDOT still plans to convert a section of U.S. 70 into a freeway through Brier Creek in Raleigh, between I-540 and the Durham County line. Jones said it will likely be 2026 before the department can award a contract for final designs and construction.

For more information about the DCHC’s U.S. 70 East Corridor Study, go to www.dchcmpo.org/what-we-do/programs-plans/special-studies/us-70-corridor-study/.