The City of Durham is moving forward with its plan to redesign Roxboro and Mangum Streets, two prominent corridors that run through downtown Durham. But the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NC DOT) says it still needs time to vet the proposal.
In March, more than 200 residents joined city and state officials for an open house at Global Scholars Academy on Roxboro Street to visualize the proposal to convert the parallel-running Roxboro and Mangum from one-way to two-way streets. After months of discussion between public officials and community advocacy groups such as Bike Durham, Durham’s transportation department collected the requisite materials and submitted its proposal to NCDOT for review in early July.
Nearly two months later, the department is still waiting for an answer from NC DOT.
“The city had some conversations with NC DOT ahead of time, put together their package that they thought addressed those questions, and now all sorts of other questions are coming up which is not a process for smoothly moving from one step to the next,” says John Tallmadge, Bike Durham’s executive director.
NC DOT has no guidelines for city road redesign. The department takes each proposal on a case-by-case basis. The lack of pre-existing parameters makes it challenging for cities to be consistent in their proposals and for NC DOT to offer clear direction.
“It’s the first time it’s ever been done,” says Kimberly Deaner, Division 5 communications officer at NC DOT, about the two-way conversion. “So [NC DOT], our division engineers, our traffic safety engineers, want to make sure without a shadow of a doubt that this is an idea that can be done safely.”
The Durham transportation department set an August 27 deadline to receive requests for design services on the conversion project. After months working with its own licensed engineers and contractors on their NC DOT proposal, the department is pushing forward to keep the project from falling behind schedule. The design consultant that the department selects will require approval from the city council.
“With the significant time required for [city] council review, this approach keeps the procurement moving while we work to secure final approvals from NC DOT,” says Sean Egan, transportation director for the City of Durham.
Durham and NC DOT have played this game of chicken before. Last September, a miscommunication between members of Durham’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC), Durham city staff, and NC DOT led to the delay and restructuring of a road improvement project on Fayetteville Street, another prominent state-owned road near downtown.
“We got a clear understanding of what riders were looking for, and now what they’ve told us is stop bringing us surveys and start delivering results that we can see on the ground,” Egan told the INDY in October.
Some hoped that the incident would create a stronger line of communication and better working relationship between the groups, but similar issues have continued to delay important road improvements in Durham.
Now, time is of the essence. With other projects on the books and two infrastructure bonds on the ballot in November, advocates are concerned that further delays on the Roxboro and Mangum project would compromise the city’s work plan and delay the project indefinitely.
“It has a cascading effect. The more time you have to spend on negotiating with NC DOT, the less capacity you have to move all these projects forward that the city’s working on,” Tallmadge says.
Disclosure: Justin Laidlaw was formerly a member of the board of directors for the nonprofit Bike Durham.
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