You’d still be able to do that on Saunders and Hammond. It would actually drive that experience faster because you’d easily be able to convert S Saunders into a smaller scale street and not have the congestion levels seen today.
Using Wilmington as the Connector approach doesn’t require any ROW or disruptions either north of 40. The way Rocky Branch traverses Wilmington plus the long span RR Bridge render most of the land adjacent useless. You wouldn’t miss out on any developable land.
you’ll have to convince me over drinks one day!
Definitely! I love the different viewpoints on here compared to Atlanta
From personal experience, the timing of the lights on Dawson / McDowell have been altered somewhat over the course of the past year. By that, I mean that the light cycles have been adjusted slightly to foil the ‘speeding to slip through the lights’ aspect of running the gauntlet. In fact, it seems to me that things are better set for flow now at just under the speed limit, rather than ‘if I go 40, I can breeze through’.
Not sure if anyone else has felt the same…?
If you haven’t done so already, I’d study the past efforts to push a N/S freeway through the east side of downtown and how community activism led by folks in Historic Oakwood successfully killed it. This was 50 years ago, and is why Raleigh doesn’t have a downtown freeway.
Yup saw that somewhere. It’s why Hammond seems so vast coming into town. That would’ve been awful for the east side of town but probably good for Downtown itself. The city as a whole is much better without it.
I can’t imagine how they couldn’t come up with better routing than through our, in my opinion, best neighborhood.
I haven’t experienced that yet, but will welcome that sort of adjustment. Drivers should be rewarded for doing the speed limit, not punished for it like they have been. Use the speed limit timing adjustments as the carrot and speeding as the stick.
I 100% agree with this. It used to be you had to push slightly over 35 mph to make all of the lights. Now they have adjusted them so it is effectively just under 25 mph. It’s really slowed it down, but in a good way.
Although on a personal note it really annoyed me that 23 mph seemed to be the sweet spot instead of 25 mph… I’m too type A for that 
They dropped the timing from over 35 to under 25 in a 35MPH zone?
I believe this is also the case for Blount and Person streets.
It honestly may be 20 on Blount and person. You have to crawl to keep up with the lights there.
Oh, that’s ridiculous. They’ve gone from one extreme to another. 
I can confirm Dawson is about 25. I go that way to work and it’s clearly been adjusted.
I think that we all should remember that the couplets of one way roads with timed signalling were put in so that a freeway wouldn’t plow through downtown and destroy it. This compromise allows traffic to move through the city orderly and efficiently. Over the years, drivers learned how to maximize that by driving faster than the posted speed by a few MPHs because they were timed incorrectly. To a certain extent, this behavior is reinforced by the design of the road itself with a few wide, straight lanes. Clearly the timed lights needed to be fixed to reflect the posted speed.
Now it seems that the timing has been adjusted significantly downward, one could argue that folks will learn that they need to go 10 MPH under the speed limit to sail through the gauntlet of lights without stopping, but I think that’s an unrealistic expectation. Not only are Americans far less likely to drive significantly slower than a posted speed, they are also less likely to do that on a wide, multilane, straight road that is clearly designed for a higher speed. Instead, I think that adjustment will cause more traffic to back up downtown and hasten future calls for a freeway to plow through the city once typical traffic patterns are back to normal.
I fear that the city will “pilot” this new speed while the context isn’t back to normal and declare a victory that wasn’t earned.
Why is so hard to set the correct expectation (posted speed) with a strategy associated with that set expectation? With this new timing strategy, there is no “carrot”, only “sticks”.
What I’m assuming is that this is the city trying to artificially lower the “speed limits”.
Legally, the speed limits are pre-determined by the road type. They would have to get all kinds of waivers to lower the speed limit on Dawson / McDowell because of the Functionality classification of the road and the Volumes.
I do believe they could get the speed limit to be 25 MPH on Wilmington / Sailsbury and Blount / Pearson though.
While they have no control over the speed limits, the city does have control over the signal timings, thus the setting of them to 20-25 MPH. So at the end of the day it’s a disagreement between the city and MUTCD / FHWA / federal speed limit guidelines that’s causing this to happen.
yea to build off this, with no freeways in or around downtown we can’t expect every street downtown to be 25 MPH, one-lane, two-way complete streets. Downtown would end up chocked, people wouldn’t come visit our shops and restaurants, and development would pretty much halt and focus on North Hills.
I do believe we can significantly diet Salisbury / Wilmington and Blount / Pearson but even with significant transit upgrades that hopefully come our way soon, Dawson and McDowell will probably always have to be a main vehicle corridor. Unless we somehow hit the lottery and can build a tunnel haha but even in that case, I’d rather focus on Transit and still have Dawson / McDowell the way they are.
So, yes while not having a downtown freeway is a benefit in terms of keeping the city together, there are big drawbacks in that our downtown streets have way more traffic that they would / should.
There are also now alternatives to driving fast through downtown with 1 and soon 2 loop roads to go around the urban core if that isn’t your destination. Cities across the US have been removing freeways through their downtowns as the negative impact they have on urban life has become clear. As a downtown resident, I would love to see 25mph be the default maximum in the downtown district but atl_transplant is probably right about the city vs State or Fed control making that difficult.
Only option would be to get all the state / us routes rerouted but then the city probably wouldn’t want to lose the funding they get from the state being over the upkeep of said road.
Also some good points, but like I pointed out yesterday, while many cities have loads of freeways cutting through and choking off downtown, we are the largest and only “big” city without any sort of freeway access (to / from) downtown. This is why we see the level of through traffic. 440/540 while loops, do nothing for people trying to get from one side of town to the other North to South. Unfortunately the Dawson / McDowell / Capital corridor will only get busier as we have a better downtown and North Hills area.
You’ve obviously never driven anywhere in Cary.
“Sign says 45, most people would go around 50-55… I’ll go 35 and brake at every slight curve! The line of cars behind me means nothing; there’s always a line behind me. I’m sure it has nothing to do with me!”
At the end of the day, I think that there just needs to be a strategy that is all aligned with what’s posted.
Someone (or many people) driving 25MPH to manage the gauntlet of lights is going to piss other drivers off and cause road rage. This will cause frustrated drivers that are trying to drive the speed limit to race around the slow drivers and put everyone in danger. I fundamentally think that this is a bad idea. Of course, if the strategy is to abandon the idea that drivers can use the gauntlet as a thru-traffic corridor, then completely abandon the timing strategy altogether and communicate that decision.
If I recall correctly, the only 35 MPH sign that physically exists is under Western / MLK NB and passing Peace St SB.
If they placed a secondary sign just past those points stating “Lights Timed For 25 MPH” that could do the trick. Therefore you’re not technically changing the speed limit but you’re communicating the proper speed for the road.
I just drove it and it’s really not that bad. The blocks are so short that you can really only get up to so much speed anyways unless you just punch it. I do think it’s timed a wee bit slow, because you really do have to go sub 25 mph if you are in the first line of cars that get’s the green light.
All that said, who knows how it will be during rush hour when traffic is back to normal 