There’s some buzz around the Marsh Woodwinds space. Rumors suggest that talks have been happening for a while but everything has been moving slowly…hopefully things will shift into high gear soon and more will be announced in the next few months.
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Any news about the Blount St/Person St project? My coworkers were wondering about that earlier today.
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The City Council should have awarded the contract to Fred Smith Company at their afternoon meeting. Most recent schedule shows the contract award happening today, April 2nd, and the completion of Phase I of the project occurring November 2019.
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About time! Wasn’t the original completion date for Phase I supposed to be back in 2017?
@MordecaiMike I don’t want to project too much, but let’s just say that some cool stuff could be coming to the surface soon.
@Tenkai Something like that. It’s been set back a few times, but if things happened as posted yesterday then there is funding allocated and a firm contracted.
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About time…2-3 years later.
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I would love to see them eventually expand on this to give Atlantic a road diet and introduce bike lanes from the end of this Phase 1 all the way up to Six Forks. Then encourage dense residential and mixed use all along this corridor. Converting Light Industrial seems like the path of lightest resistance in today’s age of Nimbyism and developable land, and this corridor would be perfect for it.
Raleigh is growing like few other cities in the US, and we need to start long term growth plans right now. The immediate downtown area and its adjacent neighborhoods are great, but we need to start expanding and creating continuous corridors for the massive growth that is inevitable to come.
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Sounds like this work can’t come soon enough, this happened literally right where this construction will take place, this morning. Wake Forest Rd. and Sycamore St.
Also, I was told some of the hold up with continuing this work further up Atlantic Ave. is the bridge that crosses over the train tracks, I believe NCDOT owns this.
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Going for a three lane section with bike lanes on Atlantic is an awesome idea. Of all the roads in the city where a road diet would be a good idea, this is near the top of my list. And why stop at Six Forks? Since Wake Forest and Six Forks are condemned to be auto sewers forever thanks to the beltline interchanges, this is basically the only shot North Raleigh has at a Complete Street that goes downtown (It would connect nicely to the Pigeon House Branch Greenway at the southern end.) I would carry this treatment at least as far as New Hope Church- maybe Millbrook or even Spring Forest.
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While I am all for less autocentric development everywhere, Atlantic is and will always be a great north/south alternative between Capital and Falls of Neuse/Wake Forest Road. That is the primary reason I use Atlantic, and I am sure I am not alone. Squeeze down Atlantic with a road diet without providing an alternative (IE light/commuter rail down the RR line adjacent to Atlantic), and the resulting congestion on Capital and FoN/WF will be horrendous. Be careful of what we wish for, because it may actually happen. Then again, this is Raleigh, nothing ever really changes 
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I agree that a road diet north of Capitol is unlikely to happen for these reasons. I’m in the process of revising a traffic study for the proposed Peden Steel development across the street from LBC at Atlantic & Whitaker Mill right now and there’s a huge number of cars that go between the northern part of Atlantic and Capital Blvd.
There’s no reason why there shouldn’t at a minimum be sidewalks (I can’t walk to Big Boss from my house and I live a mile away) or protected bike lanes, especially since GoRaleigh route #8 will eventually serve Atlantic Avenue with 15 minute frequent service.
Also I saw that the city is planning on widening out Atlantic Avenue north of 440 to 5 lanes.
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I’m with you here. While I’m nearly ALWAYS in for a road diet and added bike lanes, Atlantic is one artery the city can’t afford to clog. This is an area where some bold and major infrastructure changes need to happen. I know that means it wont happen anytime soon and it will cost a lot, but they need to not rush it here. They need to do it right and in a way that you don’t lose a lane but you add a bike lane.
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The reason why it gets the traffic is that it’s more convenient than Capital and Wake Forest, but in my opinion, it’s not needed. Wake and Capital can handle the increased traffic, especially if the city goes through with the plan to connect Six Forks to Capital. Atlantic is very close to those 2 main N-S routes, and it doesn’t inherently generate the traffic that people think. People just go out of their way to use it, because it’s a better experience than Wake and Capital Blvd.
As value to the city, the road diet and development would be so much more beneficial than keep this unnecessary thoroughfare just because it saves a couple minutes or is a better driving experience for commuters. We need to start looking for alternatives for transit and development, and a N-S bike route into downtown would be a perfect guinea pig type tester.
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Are there any roads in NR that actually go anywhere in a relatively straight line that are actually excessively wide compared with existing traffic? Ok, there’s Lead Mine, and I am fully in favor of a road diet there too, but that doesn’t go downtown. Of all the major arterials in NR that extend south of 440, Atlantic has the least traffic by a wide margin, in a part of the city completely devoid of even mediocre bike infrastructure. All I’m saying is you can’t make a bike-friendly omelet without breaking a few motorist convenience eggs.
At any rate, I think such a treatment should be undertaken if/when BRT and commuter rail in this corridor become a thing.
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Try heading north between 440 and 540 any day of the week at 5PM. There is no good/efficient way to get there. When I made the daily trek up and down Capital, I adjusted my work hours to avoid the peak drive times. I did that drive every day for 3 years before my job moved to Morrisville and I shifted to the hell that is 540. To the point that I moved across town to get out of that hell of a commute. Trash North Raleighites and Wake Forestians all you want, but affordable housing comes with the price of a really crappy commute.
That’s kind of the point: at rush hour, traffic demand outstrips road capacity by such a wide margin, that there is no way we could ever “fix” it - doing so would entail basically turning every one of these roads into a freeway, and if we did that, within a decade induced demand would overwhelm that too.
Things are bad enough now that losing one inbound lane and one outbound lane wouldn’t really make things measurably worse, I would think.
We have to stop trying to win the unwinnable fight of traffic reduction. Changing development patterns and accommodating alternatives other than the rush hour single occupancy vehicle is the only way forward.
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Try riding a bike or getting out of downtown headed north using something other than a motorized vehicle at any time really. It’s either impossible or dangerous depending on which way you go.
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Yes. I get that Capital Blvd is an intensely frustrating experience. But cycling or walking on today’s infrastructure really involves constant brushes with death. We need to pick a few bike-ped “priority corridors” and for North Raleigh, Atlantic seems to me to be the most promising and have the least downside.
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