Hitting the brakes on Renfro Street

My daily commute could soon get a bit slower. The Mount Airy City Council is voting Thursday about an ordinance change lowering the speed limit from 35 mph to 25 mph on a stretch of Renfro Street that runs parallel to downtown. To save time on explaining what stretch would slow down, I attached a screen shot outlining where the change will occur.

For a highway with four or five lanes, 25 mph speed limit is unusual. The sticky point here seems to be Reeves Community Center, which is located along this stretch and often has folks darting out in front of traffic because there’s not much parking on site. So what’s the answer? More crosswalks. More parking? Since those cost money, I can see how a lower speed limit is the easy way to go. 

Something tells me this is going to emerge as a very effective speed trap for the police department

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The ever bumpy road

When the Department of Transportation’s board meets, there’s often decent material for a story on an upcoming highway construction project. But not this month, when the contracts approved included no projects from anywhere nearby. I’ll give the DOT the benefit of the doubt and say the projects that were awarded are all badly needed, as the state’s population growth is creating infrastructure issues all over North Carolina.But it’s always frustrating to see improvements to U.S. 52 put off indefinitely, as is the case in the DOT’s Transportation Improvement Plan. Other highway projects, such as improvements to N.C. 268, are also stuck in the “unfunded” black hole. An easy-to-read breakdown of what’s funded in our district can be viewed here. It’s nice to see I-77 and I-74 rehabilitated, but better access to the Piedmont means a lot more for this county from an economic and quality-of-life standpoint. This might be the issue to follow most closely in the governor’s race, with every candidate trotting forth a different DOT reform proposal. There’s a big shortfall on the horizon for highway projects, and they only get more expensive by the month.

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