Morrisville celebrates a new greenway connection and the end of a traffic bottleneck
Over the last 40 years, as Morrisville grew from a farming community to a small city of more than 30,000 residents, Morrisville Carpenter Road remained two lanes through the heart of town, becoming ever more sluggish with traffic.
That recently changed with a $10 million overhaul that took more than a decade to get started followed by a seemingly endless time of dodging orange barrels and construction equipment.
Now Morrisville Carpenter is four lanes wide with turn lanes between N.C. 54 and Davis Drive. There’s a new grassy median and sidewalks, crosswalks, a new traffic signal at Town Hall Drive and another on the way at Old Savannah and Oriana drives.
The two extra lanes mean people no longer need to build in an extra 15 minutes just to get through the center of Morrisville, said Town Council member Satish Garimella.
“The No. 1 issue for Morrisville is transportation,” Garimella said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday. “This was a very important project for us.”
While the main goal was to move cars more easily, the project also allowed Morrisville to build a short section of greenway trail to connect the Indian Creek Greenway on the north side of town with the Hatcher Creek and Crabtree Creek greenways on the south.
“Now people can get everywhere on greenways and sidewalks, which is really a game changer for us,” Mayor TJ Cawley said as he pushed a walk signal at a new crosswalk at Town Hall Drive. “And we’ve never had a safe way to cross. Now we do.”
Two more pedestrian crossings are coming soon, at Old Savannah and Oriana drives and at a pedestrian-activated signal between Ranglin Street and Leafycreek Drive. Town Manager Martha Paige credited the town’s “active and engaged residents” with ensuring those signals were added to the project.
A federal grant covered 70% of the project’s cost, with the town paying the rest.
The federal involvement forced the town and the N.C. Department of Transportation to study the added noise it would create for nearby residents and to consider erecting 18-foot noise walls along the road. That idea proved widely unpopular, and the town and NCDOT tweaked the project a decade ago to avoid having to build them.
Morrisville still has several two-lane roads that date back to its days as a rural community. They include nearby N.C. 54, which crosses Morrisville Carpenter at the center of town, and Aviation Parkway, between N.C. 54 and the intersection with Evans Road and McCrimmon Parkway.
This story was originally published February 28, 2023 at 4:10 PM.
