Murphy – A connector road between Old Ranger Road and U.S. 64 West that was once envisioned as part of a traffic circle on the four-lane highway should be ready by Thanksgiving.
N.C. Department of Transportation spokesman David Uchiyama said DOT officials are negotiating a supplemental agreement with the contractor to complete paving, curb and gutter, driveway installation and other line items for the connector road.
Engineers anticipate completing the work before Thanksgiving, he said. The connector is the last part of the U.S. 64 West highway project in the area.
The new connector will have stop signs where it intersects with U.S. 64 West and Old Ranger Road.
U.S. 64 traffic circle
The connector road between U.S. 64 West and Ranger Road was part of a planned traffic circle at a newly created intersection with Smith Hollow/Marks Drive.
The project was mapped out when the county planned to build an Emergency Medical Services station at the end of Marks Drive. The county wound up building the EMS station off of Peachtree Street, but plans for the intersection continued.
The traffic circle was proposed instead of a traffic light to improve safety for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, while also calming and slowing traffic along the highway, but it was controversial before it was announced that they would review the project after work was completed on the new intersection.
It planned to monitor conditions and if safety concerns arose, Division 14, which includes Cherokee County and nine other western North Carolina counties, would re-evaluate the need for the traffic circle or other safety measure using its budget for safety improvements, the DOT announced in January.
Since then, the traffic circle was pulled from project plans and submitted into the State Transportation Improvement Program process with other projects across Division 14. The Southwestern Rural Planning Organization and Division 14 added points in the scoring process to other projects with a higher priority, making the traffic circle a lower priority proposal.
Andrews intersection
In Andrews, the traffic signal at the intersection of Main Street and Whitaker Lane remains a work in progress.
The signal was malfunctioning and, because traffic at the intersection hasn’t been what it once was when the town’s hospital still existed nearby, the traffic light was downgraded to flashing red off of Whitaker and flashing yellow off of Main.
Town leaders complained and full traffic signal service was restored. However, instead of being activated by sensors underneath Whitaker that changed the light from red to green, the traffic light was set on a timer.
The problem was that Whitaker Lane was getting a green light far more often than it needed, while Main Street was getting a red light too often for its traffic.
“Signal technicians have marked out the loop to have it repaired, and the contractor has been mobilized,” Uchiyama said. “In the meantime, our office will tweak the timing to help alleviate the concern as much as possible.”