Transportation plan could lead to wider rural roads

SMITHFIELD — A little pavement could make Johnston’s rural roads safer.

That’s one takeaway from last week’s discussion of the county’s next Comprehensive Transportation Plan, which is on schedule for adoption later this year.

Safety, including on rural roads, should be Johnston’s top transportation goal, according to a public opinion survey that is helping to inform the plan.

“Safety’s the No. 1 priority,” said Will Letchworth, an engineer with McAdams, the Raleigh firm drafting the plan with help from a steering committee. “We heard that time and time again.”

Many rural Johnston roads have narrow lanes and little to no shoulder. Letchworth knows that firsthand.

“I live on an 18-foot-wide rural roadway,” he said during a presentation before County Commissioners on Aug. 5.

Subdivision streets in rural Johnston are wider than that, Letchworth noted. “We don’t build 18-foot-wide roads in subdivisions,” he said. “They’re 20 feet wide.”

Such narrow roads are unsafe, said County Commissioner Bill Stovall. Farmland in western Johnston is disappearing, forcing farmers and their equipment onto narrow rural roads to reach faraway fields, he said.

“Farmers are increasingly being pushed out of the western side of the county,” he said. “The farming land is more diversified; it’s spread out.”

“Farm equipment is getting bigger because you got to go big in order to be profitable,” Stovall added. “And you’ve got to move it up and down these two-lane highways. That is continuing to raise safety concerns.”

Stovall noted that he had served on the committee that drafted Johnston’s new land-use plan. “Traffic concerns and the safety of traveling on our rural roads was a big issue in that process,” he said. “And I hope it will continue to be in the front of this study.”

It will be, Letchworth said. “You’ll see recommendations in the plan for widening, but it’s not necessarily widening to a three-lane or a four-lane,” he said. “It’s simply widening just to get a few more feet.”

Through gathering data to shape the transportation plan, his firm now knows the width of every state-maintained road in Johnston County, Letchworth said. “We’ve got a lot of rural two-lane roadways where a few feet more of shoulder on either side of the road, a few more feet of land would make a heck of a lot of difference,” he said.

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