Commissioner finds faults in traffic planning

SMITHFIELD — Like many Johnstonians, County Commissioner Bill Stovall has his traffic peeves.

One is on U.S. 70 Business in West Smithfield, where tractor-trailer rigs stream, sometimes haltingly, in and out of the Amazon warehouse.

“There are tractor-trailers that are actually backing up onto Highway 70 and blocking traffic, waiting in a queue there to get into the facility,” Stovall told his fellow commissioners on Aug. 5.

He wondered how that was even possible. “I thought something like that would have been fully considered as part of the planning process,” Stovall said.

He faulted Smithfield for traffic woes at Amazon and American Leadership Academy Johnston, a charter school farther west on U.S. 70 Business. Both, he noted, were within Smithfield’s planning jurisdiction, known formally as extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ.

“They have the benefit, or they enjoy, a two-mile ETJ boundary,” Stovall said, referring to the planning reach that most Johnston towns have beyond their borders. “But when I continue to see projects or problems created like that at Amazon …”

He didn’t complete that thought but found further fault in Smithfield’s planning. “They have recently approved about 800 homes right across the road from that,” he said, referring to a large subdivision under development across U.S. 70 Business from Amazon. “It’s only going to further exacerbate the traffic-staging issues that we have out there.”

Stovall put Smithfield and other Johnston towns on notice. “If planning is not what is needs to be in these ETJs, then maybe we need to look at revising these ETJs to give the county more influence,” he said.

The county needs “to ensure that we don’t create these problems or we address these problems before they become safety hazards,” he said.

The N.C. Department of Transportation is sometimes guilty of poor planning too, Stovall said. He pointed specifically to the DOT’s decision to close a stretch of N.C. 210 for 13 months while it replaces the bridge over Middle Creek.

“They’ve got all that traffic being routed down (Cleveland Road) onto Crantock Road, which has got a major subdivision going in,” Stovall said. “Already got a couple subdivisions out there on that blind curve, and it’s a very narrow roadway.”

An upcoming DOT project could also create problems, Stovall said, referring to the widening of the Shotwell Road-U.S. 70 Business intersection in Clayton. “That’s going to be a major disruption,” he said. “I wonder how much they took that into consideration when they shut down 210 at the Middle Creek bridge.”

Stovall said a lack of state dollars for road projects created its own problems. “It’s pushing traffic off onto these side roads … and clogging them up,” he said.

Commissioners need to be mindful of that, Stovall said. “That needs to be taken into consideration as we look at development going forward,” he said. “We’re creating conditions that are hazardous.”

Commissioner Fred Smith said the DOT’s funding model was behind the times. “In North Carolina, we pay for roads with a gas tax,” he said.

But gas tax receipts are falling as more people drive electric cars, work from home or simply drive less because of the price of gas.

North Carolina needs new ways to build roads, Smith said, whether that be toll roads, taxing miles driven or some other mechanism. “Because until we get funds, we can’t do what we need to do to build the roads,” he said.

As for congested Johnston County roads, commissioners are partly to blame, Smith said. “We sit as commissioners and give incentives to businesses to come to Johnston County,” he said. “When these businesses come, we’re promoting more traffic to be on our roads.”

Commissioners can’t have it both ways, Smith said. “We can’t say, well, we want more jobs and we want more businesses but then talk about, well, we got too many cars on the road,” he said.

Smith thinks Johnstonians appreciate new jobs and all they bring to the county. “When you have business, you get rooftops, you get shops, you get places where people go to buy the goods and services they need,” he said.

“It’s all one global situation,” Smith said. “So when we’re talking about roads, I hope we don’t just look at one thing. I hope we look at all those things because they’re all interrelated.”

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