Town of Surf City, NCDOT has public input meeting to discuss plans for roadways

SURF CITY, N.C. (WNCT) — While tourism can bring people and business, it can also bring a lot of stress to local roads.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation discussed plans on how to improve infrastructure in Surf City.

Surf City is one of many tourist destinations in Eastern North Carolina. With that, and its rapid population growth, traffic can sometimes begin to become a problem, especially on older roads and intersections not built to withstand that volume of drivers.

This is where the NCDOT comes into play, developing a plan for road and intersection redevelopment, which would improve traffic flow for everyone.

“This project aims to improve the function of the NC10-NC250 intersection from a traffic standpoint,” NCDOT Highway Division 3 Project Manager Zach Howard said. “The plan is to build a new road around the intersection to help some of the congestion at the intersection and to allow others to have another route to get to Topsail Island.

​The NCDOT has a prioritization process that works with local towns and counties to identify intersections and roads that need improvements. With that, comes the need for feedback from locals, which is what Monday’s meeting was for.

“The project is within the state’s planning framework for infrastructure but we have meetings like this as we work through the design of the project so that the local input can be incorporated into any sort of final product,” Surf City Town Manager Kyle Brauer said. “The project won’t be immediate in terms of groundbreaking but will get going within a few years.”

​”We expect the duration to take about three years for construction and because this is a new route we are building, the majority of construction will be done away from traffic,” Howard said. “So, we will be able to build a majority of the project without impacting traffic too much.”

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