Highway 74 improvements explained to Indian Trail audience

INDIAN TRAIL, N.C. — Residents along the N.C. Highway 74 corridor have a chance to say what changes they want in the area over the next 20 years.

Union County, Monroe, Stallings and Indian Trail are collaborating on a study to revitalize the 74 corridor once the planned Monroe Connector-Bypass is constructed.

Tuesday evening, dozens of residents met with representatives of HNTB, a consultant firm hired to study the corridor and suggest positive changes. A study steering committee pointed consultants in the right direction in meetings held earlier this year, but now consultants want to hear directly from the people who travel the road every day.

"Tonight is not as much about giving you answers as it is talking about what could happen, what it could look like in the future," HNTB consultant Padam Singh said.

Consultants were there to provide information, but also to gather data from the meeting participants. They asked how many of them used 74 to commute and when, if anyone rode bikes or walked along the road and what kind of future access residents wanted planned.

"The corridor right now serves a lot of purposes," Singh said. "It moves people around to get them from their houses to their jobs. It provides access to retail services and shopping."

And until the bypass is built, it is part of a drive between the North Carolina mountains to South Carolina's beaches, he said.

"That's the purpose of this study," Singh said. "To understand these changes and how we can guide those changes in a positive way."

He showed the audience before and after photos of roads in cities around the nation. Before revitalization, the roads were lined with empty stores, they lacked sidewalks and were too narrow for the amount of traffic that traveled them daily. After some changes, pedestrian crosswalks were added, new businesses moved in and much of the corridors were landscaped.

Some relief will come once the bypass opens, but that might be short-lived, HNTB representative Greg Boulanger said. Union County is still the 13th fastest-growing county in the nation and in 20 years, Highway 74 could be more congested than it is today.

"The cross streets, there's not a lot of improvement planned for those to access the interchanges," Boulanger said."You can expect to see about 55 percent growth on those interchanges."

There are seven intersections along the corridor, most of them close to the Mecklenburg County line, where delays are at an unacceptible level, Boulanger said. More growth without some relief will only make those interchanges worse.

Since there are so many land uses along the corridor, there are more than 400 driveways and entrances where traffic can enter the highway or pull off.

"That adds to delay. It adds to your level of service and increases the crash frequencies," he said.

In the last three years, there have been more than 1,000 reported vehicle accidents on 74. Many of those happened in areas where the median breaks, allowing traffic to make u-turns, Boulenger said.

"Most of those collisions, about 63 percent, are rear-end collisions," he said.

Donald Simpson, another HNTB consultant, addressed the corridor's aethetics. Newer buildings along 74 are attractive and their grounds were landscaped to look nice.

"Some of the older buildings are very plain, or worse, to put it politely," Simpson said.

But even in the newest developments in the corridor, both sides are crowded with signs for stores, services or other businesses.

"There's so much clutter that's it hard to see anything," he said.

Study leaders will hold another public regional kick-off meeting about the Highway 74 corridor revitalization plan tonight from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Carolinas Medical Center - Union in Monroe. For more information about the study, visit www.us74corridor.com.

WSOC