By David Rogers. BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — The July 14th meeting of Blowing Rock’s Board of Commissioners, also known as Town Council, brought much needed community focus on important issues.
Of particular interest was the public hearing on Green Hill Road. After several people from that long stretch of neighborhood street spoke so forcefully about the lack of safety for residents along what was once a pleasantly winding residential street, the Board of Commissioners voted to reduce the speed limit from 25 miles per hour to 20 mph. Over the last few years, the town had already approved stop signs at Green Hill Circle, Fairway 11 Court and Wonderland Drive to help drivers using Green Hill Road be more mindful of its residential characteristics. Still, the problems persist.
Did the Board of Commissioners go far enough?
It wasn’t that long ago, 15 years to be exact, that hardly anyone bothered to use Green Hill Road except for the residents who lived along it and the various side streets: Tarry Acres Circle, West Green Hill Drive, Green Hill Circle, Sourwood Lane, Green Hill Woods, Hemlock Lane, Goforth Road, and others along the route. Green Hill Road was narrow and winding, with blind curves, the same conditions that characterize the street today.
But beginning in 2011, along came the U.S. 321 Bypass (Valley Boulevard) widening project. That lasted until all four lanes finally opened in the summer of 2018. Through those seven years of frequent delays for construction and stoppages for blasting, people discovered Green Hill Road from the Green Park Inn to the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a way to avoid the construction mess. Whether the drivers of all those vehicles discovered the alternative route the old-fashioned way (reading a map) or were directed by GPS is all but irrelevant. Tourists coming up the hill from Lenoir and going to Boone and beyond; App State students, faculty and staff; and all manner of commercial vehicles began using Green Hill Road to get from point A to points B-Z in the High Country.
As witnessed by the residents who spoke at the public hearing, mailboxes have been clipped and runover. There have been a number of near-misses with cars, as well as with people walking, biking, and running. The near misses have even included folks doing nothing more than picking up their mail from their respective streetside mailboxes.
Now, not only are people seemingly in a great hurry to get to and from the Parkway to U.S. 321 and points south, but large commercial vehicles with no business whatsoever in the neighborhood are using it to get through, whether directed to go that way by Siri or another form of GPS, or just their personal preference. Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense with Valley Boulevard now a completed thoroughfare.
Yes, landscapers and maintenance people need to get to their customers’ homes. We’re not talking about them. Similarly, there have been home construction projects in and around the neighborhood. We’re not talking about them, either.
But why on earth anyone would WANT to use Green Hill Road to get from Lenoir to Boone, or vice versa, when they have a 4-lane Valley Boulevard with only three or four signal lights is beyond comprehension. But they are. Maybe it is habit. Maybe they are afraid of the police patrolling Valley Boulevard. Maybe they are just brand new to the area and are mistakenly told by GPS to go that route as “shorter” to eastern portions of Watauga County, like Deep Gap, or a shorter way to get to Ashe County.
The residents of Green Hill didn’t ask for all the new traffic, even though they got it because other people were adapting to the new transportation realities of road construction. As a town, though, we need to help them restore some of the tranquility that once was their neighborhood.
Besides the fact that Green Hill Road remains a narrow, winding street, there are some other considerations, too. In 2014, Blowing Rock voters approved the Community Improvement Bonds. For a town this size, we borrowed a lot of money to take care of some infrastructure items that had been neglected or “kicked down the road” for far too long, including streets.
Unfortunately for Green Hill Road, during the primary bond rollouts critical parts of the street were under the jurisdiction of the North Carolina Department of Transportation, so the town was limited in what it could do with regard to pavement care. The street was outside local municipal oversight at the time. For the Green Hill neighborhoods, some of the bond money shifted to underground utility improvements, but the paving explicitly centered on high-volume municipal arteries, i.e. Main Street and Sunset Drive.
In recent years, we understand that the Town of Blowing Rock has taken over maintenance of the Green Hill Road segment that runs roughly from U.S. 321 to Wonderland Drive. If the Town has any plans of repaving Green Hill Road, the Town Council should recognize a fiduciary responsibility to help protect the residential street from unnecessary traffic. This means not only reducing the volume of traffic because of people using it as a bypass to Valley Boulevard, but also heavier commercial traffic with no business in the neighborhood. Continued usage as it is may shorten the benefit of repaving from a planned 10-15 years’ schedule to something much shorter, even five years. Anyone driving it now will see that shoulders are few, edges are breaking down on the sides, and some areas look like they are ready to start sliding off of the hills.
Lowering the speed limit from 25-20 may help, if obeyed. Installing stop signs at Wonderland, Fairway Court and Green Hill Circle, if obeyed, will help, too. What are the other steps that can be taken?
Signage: Perhaps the most important signage is already being discussed between Mayor Charlie Sellers, Commissioner Doug Matheson, and State Representative Ray Pickett, we understand. That is to warn drivers coming up the mountain, before they get to the Green Hill Road intersection, that it is a residential, narrow and winding road, unsuitable for vehicles with more than two axles. Just this year, there have been a few 18-wheelers or large buses who have gotten stuck trying to make the sharp curve just behind what is the Green Park Inn property. We applaud this signage and encourage its utilization to be hastened, but in the meantime there is a key question: Who is paying for the damage caused to retaining walls and decorative landscaping?
More signage reminding drivers to slowdown, characterizing Green Hill road as a residential street, is probably necessary.
Table Top Speed Bumps: Any driver in a hurry hates to go over these, but they might be the most effective step the Town can take in reducing unnecessary traffic. It might only take three or four of them strategically placed along the town portion of the street to persuade people to not go that way. These would be far more effective than, say, rumble strips, which also add unwanted noise for nearby residents.
From what we heard from the residents along Green Hill Road who spoke at the Town Council meeting on July 14, especially those most closely affected by the increased traffic will not mind the inconvenience of stop signs, lower speed limits and table top speed bumps.
GPS: One of the best fixes would be if the Town could get Google, Apple and any other GPS providers to stop sending drivers to Green Hill Road. They obviously don’t know the risks to the residents or to the drivers themselves, i.e. when an 18-wheeler or big bus gets stuck in the curve behind the Green Park Inn property. Commercial vehicles are not supposed to be driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway, either, so commercial drivers risk getting a ticket from one of the (understaffed) Park Rangers.
Other Green Hill neighborhood residents may be irritated speeding prevention measures because they are not directly affected. One Green Hill Circle resident already complained to me about the lower speed limit, “Everybody is going fast everywhere in the state,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”
Well, the big deal is resident safety. One of the July 14 speakers brought up an important point: If the Town is aware of the problem and doesn’t do anything to better restore the residential characteristics of the street, what becomes the Town’s liability when and if someone is badly injured or, heaven forbid, killed in an accident?
ISSUE NO. 2
Another issue raised at the July 14 meeting of Town Council was the growing deer population, advanced by resident David Sweet and reinforced by resident Jenny Miller. As Sweet pointed out, deer are frequently host to ticks, which frequently carry serious diseases such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease. Sweet was a victim of a tick-borne disease, he said, even passing out. “There was blood,” he said of his falling down while describing other hardship symptoms.
Another former Blowing Rock resident, Jim Ruff, passed away last year after a long battle with the effects of contracting tick-borne Lyme disease, more than likely as a result of an earlier photography adventure in the Rocky Mountains.
A lot of Blowing Rock and High Country residents work in their gardens over the course of the year, and deer are frequently unwelcome visitors munching on flowers and plants. In recent weeks, not a day goes by but what I see deer, including fawns, crossing streets in Blowing Rock and the surrounding area. Because of the severity of tick-borne diseases and deer as a known carrier, it just makes sense that we should investigate ways of thinning the local deer population.
