Transportation's a hot topic in Winston-Salem these days, with elected officials, landowners and motorists fretting over the dim prospects for quick action on road projects such as the Northern Beltway and Business 40 reconstruction.
As action in Winston-Salem is delayed, people in Greensboro can look forward to the completion of two more links in their outer loop, assuming the state's plan for prioritizing urban loops stays in place.
The road decisions continue a trend that has seen Winston-Salem lose ground to Greensboro for some time, whether the transportation issue is airport services, train tracks or roads.
"We continue to see construction of the large roadways fall behind and slip away," said Brent McKinney, the former director of Winston-Salem transportation who now heads the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation.
The eastern beltway leg would relieve traffic on U.S. 52, while the western leg would reduce pressure on local streets. At the same time, he said, the city needs to "begin as soon as possible to develop a robust public transportation system."
Local officials acknowledge that what helps Greensboro helps Winston-Salem, too, because companies relocating to the region look beyond the county lines to see a road network that connects the Triad to destinations throughout the eastern part of the country.
Still, Winston-Salem has work to do on the transportation front to continue to bring businesses to the city, local officials say.
"We are very quickly running out of quality developed sites," said Bob Leak, the president of Winston-Salem Business Inc., a business-recruitment organization. "There should be opportunities along some of the beltway to potentially build some new business parks that would be able to further serve the area. The ... beltway would certainly do that."
Heyday passed
McKinney points out that Winston-Salem had its heyday of road construction in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Silas Creek Parkway was extended to join North Point Boulevard, and I-40 was rerouted to the south side of the city. A $12 million bypass around Bethabara Park also was built.
"When we cut the ribbon on I-40 in 1992, we moved the congestion out of Winston-Salem and over to the Guilford County line," PART's McKinney said. "There have been good times for Winston. Now there are good times for Greensboro. The pendulum is going to come back."
Daily passenger service at an airport is one form of transportation that isn't likely to come back to Winston-Salem, officials say, and a rail connection also is likely only in the distant future.
With about 130,000 takeoffs and landings, Smith Reynolds Airport was No. 1 in the state in 1963. By the time Piedmont Airlines merged with USAir in 1989, Smith Reynolds had long been surpassed by Greensboro as the Triad's main airport for passenger aviation. In 2000, commercial passenger flights stopped at Smith Reynolds.
By then, passenger rail service, too, was 10 years gone in Winston-Salem; the last such train pulled out in July 1970. Amtrak passenger train service currently travels through Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte. Plans to upgrade to high-speed rail include a loop for Winston-Salem.
Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines stresses the need to preserve the option of bringing back passenger rail service.
"There are three rail things we are working on," Joines said. "One is the connector to the high-speed line. The second is the commuter rail system that would link eastern Greensboro to western Winston-Salem and connections to the airport. That would run along those rail lines that come into the Piedmont Triad Research Park. And then the third piece is the downtown streetcar system that ties it all together."
Joines can't predict when any of those rail links will be up and running, but said they will need a subsidy to work.
"I think what we need to do during my tenure is make sure we're keeping all of our options open, protecting right of way and working with PART on developing a seamless transportation system."
Step by step
Building the eastern leg of the beltway -- which also would be a segment of I-74 -- is significant even to local public transportation needs, McKinney said.
That's because U.S. 52, which would get relief from the beltway, now carries two different driving populations. One group consists of drivers who are simply trying to get past Winston-Salem for destinations on the other side. The other drivers are those coming to Winston-Salem and those who live here already.
"The majority of the ones that would take I-74 would not be interested in stopping," McKinney said. "They would use the bypass to go around town, and that would free up capacity for local traffic and traffic that wanted a high level of service downtown. Right now, those folks are being robbed of that level of operation because of the through traffic that does not want to be there in the first place."
With good freeways in place, McKinney said, a local transit system will work better. McKinney said the local system has to start in the downtown core and work out in order to succeed. There's no point in having a high-speed train come to town if the passengers can't get around once they get off, he said.
"Invest in downtown," McKinney said. "We will worry later about connecting to Greensboro with rail."
As officials look to develop public transportation with a downtown core, they're looking at alternatives to buses and focusing on ideas such as a streetcar that would link downtown with the developing Piedmont Triad Research Park and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
"Having a variety of transportation, including transit and walking and alternate transportation is particularly good for knowledge-based businesses," said Paul Norby, the city-county planning director. "Typically, they are attracting younger employees, well-educated employees who are seeking out an active urban environment, and they're not necessarily looking to be out in the quiet suburbs and driving their one-passenger car into downtown every day. They're going to want to tend to live in an urban environment very close to their workplace."
The beltway is important for those businesses that rely heavily on transportation, Norby said.
"You really don't want large trucks going over miles and miles of city streets," he said. "You also don't want your trucks sitting in unpredictable traffic jams. So picture U.S. 52 shut down on an average of once or twice a day because of an accident, and if that is your main route to and from your markets, that makes your business kind of uncompetitive in the marketplace."
Beltway key
Leak's counterpart in Greensboro, Dan Lynch, sees the completion of Greensboro's urban loop as the No. 1 transportation priority there. Lynch heads the Greensboro Economic Development Alliance. The southern loop around the city was completed in 2008.
"Up and down that whole corridor there are sites that were less accessible before the loop went in," Lynch said.
"In addition to getting to the airport quicker, if you look at how the loop travels, it opens up some roads that didn't have access to an interstate highway prior to that. If you are recruiting an advanced manufacturer that has to get raw materials in and out, they want to be close to a four-lane highway."
Joines points out that Caterpillar Inc. recently chose Winston-Salem for the site of a new axle-manufacturing plant in part because of existing transportation links. But Joines and other officials worry that the lack of a beltway in Forsyth County may create the kind of congestion that over time will make Winston-Salem less attractive.
"From a logistics standpoint, it's very important," Joines said. "One of the things that we sell about Winston-Salem -- and really North Carolina in general -- is we're within a huge percentage of the East Coast. If we don't get it built, I think we would be reaching a point sometime in the future of congestion, and that's a factor that would play into a company's decision."
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