story co-written with Jake Harkey
Part 1 of the serial of stories published in The Sylva Herald, Dec. 13, 2023
America runs on Dunkin and Sylva lost the only one in town. Dunkin ceased selling coffee and doughnuts in November due to road construction and more businesses will be closing permanently or moving to a new location in the near future.
The N.C. Department of Transportation plan to reconfigure N.C.107 through Sylva’s commercial corridor for safety reasons is knocking down some buildings and taking property from other plots.
In the summer of 2021 NCDOT started working on the road. It started with settling with the property owners who will be impacted by the road.
According to Sylva lawyer and roads activist Jay Coward, there are 152 parcels that will be impacted by the road and of those 20 businesses and seven residential properties will have to relocate.
Coward and eminent domain attorney Kevin Mahoney represent 22 property owners.
Inevitable
Despite local reaction to the loss of the businesses, the road goes on.
“This project would have happened regardless because of the crash rates and the traffic congestion Sylva town manager Paige Dowling said. “There is a crash every working day on 107,”
Crash analysis data from NCDOT of the road found that “the corridor experiences a high percentage of rear-end collisions which can be caused by congested conditions — a crash rate higher than the state average.”
The Traffic Engineering Accident Analysis System posited that “the five-year crash study from Aug. 2011 through July 2016 found 254 total crashes on N.C. 107 from N.C. 116 to U.S. 23 Business. That translates to 234 crashes per 100 million vehicle miles of travel — a rate higher than the 2013-15 statewide average for all N.C. routes (221 per 100 motor vehicle mile) but lower than the statewide average for four-lane N.C. routes with a continuous left turn lane.”
NCDOT crash analysis from the start of 2017 up to the end of September 2023 on the stretch of Highway 107 from U.S. 23 up to Evans Road (SR 1774) boasted a total of 707 crashes. The majority of the crashes involve property damage (85 percent) but 15 percent had injuries and three crashes were fatal injuries.
Data from the 2022 ranking of cities with populations of less than 10,000 based on all reported crashes from Jan. 1, 2020 through Dec. 31, 2022 ranked Sylva 10th out of 432 cities. Jackson County is ranked 42 for 2022, which is down from the 51 place in 2019 in the ranking of all counties in North Carolina.
Discussions and various plans for making the traffic through town better have been ongoing for over 20 years. The Southern loop, an attempt to bypass the busy part of N.C. 107, was one idea that met strong public opposition.
Just wouldn’t do
That project was not acceptable for the people so the DOT said it would have to do something else with N.C. 107, Coward said.
NCDOT explored the idea of a bypass that would have gone through the Cane Creek area that would have put western traffic towards Balsam.
Sylva businesses didn’t really want the bypass because they didn’t want all the traffic to bypass their businesses, Dowling said.
Some examples of other ideas include the 2012 Jackson County N.C. 107 feasibility study, with talks of constructing roundabouts, replacing center turn lanes with islands and adjusting traffic signal timings.
Eventually, these ideas led to a campaign formed by the people of Sylva using the slogan “Smart Roads not New Roads” meaning “use the existing roads we have just designed a better layout for them. Make it so people are able to travel on the same roads they already travel on but can now do it in a much safer way.”
“Really, I think the southern loop across Kings Mountain and the other loop that went from approximately where the Southwestern Community College bypass is now, that would have gone through the mountains over to where Blanton’s Branch is on the other side would have been a much better solution than killing off half of the business district of Sylva for an improved N.C. 107,” said Coward, an attorney at Coward, Hicks and Siler.
Coward and his Smart Roads group were unable to stop R-5600, the current plan, but that doesn’t mean he has totally given up. He and Mahoney hope to get the affected business and property owners the money they deserve, he said.
Part 2: N.C. 107 road work leads to revenue decline for Sylva
Part 3: 107 Project impacting 152 properties along route
Abigail Queen and Lauren Ramsey contributed to the story. The story is produced as part of collaboration with The Sylva Herald and supported by small grant from the Center for Community News.
