On a once quiet street, Holly Springs begins the biggest road project in town history
As the population of Holly Springs has ballooned in recent decades, the town’s network of two-lane roads has been pushed to its limits.
Now the town is about to begin widening one of those roads while also making it less prone to flooding and safer for parents and children who walk or ride bicycles to Holly Ridge elementary and middle schools.
The overhaul of a 1.5-mile section of Holly Springs Road is the biggest road construction project the town has ever undertaken. It will create a four-lane thoroughfare from Flint Point Lane out to Sunset Lake Road, near a future interchange with N.C. 540, the six-lane Triangle Expressway now being built across southern Wake County.
“It’s going to be the new gateway to the town,” Mayor Sean Mayefskie said at a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday. “It’s a big project.”
Holly Springs Road was once a two-lane country road that connected a small crossroads community with the growing Raleigh suburb of Cary. Now Holly Springs is also a growing suburb, with all the traffic that comes with it, said Kendra Parrish, the town’s director of utilities and infrastructure.
”With a population of about 45,000 people, we’re still traveling the same road as when we were 900 people,” Parrish said. “And so this project is very needed for our community. It’s very needed for our region and for 540.”
Contractors for the N.C. Department of Transportation have taken down houses and trees and begun moving dirt where Holly Springs Road will meet N.C. 540 on the northeast side of town. From there, NCDOT will widen the road to four lanes as far into Holly Springs as Spring Lake Road.
The town will take it from there, in a project that is expected to take three years to finish and cost $37 million. Most of that money will come from bonds that town voters approved for road construction in 2018.
In addition to the extra lanes for cars, the town will build eight-foot-wide sidewalks for pedestrians and cyclists. Near the Holly Ridge schools, it will install two crosswalks known as HAWKs or “high-intensity activated crosswalks” that bring traffic to a stop when pedestrians push a button.
In addition, the intersection with Cobblepoint Way, in front of Holly Ridge Elementary, will become a roundabout, to slow through traffic and make it easier for cars to get in and out of the school during busy times.
All those changes will be welcome to Joy Gorman, who has been principal at Holly Ridge for 14 years and seen the traffic grow.
“This used to be a very quiet street,” Gorman said. Now, she added, it can be “scary. Every time I see kids crossing that road, I just hold my breath.”
Rebuilding Holly Springs Road should also solve another problem: regular flooding where Middle Creek passes through a 20-foot-wide culvert under the road. It’s gotten to the point that when heavy rain is forecast the fire and police departments move crews and equipment to the north side of the creek.
“Because if it rained and it flooded, guess what?” Mayefskie said. “The other side of town wasn’t going to be taken care of.”
The town will replace the culvert with a 150-foot-long bridge that will be 12 feet higher than the existing roadway.
Holly Springs Road will remain open throughout the project, according to the town. That includes at Middle Creek, where a new two-lane span will be built next to the existing road, then traffic shifted over while two more lanes are built.
For more information and updates during construction, go to www.hollyspringsnc.gov/1664/Holly-Springs-Road-Widening---East.
This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 10:00 AM with the headline "On a once quiet street, Holly Springs begins the biggest road project in town history."
