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DOT says it has awarded a $604,000 contract to build the 1.3-mile Edwards Mill Road Greenway in West Raleigh, from the Reedy Creek Road Greenway to Trinity Road.

State Contracting of Wake Forest won the contract, to start work as soon as Feb. 28 with completion in mid-October.

The new trail on the east side of Edwards Mill Road will extend Raleigh's greenway network, adding a connection to the Loblolly Trail through Schenk Forest. It also will give pedestrians and cyclists a new route to the RBC Center.  The city of Raleigh will contribute $28,000 to the project and take over maintenance of the greenway after it is built.

The state Division of Parks and Recreation toyed for a year with the idea of opening a third automobile entrance to Umstead State Park (at Graylyn Drive), and it received a few hundred comments expressing sharp opinions on both sides.

The Raleigh City Council's Public Works Committee struggled this year with calls to erect "No Parking" signs in residential neighborhoods where Umstead users leave their cars There were sharp, competing opinions here, too.

State and city agencies helped create these problems. The Umstead maintenance gate at the corner of Trenton and Reedy Creek Roads became an even more appealing destination for park users after the city and the state extended the Reedy Creek Greenway west from the NC Museum of Art -- and stopped it there. The closest parking lot is two miles away at the art museum.

NCDOT banned parking on the state roads outside the Graylyn and Reedy Creek Road maintenance gates -- after it justified paving Graylyn by using high traffic counts that had been generated by those same parked cars.

Both the city and the state are wary of taking steps that will set uncontrollable precedents, cost money and perhaps create new sets of environmental, legal and political problems.

So the parks division refused this week to open the Graylyn gate. And the city council said ... [MORE]