In February of 2020, a portion of what was formerly known as Business 40 in Winston-Salem reopened following a complete rebuild.
The goal was to make an outdated 1.2-mile stretch between U.S. 52 and Peters Creek Parkway safer. Five years later, WFDD’s David Ford is Carolina Curious to know: Is it? To find the answer, he has this look back at the project.
In October 2016, then-Governor Pat McCrory and a group of state officials held an official groundbreaking ceremony for the Business 40 Improvement Project in Winston-Salem. They announced the highway’s new name, Salem Parkway, construction began the following year, and by the fall of 2018, that heavily trafficked roadway was completely shut down.
Suddenly, Triad-area commuters had to deal with some major traffic congestion. Many retailers and restaurant owners who relied on easy road access for their customers began to see a drop in business. North Carolina Department of Transportation engineer John Rhyne says, before its rebirth as Salem Parkway, Business 40 was a bit of a mess.
"It was an old relic from designs of yesteryear," says Rhyne. "Lots of ramps through there, very short ramps to get out onto Business 40, the shoulders on the sides were very narrow. Had old double-faced guard rail in the middle. If you had any issues on that road, there just wasn't a lot of room to navigate or to get around issues — very congested, very dark."
Rhyne says they don’t know for sure, but those conditions may have contributed to the spike in the total number of crashes along that stretch in the years leading up to the shutdown. Between 2013 and 2015, the annual average was 52 crashes. Over the following three years, that average more than doubled to nearly 120.
"Seventy-two percent of those were rear-end accidents, which was a common issue there on Business 40 at the time," he says. "So when something happened, you know, in front of you, several cars, it was just brake lights immediately, and folks didn't have anywhere to move to."
So, Rhyne, who was then managing maintenance and operations, and his colleagues set about modernizing: widening shoulders, extending short ramps by several hundred feet, replacing the bridges, raising them to meet all vertical clearance standards, adding pedestrian bridges and improving safety overall.
Looking back on the birth of Salem Parkway, Rhyne says it took a lot of outreach efforts to find out what everyone needed from this project.
"A lot of coordination with the city and the businesses in that area, unlike anything that we had done before, with regard to public engagement," says Rhyne. "We knocked on doors, tried to talk to everybody that we could, held multiple public engagement sessions leading up to the closure, trying to refine the design and really hone in on what folks were looking for in this new rebuild."
He adds they also got buy-in from the community on a full road closure to significantly speed up the construction process and lessen the impact on the community as a whole.
And by most objective measures, that planning paid off. The Parkway reopened to traffic in February 2020, 10 months ahead of schedule, and the work was recognized nationally, receiving numerous awards.
And yet, circling back to the question: is Salem Parkway any safer today than it was back in the old Business 40 days? Well, going by the numbers, not necessarily. According to the state’s crash database, after a slight dip in the total crashes in the two years following its re-opening, those numbers have steadily risen from 36 in 2021 to 64 just last year.
But Rhyne says this is part of a statewide trend.
"The last several years we have seen an uptick in traffic accidents across our major networks," says Rhyne. "The Governor's Highway Safety Program is looking into that, trying to determine exactly what that is contributing to it. But it is not foreign to us. We kind of see that in different places. And Salem Parkway as we know it now is not immune to that, unfortunately."
It’s tough to say for sure how many accidents may have been prevented by the Business 40 improvement project. According to John Rhyne, one thing we do know, though, is that Salem Parkway was designed to be around in its current form for at least another 20 or 30 years.