Sidewalks - Part 1 - setting the context

Do you wish there were sidewalks all the way along Jeffreys Grove School Rd?

Perhaps you walk your kids to the elementary school or maybe you would like to walk a loop around the neighborhood with your dog or perhaps you wish your front lawn wasn't trampled in to mud by everyone walking by.

Whatever the reason the idea of adding sidewalks to this road is a popular topic of conversation.

This blog and associated Google account was created to help capture input and coordinate efforts of neighbors, parents of the nearby elementary school students and its PTA and, any other impacted residents of Raleigh for issues like adding a sidewalk.

Over the summer we were able to prompt the City to finish painting the road markings on the repaved portion of Ponderosa and renew the markings on Jeffreys Grove School Rd. In October we focused on the safety issue of wrong way drivers who are crossing the freshly painted double yellow lines. 

While adding a sidewalk would lower the risk to pedestrians from this illegal behavior, the wrong way problem needed tackling promptly. Adding a sidewalk will necessarily be a longer term goal. While the wrong way driver issue remains, including by a Solid Waste Services garbage truck just this morning!, we succeeded in making the Raleigh Police Department's Traffic division aware and we will continue to monitor and photograph occurrences to help RPD with enforcement as much as possible. Remember you can email or text photos of wrong way drivers to this account at any time. Where we can follow-up, like contacting Solid Waste Services to ask for a route change, we will.

Because the City of Raleigh's sidewalk petition process will take time, the author of these first blog posts feels it is important to have a mechanism for communication and organization that is independent of any particular individual and can be handed over to others to carry the torch through what is likely to be many years before sidewalk is actually built. And because this topic impacts neighbors who are not parents of students at the school we kept this blog & account distinct from the PTA (full disclosure: the author of this post is a parent of two JGMES students and has a spouse in a PTA board position).

In the next part of this series of blogs we will review what has been learned so far about the sidewalk petition process from contacting the office of the city councilor for this district and coordinating with the City of Raleigh teams they connected us with.

Please leave a comment here, drop a message to jgschoolroad@gmail.com or text/leave a voicemail on ‪(919) 578-3357 if you have a question or suggestion. Part 2 will be published soon.