Backups on this Lake Norman road still stretch for miles years after NC vowed relief
READ MORE
Getting around Charlotte
This is an occasional series about dangerous or tricky intersections and roadwork across the Charlotte region. Know of one? Send an email to Joe Marusak at jmarusak@charlotteobserver .com.
Expand All
Backups on this Lake Norman road still stretch for miles years after NC vowed relief
I-485 toll lane update: Here’s what to know about work on bridges in south Charlotte
Work starts on major I-77 bridge near Charlotte with goal of solving traffic mess
This road near Charlotte got new lanes months ago. Why do barrels still block drivers?
This Charlotte-area intersection saw 63 wrecks in 4 1/2 years. Why has no one fixed it?
Drivers on N.C. 150 at Lake Norman stew in miles-long daily backups that grow worse with every new mega-subdivision and retail center popping up.
Frustrated drivers include Bill Nagel, who bought a lot on Kiser Island Road off N.C. 150 on the lake in 1985.
A gas station and a retail store were the only signs of civilization along the 7-mile drive on N.C. 150 to Interstate 77 Exit 36 in Mooresville from his and his wife, Barbara’s home, he said.
Today, with major subdivisions and retail centers cramming the corridor, it takes 45 minutes to get from the interstate back home during peak traffic hours, he said.
At peak hours and often other times of the day, traffic backs up for 5 to 6 miles, according to Nagel and other residents who complained to The Charlotte Observer about the N.C. 150 snarls.
“We’re very upset with it,” Nagel said during an interview along a clogged stretch of N.C. 150 near Doolie Road and Perth Road west of Mooresville on Wednesday, Nov. 17.
“Over the period of the last 30 years, 35 years, the growth has been explosive, particularly west of Mooresville” in eastern Catawba County, he said.
NC 150 widening plan
The state Department of Transportation has promised relief for decades.
Its latest plan calls for widening 15 miles of N.C. 150 in Iredell and eastern Catawba counties starting later this decade.
The $269.47 million project stretches from just west of the U.S. 21-N.C. 150 interchange in Mooresville to N.C. 16 Bypass in Catawba County.
NCDOT plans to accept bids for and start construction of the Iredell County leg of the expansion in 2025, according to the department’s latest project timetable. Construction of the Catawba County stretch would begin in 2029, the timetable shows.
How long the work will take is still to be determined, according to NCDOT.
Nagel, a General Electric retiree, estimates that the Iredell County leg will take three years to complete. By then, he said, N.C. 150 will be “impossible” to drive given all of the new and planned development particularly along the Catawba County leg of the project.
“The next several years, I predict that the amount of traffic on 150 by the time they widen it, there’ll be at least another 50,000 vehicles because of all the multi-family developments that are now in progress and are planned, much of it in Catawba County,” Nagel said.
He sees the new development every day as a resident of the Terrell area of eastern Catawba County.
Did politics delay widening?
Newcomers might be unaware that N.C. 150 could have been expanded in Iredell County and eastern Catawba County in the early 1990s.
The state instead opted to expand the primarily two-lane highway starting 35 miles to the southeast of Exit 36, in the rural Gaston County city of Cherryville, present-day population 6,000.
Mooresville’s population, meanwhile, has mushroomed over the decades to more than 40,000.
Back when the state chose to expand N.C. 150 in Cherryville first, a member of the state Transportation Board was an executive with Carolina Freight, a nationwide trucking company based in Cherryville.
An Observer investigation at the time revealed that the Carolina Freight executive, Kenneth Younger, voted repeatedly to start the widening in Cherryville.
Younger denied his votes were a conflict or interest. He said business and political leaders in neighboring counties also backed the measure and that local residents would benefit from a safer road.
N.C. 150 at Exit 36 in Mooresville was already clogged and wreck-prone at the time and deserved to be widened first, many lake residents argued to no avail.
Bottlenecks grow
Bottlenecks have only grown with time, despite the 2013 opening of a new I-77 interchange — Exit 35 — a mile to the south of Exit 36 at Brawley School Road.
Since Lake Norman High School opened in 2002 on Doolie Road off N.C. 150 in Mooresville, morning and afternoon lines of yellow buses have added to the traffic snarls, Nagel said.
And remedies to the bottlenecks pitched by the town of Mooresville never materialized after intense neighborhood objections.
Proposals included a bridge over the lake at the opposite end of Doolie Road, and a “shortcut” road that would have diverted traffic off N.C. 150 but spilled it into the Morrison Plantation subdivision, one of Mooresville’s largest communities.
A simple solution?
Nagel said such a new road would go far in solving the N.C. 150 conundrum. So would simply lengthening the short right-turn lane on N.C. 150 at Morrison Plantation Parkway, he contends.
NCDOT spokesman Marcus Thompson told the Observer on Friday that he would check with the state highway division construction engineer regarding the prospects of a longer N.C. 150 turn lane onto the parkway.
In an Oct. 20 letter to government officials and others, Nagel urged immediate action.
If not?
“Movement on 150 will come to a halt at all times of day,” he wrote.
This story was originally published November 24, 2021 at 6:15 AM.