After 31-year wait for NE Charlotte sidewalks, a death. Then car hit the memorial
A car struck and killed a pedestrian in October while traveling along Harris Houston Road on the fringes of the Charlotte city limits.
The death was a tragedy and, according to longtime Harris Houston Road resident Ed Mulheren, entirely preventable.
Mulheren has been advocating for his busy north Charlotte street to get a sidewalk for more than 30 years. He claims officials promised the infrastructure before he even moved to town but bumped other projects ahead of them.
Email exchanges obtained by The Charlotte Observer confirm Harris Houston Road has been on the city’s list of future projects since at least 2018, when a Charlotte transportation employee told Mulheren a sidewalk was still “many years” out.
Charlotte has a backlog of sidewalk projects stretching across more than 250 miles of thoroughfares. With limited time and capital, the city generally prioritizes high-volume, high-speed streets that “pose the greatest safety risk for people walking,” according to a statement from the city.
Harris Houston Road is not among them.
The pedestrian’s death on his street was decades in the making, Mulheren said, with the absence of a sidewalk posing a 31-year-long barrier to residents who wish to safely traverse their street. Critics say the city’s methodology for selecting projects resulted from years of poor urban planning.
The city would not confirm how long the road has been in the sidewalk project queue or how it ended up there. Charlotte spokesperson Jack VanderToll said “officials are unavailable for an interview” after two requests to speak to city leaders by phone or in person. They instead provided written responses that did not address most questions.
The city told the Observer it “is unable to comment at this time” on why Harris Houston Road remains in the same situation as it was in the ‘90s. It curves through a residential area with single family homes, townhomes and apartments just outside of Interstate 485 near PNC Music Pavilion, which draws thousands of people to its concerts.
“Every year I bring it back up to them,” Mulheren said. “And every year we’re on the list. ‘We don’t have the money’ is pretty much the response.”
‘Nowhere to go’: Lack of sidewalk leaves some residents immobile
Susan Mulheren is a big clothes, shoes and jewelry person. Shopping is one of her favorite pastimes, and she loves a reason to get dressed up and leave the house.
But those reasons are few and far between: Susan Mulheren is confined to a wheelchair and cannot get around without help from others. When her husband is at work, she’s left to wait at home by herself.
Most days, her clothes serve as little more than a reminder of her restrictions.
“I look at them and I want to cry because I have nowhere to wear them except for a doctor’s visit,” Susan Mulheren said. “I just want to get rid of them, like, get them out of here.”
Her back problems began shortly after her family moved from New York in 1995. Ed Mulheren recalled the city promising a sidewalk as part of infrastructure improvements coinciding with the Interstate 485 project, which was nearing completion after a quarter-century of construction.
The city would not confirm this promise and told the Observer it was “not aware of any connection” between I-485 and Harris Houston Road. The interstate was a multi-decade state project.
Once Ed Mulheren’s wife finished her first back surgeries, the need for a sidewalk became more pressing. He started badgering the city to follow through, to no avail.
“It’s been tough. Just for me, I go through periods of depression because I can’t do anything, or I ask somebody else to take me somewhere,” Susan Mulheren said.
Food Lion, Goodwill and other stores are located a little less than a mile from their house. For Susan Mulheren, who owns a motorized scooter she seldom has reason to use, a sidewalk would mean independence.
“I (could) go where I wanna go without having someone push me,” she said. “Just for something to do, and I enjoy, and it gets me out. But I could do it myself.”
Ed Mulheren splits his efforts between trying to get a sidewalk and making life more comfortable for his family at home.
He built a circular driveway in his front yard so his children and, later, grandchildren could practice riding bikes. In the back, he built a covered patio area and a swimming pool so his wife could occupy herself while he’s away.
“This is where I sit most days when it’s nice out,” Susan Mulheren said. “I’m in my house. I watch a lot of TV shows. And then I’m out here and sit until he gets home.”
Death on Harris Houston Road
Dale Lee Byrd, 66, was struck and killed around 9 p.m. Oct. 21. A preliminary investigation by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department found he was lying in the roadway at the time of the accident.
The city declined to comment on his death.
Charlotte has been trying to reduce the number of traffic deaths to zero by the year 2035 as part of an international initiative called “Vision Zero,” which it adopted in 2019. An internal audit from 2024 found little has changed in that time despite spending millions of dollars, however.
Byrd is one of 21 pedestrian deaths across Charlotte through Dec. 18, according to city data. Last year, there were 28 pedestrian deaths.
“A lot of them could have been preventable,” said Eric Zaverl, an urban design specialist at nonprofit Sustain Charlotte.
Most of Charlotte was built on “bad design methodologies,” Zaverl said. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the city adopted a sprawling, car-centric approach to urban planning that wasn’t friendly to other modes of transportation, such as walking.
The city started requiring new developments to build sidewalks on both sides of the street around the turn of the century, but the damage was already done.
“We have a long list of projects. Physically, it’s just impossible to do them all,” Zaverl said. “It’s sort of like you dug yourself into a hole, like debt. Unless some magic wand comes around and waives all your debt, you just need time to get out of it. I think we’re at a debt of infrastructure from decades of not building for multimodal.”
Nearby Pavilion Boulevard is an example of the patchwork of sidewalks Charlotteans might find closer to home. It contains sidewalks near its intersection with North Tryon Street, where there’s a movie theater and a shopping center with a Walmart. Then, sidewalks are sporadic, including none in front of PNC Music Pavillion, until reaching University Meadows Elementary School.
The city relies on a combination of serious injuries and fatalities to guide its sidewalk decisions, Zaverl said.
In an Oct. 31 email obtained by the Observer, Debbie Smith, director of the Charlotte Department of Transportation, told the department’s public relations manager that Harris Houston Road was 500th on the city’s list, which “didn’t really mean that we could ever feasibly get to building the sidewalk.”
The city would not say how exactly fatalities factor into sidewalk prioritization or whether Byrd’s death will change Harris Houston Road’s odds.
However, the city said the passage of the 1% mobility sales tax this fall and the funding that will come with it present an opportunity to reevaluate Charlotte’s sidewalk approach.
The Karen of sidewalks
Screeching tires have become almost background noise to the Mulherens, who hear speeding drivers slam on their brakes every day.
Harris Houston isn’t a straight road. It curves left and right, goes up and down. Foliage challenges visibility in some spots.
A mangled guardrail down the road is hit every week, Ed Mulheren said. They don’t let their grandkids check the mail because their mailbox has been knocked down before, too.
A cross marking the spot where Byrd died was also taken out by a car.
“They just zoom by the house, you can hear them,” Susan Mulheren told the Observer over the sound of squealing tires. “Even sitting back here, I can hear them zooming back and forth.”
Emails between city officials, obtained by the Observer, show there have been 76 crashes along Harris Houston Road since July 2020. Three resulted in severe injuries.
Ed Mulheren has explored every avenue he could think of. He founded a nonprofit organization to request a $5,000 city microgrant to build a small section of sidewalk they would call the “Dale Lee Byrd path.” The city denied that request, saying it fell outside the scope of the grant, which was intended for “small-scale, community-led initiatives rather than capital or infrastructure projects.”
In 2003, he ran in the Republican mayoral primary against longtime incumbent Pat McCrory with infrastructure and sidewalks incorporated into his platform. He would’ve run again in 2025 if his employer, Wells Fargo, didn’t deny his request.
The city shot down speed bumps and a reduced speed limit, too, he said.
“Unfortunately, sometimes there’s just not a quick, easy, simple solution because we didn’t get here in a quick, simple way,” Zaverl said.
The financial barrier is steeper than residents might realize. A single block of sidewalk on Zaverl’s street took four years and several million dollars to complete, he said. That was on a busy road with a school and limited crosswalks for children.
“You could see them crossing every day in the morning, and you would hold your breath,” Zaverl said. “It took the neighborhood association asking for that, myself championing that since it’s literally outside my door. But it took awhile.”
The cheapest solution for Harris Houston Road would be slapping a sidewalk directly next to the curb without a separation, but that would do little to address the danger posed by speeding vehicles that sometimes veer off the road. People speed because of the city’s sprawling design and congested streets, issues a sidewalk would not fix, Zaverl said.
“There’s a million ways to do it wrong and just maybe a handful or one way of doing it right, and that all comes down to how things are designed. You can design it bad a lot of ways,” he said.
Realistically, Zaverl said the sidewalk would need 8 feet or so separating it from the road. The project would be a costly endeavor.
“The end result is, there’s nothing I can say to the city to get us a sidewalk. I’ve said it all so many times and over and over that they don’t respond to me. They don’t really care. I’m just an annoyance to them,” Ed Mulheren said. “I’m like the ‘Karen’ of sidewalks.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
