The City of Raleigh encourages multimodal transportation, especially walking. The City tries to accommodate pedestrians with appropriate facilities while keeping safety in mind. The City does not install pedestrian crosswalks across main streets at non-controlled intersections unless various thresholds are met. Peace Street which is the main street at this location, is not controlled by a stop sign or signal. Installing a crosswalk across Peace Street at this location would be encouraging pedestrians to cross a 5 lane roadway that carries heavy volumes of traffic, which could be a safety risk. An alternative to crossing Peace Street at this location would be to walk down Peace Street to the west and cross at the signalized intersection of West Street which has a marked crosswalk. The geometry and characteristics of this intersection also impedes the possibility of installing a crosswalk across the southbound Capital Blvd ramp. There is a concrete monolithic island located in the middle of crossing path between the two receiving wheel chair ramps. Due to geometry, the natural position at which a vehicle comes to a stop on the off ramp is past where the crosswalk would be located. Due to these two cases, installing a crosswalk would be extremely costly and not safe. Capital Blvd is a part of NCDOT’s roadway system and they have the ultimate say in what can be done to their roadways, the City of Raleigh can only make recommendations. The good news is NCDOT is currently planning to replace the bridge crossing over Peace Street in the very near future as well as looking into changing the geometry of the on/off ramps. The City will work with the NCDOT when the time comes to have appropriate pedestrian accommodations installed so there will be uninterrupted accommodations for east/west pedestrian travel.

The gist of your message made sense.

These two sentences did not:

"Installing a crosswalk across Peace Street at this location would be encouraging pedestrians to cross a 5 lane roadway that carries heavy volumes of traffic, which could be a safety risk. An alternative to crossing Peace Street at this location would be to walk down Peace Street to the west and cross at the signalized intersection of West Street which has a marked crosswalk."

Since the road is for all citizens, not just those who use cars, the safety risk needs to actually be resolved, not ignored. There is a crosswalk across Peace at West, and another at Blount. These two crosswalk are too far away to be a reasonable solution.

It sounds like this request should stay closed (for all the other good reasons you've given) and that the safety problem might be better addressed by putting a crosswalk across Peace between West and Blount.

I'm sure this has been considered previously. Do you know of previous requests for a cross walk across Peace near the Seaboard Shopping District?

Actually, to the knowledge of anyone in the traffic engineering division, no one has ever made a request for a crosswalk here, until now.