ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 22, 1996 TAG: 9603220086
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: S.D. HARRINGTON STAFF WRITER
SCHOOL BUSES and garbage trucks can no longer turn around at the potholed end of Yale Drive.
Residents along Yale Drive in West Roanoke County say they were just trying to send a message to Roanoke County and the Virginia Department of Transportation when they blocked part of their road to keep school buses and garbage trucks from turning around in the dead-end street.
Most of Yale Drive is maintained by VDOT. But over the years, a stretch at the end of the road that is not state-maintained - particularly a circle that school buses use to turn around - has become pocked with potholes.
Starting Monday, the property owners at the end of the road parked their cars, horse trailers and whatever else it took to keep school buses from turning around in the circle.
And on Wednesday - trash pickup day for the neighborhood - they blocked garbage trucks from turning around.
"It's been this way for 15 years," said Brad Walker, who lives at the unmaintained end of the road. "We're talking potholes that are 4 feet wide in some places."
John R. Hinkle, who lives at the end of the cul-de-sac, says that when the residents saw how much money the county was spending on pavement in Valley Techpark, a nearby industrial park, they decided enough was enough.
"They laid down and tore up probably as much pavement" as it would have cost to fix Yale Drive, Hinkle said.
The three school buses that used the road every day no longer are able to pick up three schoolchildren from the road - forcing the parents to taxi their children to school, or making the children walk over a steep hill to U.S. 11/460.
The parents say that while it isn't fair for them as taxpaying county residents not to have the buses pick up their children, they understand the woes of their neighbors at the unmaintained end of the road.
"So far, it hasn't been a big inconvenience," said Ken Winslow, whose son was picked up by a school bus at the end of their driveway before the street was blocked.
Winslow has been taking his son to school in the meantime. But if there comes a time when neither he nor his wife can take him, his son might have to walk to the highway and wait for the bus.
"I can't leave a 6-year-old along a busy highway," Winslow said.
Arnold Covey, the head of Roanoke County's Engineering Department, said he has been working with the residents to resolve the problem.
Roanoke County does not maintain its own roads. VDOT does.
But the county does tell VDOT which roads are a priority.
Covey says the problem the Yale residents are experiencing is one many subdivisions have had.
In the 1950s and 1960s, developers weren't required to post funds to guarantee improvements to roads, he said. The subdivision off Yale Drive was developed during that time.
Covey said the residents have three options: pay for the road improvements themselves; wait two years and try to get into VDOT's revenue-sharing plan, where residents have to pay only half the cost; or petition VDOT to put the remainder of the road on its six-year secondary road construction plan. But Covey said the third option could take years because VDOT already has a long waiting list of projects.
"There's a lot more needs than there is money," Covey said.
Hinkle said he isn't sure what the residents on Yale Drive will do next. He said they are just waiting.
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