THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410300038
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GATESVILLE LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, Jesse Liles should have better-lubed axles than the 18-wheel trucks he's trying to get off a Gates County road.
But Liles, who's been squawking to anyone who will listen for the past two years, says officials have turned a ``deaf ear'' to his complaints that a Route 137 stretch through Gatesville and Eure is both irritating and dangerous.
``The powers that be out in Raleigh just don't think that I'm making any sense,'' said Liles, 80, a retired rural mail carrier and magistrate who has lived in Gates County for 46 years.
``This was a quiet, residential, nine-mile road,'' Liles said. ``Now we have asphalt trucks, grain trucks, poultry trucks . . .''
Route 137 runs east-west for about eight miles between Route 37 in Gatesville and Route 13/158 at Storys. The winding, two-lane road was widened to 24 feet and repaved within the last few years to accommodate heavier truck traffic.
Department of Transportation officials, who finished a study of the area last year, say Route 137 has less traffic and fewer accidents than a slightly longer stretch of Route 158 just north of the road. And they say it is perfectly suitable for truck traffic.
But Liles, whose home is set back on a wooded lot just off 137, adamantly disagrees. In a flurry of letters to DOT officials and state political leaders, he has said ``the number, weight, noise and speed of these trucks has made N.C. 137 unsafe for our school buses, senior citizens, farmers and funeral directors.''
Liles wants through-truck traffic prohibited from Route 137 and sent up to Route 158 for passage through western Gates County. Late last year he secured about 150 signatures on a petition calling for just that, which he presented to the Gates County Board of Commissioners.
Gatesville Mayor Elton L. Winslow wrote Transportation Board member R.V. Owens III last September promoting Liles' proposal, saying ``we wholeheartedly support any effort that you could undertake to have the alternate route designated as the truck route, thus prohibiting heavy truck traffic on NC 137.''
Among the safety problems, Liles said, is the intersection of Routes 37 and 137 in downtown Gatesville. Northbound trucks have to make a tight left turn in the heart of town, and the huge vehicles regularly force motorists at the intersection to back out of the way.
In response to Liles' early requests in 1992, DOT officials put a fat white stop bar on the pave
ment to keep cars back in the intersection. But turning trucks sometimes cross that line, even when cars stay behind it.
``This is what DOT has given us as a solution,'' a frustrated Liles said recently as he watched a car reverse to make way for a turning truck. ``When they turn this corner, they floorboard it for the next two miles.''
W.T. Doughtie, a 59-year-old school bus driver who lives in Eure, said trucks speeding through 35- and 45-mph zones on the road pose a safety problem for bus-boarding kids.
``They come through here, screaming past, and they don't respect nobody,'' said Doughtie, who signed Liles' petition.
But DOT officials say the intersection, the speeding and Liles' other problems with the trucks are common everywhere. And they say the road itself is in fine shape.
``There's a lot of intersections that are not ideal for truck traffic,'' said Division Engineer Don Conner. ``That might not be ideal, but we did improve the radiuses the best we could there.
``Residential areas and curves and cemeteries, that's not an unusual thing to encounter on any road in North Carolina.''
``You also have to have a reason to prohibit the trucks,'' Conner said. ``The accident history does not bear out that 137 is bad for trucks. . . . We don't find any reason here to restrict trucking on N.C. 137.''
Despite the petition and the letter from Winslow, Owens says Liles seems to be the only one really interested in Route 137.
``The county commissioners have not rang my phone off the hook,'' said Owens, who exchanged letters with Liles a year ago.
Gates County Manager Edward C. McDuffie wrote DOT officials last year asking them to look into the situation.
He said Thursday the county has no position on the issue after receiving the department's report on the routes.
Owens said he's abiding by the recommendation of DOT staff, and he wondered aloud several times why his board predecessor, Phil Godwin Sr. of Gatesville, didn't address the problem if it was so serious.
``The man is obsessed with this,'' Godwin, Gatesville's town attorney, said of Liles on Friday. ``I realize that in life you can't have everything the way you want it.''
Liles says his situation is part of a bigger picture.
``It's going on all over North Carolina,'' he said, producing a pile of news articles he has collected that are critical of the department's response to citizens.
``DOT doesn't want to spend any time on anything except these big roads to accommodate out-of-state people,'' he said.
But DOT officials disagree, saying the department studied the road thoroughly and simply found no reason to act.
``I don't think they've been insensitive at all,'' Godwin said. ``They've investigated.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
DREW C. WILSON/Staff
Jesse Liles of Gatesville watches a truck round a corner in
Gatesville at Routes 37 and 137. The 80-year-old crusader says the
tight squeeze for trucks at that intersection is just one reason for
the state to keep the rigs off Route 137.
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