Garden Parkway makes congestion worse.

The Garden Parkway will make traffic on I-85 worse than it already is.  A June 2, 2009 study by the Turnpike Authority shows the following daily traffic counts in the year 2030:

Jennifer Harris, project engineer for the Turnpike Authority, told the Belmont BannerNews that the purpose of the toll road “is not to alleviate congestion on I-85.”  Read about it HERE. She had to say that because the documents show, and EPA has caught on, that the toll road does not improve traffic congestion.

The toll road does not meet the basic community goals of relieving I-85 traffic.

Garden Parkway doesn’t save any travel time.
EPA says that more than half of the highway would provide less than 5 minutes in time savings. The Turnpike Authority estimates, for example, that travel between downtown Gastonia and south Belmont on this $1.2 billion toll road will decrease 1 to 3 minutes in 2030.  For this small savings commuters would have to pay up to $2.50 a trip.

On other trips, the Turnpike Authority makes up future time savings - saying, for example, that a trip to the airport from Belmont's peninsula, in 2030, will take 57 minutes, when today the trip takes only 17 minutes.  Other "savings" have a similar problem with having no basis in reality.

The Garden Parkway provides no meaningful, credible east-west connection, and certainly isn’t worth the community disruption it will cause.