Cheek Road has needed improvements for decades. It is the main artery of the Merrick-Moore Community: a two-lane rural road, mostly without sidewalks, with very narrow shoulders and a couple areas where the elevation of the road is higher than homes, making it difficult to safely walk to school or public transportation points.
TRAFFIC SAFETY & SIDEWALKS
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Walking is essential for kids to get to Merrick-Moore Elementary School and Southern High School. Years ago, a child was struck and killed on Cheek Road and Roane Street. Another fatal accident involved a female pedestrian and a teenage driver at Cheek Rd and Center Street.
Permanent speed-control features are not present throughout the neighborhood and traffic ranges from cars to trucks and tractors, since the neighborhood lies between industrial parks on the east and west. Between 2015 and 2019, there have been at least 112 car accidents, according to open data available at the Department of Transportation.
Traffic will only become worse after the North Carolina Department of Transportation finishes building the East End Connector between the Durham Freeway and Miami Boulevard on the southwest of the neighborhood, to which Cheek Road will be a shortway. This, paired to the increasing building of new residential areas in the rural parts of Durham, will only increase the pressure surrounding this road which wasn’t built for such traffic densities. The lands where Merrick Moore is located are more rural in nature; people here used to farm and garden – they were never fit for large scale developments.
For now, the city of Durham has put Cheek Road on an unfunded list for modernization. Cheek Road is owned by the NC State Department of Transportation.
A Boy’s Bicycling Death Haunts a Black Neighborhood. 35 Years Later, There’s Still No Sidewalk.
DURHAM, N.C. — It’s been 35 years since John Parker died after a pickup collided with the bike he was riding on Cheek Road in east Durham before school. He was 6.
His mother, Deborah Melvin-Muse, doesn’t display photos of him, the second-youngest of six children. His brother’s birthday was the day after the crash — and he hasn’t celebrated it since. An older brother carries a deep sense of guilt because he was looking after John that morning.
And Cheek Road, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, still lacks sidewalks for children to safely make their way to the local elementary school.
This, despite the years community activists and academic researchers have spent pleading with city leaders for safety improvements along the busy thoroughfare with sloping shoulders where John died. Drivers zoom along Cheek Road in the Merrick-Moore neighborhood, which connects downtown Durham to industrial sites and newer suburban developments.
