RALEIGH – A road improvement project in a Jones County town earned first place honors as one of the best multimodal projects in this year’s N.C. Department of Transportation Mobi Awards.
Officials with the Down East Rural Planning Organization took top honors for the project they nominated, Improvements to Main Street (U.S. 17 Business) – Pollocksville. The project earned first place in the contest’s Rural category for projects that serve North Carolina’s communities with under 10,000 residents.
“We’re proud to even be honored,” said Pollocksville Mayor Jay Bender. “This project came as a phase of our Pollocksville Floodprint Plan, which was designed to reimagine what town could look like after the bypass came through as well as after Hurricane Florence completely flooded all of downtown.”
The NCDOT Mobi Awards, now in its fourth year, honor towns, cities and counties for multimodal projects that spurred economic development, improved public health and enhanced communities. First, second and third place winners were selected in six categories – Rural, Small Urban, Urban, Large Urban, Innovation and Most Voted Project.
Pollocksville’s project was one of 20 entered into this year’s competition.
The Pollocksville improvements were made in 2021 to promote downtown revitalization, better access and safety after U.S. 17 was rerouted to a four-lane bypass around the town in 2019. The project involved repaving and restriping Main Street to remove the center turn lane and replace it with a dedicated cyclist lane and designated on-street parking. Bulb-outs were constructed along the road within the town limits.
The changes enabled motorists and pedestrians to more easily share the road and have made downtown Pollocksville more attractive and accessible.
“This project is a great example of how a multimodal transportation project can offer multiple benefits to communities,” said NCDOT Deputy Secretary for Multimodal Transportation Julie White. “It puts safety first, beautifies the community, and offers transportation that works for all road users.”
Also in the Rural Category, Lydia’s Bridge project, which was nominated by Jamestown, claimed second place honors and the Spruce Pine-Pine Line Shuttle, which was nominated by Mitchell County and the town of Spruce Pine, took third place. Write-ups on all the projects can be found by visiting the
NCDOT Mobi Awards’ online booklet.
This year’s Mobi Awards were hosted by NCDOT, the North Carolina Triangle Chapter of the Women Transportation Seminars, NC Go!, N.C. State University Institute for Transportation Research and Education, and ACEC: The American Council of Engineering Companies.
To see this year’s winning projects, including NCDOT-produced videos of the first place winners, visit the
Mobi Awards webpage.