Greenville is nearing completion of a roughly $2 million road safety project along Ashley Avenue, a stretch of the North Main neighborhood that residents say had long become a magnet for speeding drivers looking to dodge traffic on Stone Avenue. City crews are finishing work meant to slow cars down and make the street safer for families living along the corridor.
According to WYFF News 4, Ashley Avenue had served as a shortcut for drivers traveling down Stone Avenue, turning a residential street into something closer to a thoroughfare. City Councilmember John Deworken, who represents District 1, told the station that Ashley Avenue became the easiest route for cars cutting through North Main. He warned that a car could travel through the neighborhood at 40 miles per hour without a driver even recognizing children were present.
Deworken has been blunt about how he sees these roads: not as through-routes, but as neighborhood streets meant for the people who live there. That framing has shaped years of city planning for the corridor. The city first proposed the project around 2023. Separately, a traffic study followed a petition and kickoff meeting in October 2024, per the same report.
A Years-Long Process Driven by Petition and Vote
The traffic study followed a petition and a kickoff meeting held in October 2024, WYFF reported. From there, the process moved to the neighborhood itself: in May 2025, residents voted on a slate of proposed traffic-calming measures and ultimately approved all six items on the table.
The project that resulted includes sidewalks stretching from Rutherford Road to North Main Street, five new speed bumps, and widened roadways in portions of Ashley Avenue, according to the station's reporting. City officials say the combined goal is to improve safety for both drivers and the families who live along the corridor.
Separately, Greenville City Council has taken formal action tied to the same project. Council approved the final reading of an ordinance to abandon a portion of the public right-of-way on Wilton Street for the proposed improvement project on Ashley Avenue, according to Greenville Journal. The project also includes reconfiguring the intersection of Ashley Avenue and Wilton Street, the outlet's coverage of a later city budget workshop noted.
Part of a Bigger Push Across Greenville
City officials have said they plan to expand traffic-calming measures to dozens of other Greenville neighborhoods, per WYFF's report, signaling that Ashley Avenue is a pilot of sorts for a wider citywide effort. Those broader traffic-calming measures include speed humps, islands, repaving and sidewalks, the station reported.
That expansion builds on a program the city has run for years. The City of Greenville's Traffic Calming Program is built around the idea that the city and residents work together to improve public safety on neighborhood streets, according to the City of Greenville. In an earlier budget cycle, the city planned to spend $250,000 on traffic-calming efforts in residential neighborhoods, The Post and Courier reported.
The city has also wrestled with how far to go on speed limits citywide. The Post and Courier found that Greenville uses what is known in traffic engineering as the 85th-percentile rule when setting speed limits, and that a study of blanket speed-limit reductions showed only a modest average decrease of 1.9 mph. Rather than cut speed limits across the board, city leaders opted for a more targeted approach, favoring a campaign encouraging 20 mph driving over a citywide change, according to the outlet. Greenville had studied five other cities — Asheville, Fremont, Franklin, Boulder and Concord — that had dropped speed limits to 20 mph before reaching that decision.
A Citywide Push for Traffic Calming
Greenville's traffic-calming efforts are part of a broader push to improve safety on neighborhood streets.
Ashley Avenue isn't the only Greenville corridor getting a safety-driven redesign. On North Main Street, a separate project is underway to reduce the road from four lanes to two between Ashley Avenue and Rutherford Road, according to WYFF's earlier reporting. That project followed a traffic study showing drivers on the stretch averaging 50 mph in a 35 mph zone, and it's expected to add bike lanes and wider shoulders when finished — with completion targeted by Thanksgiving.
