A dedicated crossing over Wade Avenue was supposed to be ready before crowds arrived for the 2023 North Carolina State Fair. The piece is a pedestrian and bicycle bridge in West Raleigh, running parallel to Blue Ridge Road, inside a $5.5 million city project that also builds a 10-foot-wide path along that road.
By September 2025, the bridge and path were not expected to be completed and open until fall 2026, the News & Observer reported. Preliminary plans had reached the public in early 2020, with construction then set for summer 2022 so the path could make that fair.
What The Project Actually Builds
The bridge spans Wade Avenue and is meant to give cyclists and pedestrians safe passage along Blue Ridge Road near the N.C. Museum of Art. Friday's News & Observer account calls the work the first pedestrian and cyclist accommodation on a busy five-lane stretch of road.
It is also supposed to connect sidewalks and greenway trails at the art museum with the Lenovo Center, the N.C. State Fairgrounds and Hillsborough Street. Those are the places a crossing has to serve if it is going to matter on a fair day, a concert night or an ordinary afternoon at the museum.
The path itself was conceived more than 14 years before this month's story. The 2020 drawings were a public unveiling, not the start of the idea.
A Corner Built To Slow Traffic
The city project also includes a protected intersection at Blue Ridge Road and Reedy Creek Road. The plans call for more distinct crosswalks and islands on each corner to protect cyclists and pedestrians.
The intersection is designed to make cars slow down as well. Islands and tighter corners do that by changing the geometry of the turn, not by asking drivers to be considerate on a five-lane road that already carries arena, museum and fairgrounds traffic.
For anyone crossing on foot or on a bike, the island is the practical part: a place to wait that is not the travel lane, with a crosswalk that reads as a crosswalk. The bridge gets people over Wade Avenue. This corner is what meets them at Blue Ridge and Reedy Creek.
The Fair Deadline That Slipped
The first construction calendar was pinned to October, not to a vague later season. Work was supposed to start in summer 2022 so the path could open in time for the 2023 State Fair. In June 2022, CBS 17 reported that work was scheduled to wrap up by October 2023.
That October passed without the opening the schedule had promised. The News & Observer's September 2025 report said the bridge and path still were not expected to be completed and open until fall 2026. City spokesperson Tiffanie Mazanek said problems related to water utilities, and the state's nearby Beltline and Blue Ridge Road construction projects, led to the delays.
A $5.5 million path did not miss its fair because nobody had thought of pedestrians. On Mazanek's account, it waited on pipes and on state road work already occupying the same neighborhood. The target that made the slip easy to see was the 2023 fair. Two years later, the published window still had the bridge unfinished through another summer.
Saturday On Blue Ridge Road
The News & Observer also described West Raleigh Multimodal Day for Saturday, Nov. 14, organized by the West Raleigh Alliance and the city. The event is aimed at highlighting ways of moving to and through the area.
That corridor is the one the bridge was drawn to serve: museum trails on one side of Wade Avenue, the Lenovo Center, the fairgrounds and Hillsborough Street beyond it, and a protected corner at Reedy Creek for people who are not in a car. Saturday's gathering is the public moment now attached to that network, organized around how people get there rather than around another construction date.
