The cutting room floor from Monday night

And that's how the gym looked at the start of the hearing.

At Monday's Brady Road public hearing, I sat behind a woman who did not give her name and said she was not planning on speaking, but who had a very personal connection to this road project. A resident of Riverside Drive, she told me Alternative 4 could take her house. Though she wasn't a speaker — she told me she only speaks out on things where she knows all the facts — she sat in the front row, so I'm sure she was as interested as the several hundred others who packed the auditorium that night.

Some other quotes and tidbits that were cut from the long story appearing in this week's paper (I cut about 600 words' worth of other speakers, keeping those I thought best represented the viewpoints on the bypass issue):

Mary Fox, a resident of Buttonwood Drive, said she supported Alternative 3.
“It’s the only thing that will get the traffic off Churton Street,” she said. “The others are too costly.”

Jane Gaede, a resident of Ivey Drive in the road study area, said the timing of streetlights and the ban on large trucks through downtown has helped calm traffic issues foreseen in the 1980s.
“I cannot imagine that saving a few minutes is worth destroying the homes of 24 families and [impacting] the Eno River,” she said.

Holly Reid of the Walkable Hillsborough Coalition said she supports a DOT initiative to look at transportation beyond new roads and looking at multi-modal transportation plans for Hillsborough.
“Our town wants to be a leader in North Carolina and supports this model of transportation,” she said.

Joanie Alexander, who said she moved to Riverside Drive one year ago, said the DOT should support the town’s proposed alternatives to solve smaller issues instead of one large project.
“We have to start thinking outside the box, have to do things differently, to make things different,” she said.

Resident Renee Price delivered to DOT a petition with almost 1,000 names of residents who oppose any of the road construction alternatives. What started as a neighborhood petition grew into a community effort, she said, drawing in NASCAR fans who wanted the Speedway preserved and to others beyond the affected area.

(If I misspelled a name, please let me know and I will correct it. My request for the DOT's sign-in sheet has so far not yielded the document.)