The Exit 28 Roundabout Plan: A Cornelius Resident's Map to the Next Two Years

If you drove Torrence Chapel Road last week and watched half a mile take seventeen minutes, you already know phase one has started. What most residents haven't seen yet is the drawing that explains why. The construction on Knox Road is not a standalone project. It is the east half of a matched set that Cornelius Today has been calling the "roundabout bookends," and the west half has been open a hole in the pavement near Cashion's for over a year.

The thesis of this piece is simple. The next four months of disruption are narrower and more predictable than the community meeting made them sound, and the version of Cornelius that emerges in spring 2028 is not just faster. It is walkable through the middle of Exit 28 for the first time.

The bookends, plainly

Two projects, one strategy. On the west side of Exit 28, dual roundabouts north and south of Catawba Avenue near the Cashion's and QT gas stations have been under construction since 2024. As of last September that work was 38% complete, with overall completion expected in fall 2026, according to a progress report Cornelius Today obtained from NCDOT.

The east side is the new one. A $25.6 million contract, awarded to Ohio-based Kwest Group, covers a six-phase build along Knox Road, Torrence Chapel Road, Chartwell Center Drive, and Liverpool Parkway. NCDOT approved the contract at $21 million in November 2025, and the number climbed with contingency and inflation. The town of Cornelius is on the hook for $7.7 million of that.

Together the two projects rebuild every left turn between the interstate and West Catawba Avenue. That is the frame to hold in mind. Phase one is not the story. Phase one is one page of a six-page story that ends in spring 2028.

The six phases, on a calendar

That last number comes from Deputy Town Manager Wayne Herron, who told the July community meeting the corridor is being engineered for an 8.5-minute reduction on the primary through-route.

What phase one actually closes

Two things are worth knowing before you plan a Saturday morning around Cornelius.

The first is the elimination of the left turn from One Norman Boulevard onto Knox Road. NCDOT is redesigning that meeting as what it calls a reduced-conflict intersection, which is engineer language for taking the left turn out and forcing drivers into a downstream U-turn or a roundabout instead. The practical effect for anyone leaving One Norman heading toward the interstate is that the shortest line disappears. You will use Torrence Chapel to get across.

The second is the Fresh Market driveway. Phase three, in 2027, converts that driveway into a roundabout of its own. It is not affected this year, but it is the reason so much of the Torrence Chapel work is being sequenced tightly against the grocery store's peak hours. Anyone who runs errands out of that plaza should expect the real disruption on that block to arrive next spring, not this summer.

"The current backups affect her every day. She's spent 17 minutes traveling half a mile." — from reporting on Chris Watson, a Torrence Chapel resident who spoke at the July transportation meeting

Roughly sixty residents attended that meeting. The frustration was real. The window in which it is the dominant story is shorter than it feels.

The part nobody is talking about

Read the phase one scope again. Sidewalks and bike lanes, both sides of Knox Road. That is what phase one is actually doing before the roundabout circle goes in.

Right now Knox Road is a shoulderless connector between a strip of offices and the highway. It is not a place anyone walks. In November, it becomes a place people can walk. The same is true for the Torrence Chapel corridor once phase three finishes in August 2027, and the same is true for Liverpool Parkway once the post office roundabout ties into the sidewalk grid.

This is the quiet half of the project. Cornelius is not just moving cars through Exit 28 faster. It is stitching the pedestrian network across the interchange for the first time. If you live in the Peninsula or Antiquity or one of the neighborhoods off Torrence Chapel, the version of this corridor you inherit in 2028 is one you can actually cross on foot.

Town Commissioner Colin Furcht made the case for the traffic side by pointing at working examples. Davidson uses roundabouts. Concord uses roundabouts. Huntersville just put a set in. The Cornelius design borrows from all three. What Cornelius is adding on top is the sidewalk-and-bike-lane layer, which none of those neighbors built into their original roundabout retrofits.

A rerouting playbook for this summer

Until November, the pressure points sit in a small area. Here is how to plan around them without adding time.

• Interstate access from the Peninsula: Skip One Norman Boulevard's left turn onto Knox. Use Jetton Road out to West Catawba and enter I-77 at Exit 28 from the north side. It adds distance on paper and saves time in practice.
• The Fresh Market and Harris Teeter runs: Approach from the Chartwell Center Drive side rather than Torrence Chapel through the Knox intersection. Phase four does not touch Chartwell until August 2027.
• Post office trips: The Liverpool Parkway post office site is a future roundabout, not a current one. It is still the fastest way in and out this year.
• School drop-offs and after-school activities: Build ten minutes into any route that touches Torrence Chapel between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. or 3 and 4 p.m. That is where the current 11-minute wait sits.
• Weekend restaurant trips in Old Town: Use Catawba Avenue from the east, not the west. The Cashion's-side dual roundabouts are still active construction and will be into the fall.

None of this is permanent. All of it resets in November when phase one closes and phase two waits until May.

What "reduced-conflict" is actually buying

The phrase sounds bureaucratic. The math behind it is not.

A signalized intersection with left turns has thirty-two possible vehicle-to-vehicle conflict points. A single-lane roundabout has eight. Eliminating left turns at One Norman and Knox, and replacing the Knox and Torrence Chapel signal with a circle, removes the two most crash-prone movements at Exit 28's east shoulder. That is the safety argument. The delay argument is the eight-and-a-half minutes Herron cited.

Whether the design works is not really an open question anymore. Furcht was making a specific point when he named Davidson, Concord, and Huntersville. Every one of those towns absorbed the same complaints during construction and now has residents who barely notice the roundabouts exist. Cornelius will go through the same arc. The town has already committed to it. The contract is signed, the crews are on site, and the phasing runs through May 2028 whether the coverage stays hot or fades.

The version of this corridor that residents will actually live with is the one that shows up in the spring of 2028, with roundabouts at four intersections, sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides of Knox Road, and a walkable connection through the middle of Exit 28 that has never existed before. Two summers of patience is the price. It is a fair one.

If you are weighing what the next two years of change means for your specific address, whether that is a Peninsula waterfront property, a home off Torrence Chapel, or a rental you own in the corridor, the phasing map matters more than the headline number. Nicole Leininger has been watching this corridor since long before the first contract was signed and is glad to walk through what phase-by-phase construction means for your street. Let's Connect.