Walk from the Villas toward the Plaza along Route 2 and the shoulder narrows to something the city itself has described as less than three feet of gravel. Traffic in that stretch runs at 45 miles an hour. There is no curb, no buffer, nowhere to step if two people meet coming from opposite directions. This is the Williams Run area, and it has been the subject of a city council resolution, a Zoom call with three state transportation officials, and now a $12 million federal grant. None of that has put a sidewalk there yet.
That gap between money and pavement is the actual story right now, and it matters if you live anywhere along Route 2 or the four-lane, because two different infrastructure projects are moving through New Martinsville at two very different speeds.
What The City Was Actually Asking For
On May 5, 2025, New Martinsville's city council passed a resolution laying out the problem in plain terms. The entire 45-mile-per-hour section of Route 2 had been identified as needing sidewalk improvements, and the resolution named who was most exposed: children, older residents, and people with disabilities navigating a road with no safe place to walk.
Two weeks later, on May 19, 2025, Mayor Keith Nelsen convened a Zoom meeting to push the issue with the state. On the call were Timothy Sedosky, section head at the West Virginia Division of Highways, District 3 Manager Michael Daley, State Highways Engineer Jacob Bumgardner, City Councilman Steve Pallisco, City Recorder Kim Whiteman, grant writer Bev Gibb, and State Senator Charles Clemens. The specific stretch under discussion was the corridor from the Tractor Supply shopping plaza down to the four-lane, the same Williams Run gap where pedestrians currently walk gravel instead of concrete.
Pallisco laid out the history on that call: since a third travel lane was added to that section of road years ago, there have been repeated pedestrian injuries. The city had floated one cheaper option, petitioning the state to drop the speed limit from 45 to 35, but officials on the call agreed that alone wouldn't fix the core problem of people walking within a few feet of moving traffic.
The number that came out of that meeting is worth sitting with. Using costs from comparable sidewalk projects elsewhere in the state, officials estimated the Williams Run segment alone at roughly $1.3 million. That was the ask on the table in May 2025. What eventually arrived eight months later was nearly ten times that, and it covered far more ground than one gap in the sidewalk.
What Got Funded In January
New Martinsville was awarded $12 million through the U.S. Department of Transportation's Safe Streets and Roads for All program, announced in January 2026. The scope is bigger than the Williams Run fix that started the conversation: continuous, ADA-compliant sidewalks, curbs, ramps, and pedestrian crossings along Route 2 and County Route 2/9 within city limits, connecting homes, schools, businesses, and essential services.
Mayor Nelsen credited grant writer Bev Gibb specifically for the outcome, and her own comment about the process was direct: these grants don't happen overnight, and it's easy for the public to lose patience waiting on them. The data behind the urgency is specific too. Between October 2024 and April 2025, four people walking or biking were struck along Route 2, including one fatality. Council members have also pointed to a longer pattern behind that single window, describing several deaths over the years along that corridor and a teenager hospitalized with facial and skull fractures after being struck by a vehicle.
Here's how the timeline actually lines up, start to where things stand now:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| May 5, 2025 | City council passes resolution identifying the full 45-mph Route 2 corridor as unsafe for pedestrians |
| May 19, 2025 | Mayor Nelsen holds Zoom meeting with WVDOH officials; Williams Run segment estimated at roughly $1.3 million |
| January 2026 | $12 million SS4A implementation grant awarded, covering Route 2 and County Route 2/9 |
| Now | Engineering and design underway; no construction start date has been set |
That last row is the one that matters if you're walking that road this month. City officials have said planning is already underway and will continue to provide updates, but the construction timeline itself hasn't been announced. The grant solved the funding problem. It hasn't yet solved the gravel shoulder.
The Project You Can Already See
While the sidewalk work sits in the design phase, a separate project is visibly underway on the four-lane: the overpass bridge replacement. Preliminary work has begun, and it includes new traffic lane configurations for vehicles heading north and south, including drivers crossing into and out of Ohio. The reconfiguration is designed specifically so drivers won't have to detour further south or north to get around the work zone while it's active.
If you drive the four-lane regularly, this is the change you'll notice first, well before any new sidewalk appears along Route 2. It's a useful distinction to hold onto: New Martinsville has two infrastructure projects running in parallel right now, one already reshaping how traffic moves through town and one still working through engineering before a single shovel goes into the ground.
The sidewalk grant also landed in the same stretch of local news as word that construction is finally moving forward at Bruce Park's water and recreation park, a separate long-discussed project that's been part of the same broader wave of the city pursuing state and federal dollars it's been chasing for years. None of these projects share a contractor or a completion date. What they share is a pattern: New Martinsville spent real time building the case for each one before the money showed up.
What This Means If You Walk Or Drive That Stretch Today
If your daily route includes the Villas-to-Plaza stretch or the Williams Run gap, nothing about your walk has changed yet. The gravel shoulder that prompted the original resolution is still the gravel shoulder. The $12 million is real, the scope is defined, and the city has a funded mandate to fix the exact problem residents have been describing since at least the spring of 2025. What's missing is the piece that turns a funded plan into a finished sidewalk: an actual construction calendar.
If your route runs through the four-lane instead, you're already seeing the difference. The overpass work is live, and the lane changes are the visible proof that at least one of these two projects has moved from paperwork to pavement.
Both are worth watching over the next several months, not because either one changes what a house down the street is worth today, but because a decade from now the story of this stretch of Route 2 will be told in two chapters: before the sidewalk and after it. Right now, New Martinsville is still living in the first one.
If you're curious how infrastructure changes like this tend to show up in what a specific property is worth over time, that's a conversation worth having before you assume either way. Pathway Real Estate Professionals tracks this kind of local change as part of how we talk to homeowners about timing and value, and we're happy to walk through what it means for your street specifically.
