Residents in northwest Greensboro worry speeding puts children at risk

Drivers rolling through stop signs at River Hills and Northbrook Drive have become a daily fear in northwest Greensboro, where homeowners say children wait near a bus stop and cars still move too fast through a 25-mph neighborhood street. Leyton Maluka, a River Hills resident, said drivers do not stop often and that nighttime traffic can be even worse.

The concern in River Hills Plantation is not tied to one crash. It is the slow, repeated pattern residents say they see at the intersection, where some drivers appear to be traveling 30 to 35 mph and treating stop signs like suggestions. In a neighborhood built around homes, walking paths, a playground and an eleven-acre lake, residents say that behavior turns ordinary streets into a risk zone for kids walking, riding or waiting for the bus.

Greensboro’s Neighborhood Traffic Management Program is the city’s main path for neighborhoods that want relief. The city says the program partners residents, neighborhood associations and homeowner associations with engineers to reduce speeding, cut-through traffic and other hazards on residential streets. It is built around physical traffic calming, with tools that can include speed humps, raised crosswalks, pedestrian islands, road diets, traffic circles and narrowed or curved lanes.

That approach matters in River Hills because the city says stop signs are not traffic calming. When they are not warranted, Greensboro says, they are often ignored and do not reduce speeds along a block. For neighborhoods like River Hills, that means the fix residents want is not necessarily another sign, but a design change that forces cars to slow down.

River Hills has tried before. A 2024 application to the traffic management program did not move forward, and no one from the neighborhood applied in 2025. City records show the 2025-2026 application window ran Oct. 1 through Oct. 31, 2025, followed by evaluation and data collection in winter 2025 and spring 2026, then community engagement and project development later in 2026.

The program has drawn strong interest citywide. Greensboro launched the effort on June 24, 2024, with $500,000 in that year’s budget, and by November 2025 the city said it had received 388 total project submissions. In late 2025, it said 38 new requests came in during that year’s call for participation.

River Hills itself, a planned community with 489 single-family homes, was annexed into Greensboro in July 2008. The neighborhood’s size and shared spaces help explain why speeding at one intersection has become such a public safety issue. In Greensboro, the question is no longer whether neighbors are worried. It is whether the city will move fast enough to slow the cars before a child is hurt.