"The curves are dangerous to go up to 45," Oak Island councilmember Terri Cartner said this spring, explaining her vote to slow down one specific stretch of East Oak Island Drive while leaving the rest of the island's speed limits untouched. Her reasoning turned out to be the deciding logic for the whole debate. Slow down where the road curves. Leave it alone where it runs straight. Two council votes on the same night landed on opposite sides of that line, and the result is a town where one road got safer this year and the road most golf carts actually use did not.
If you've lived on Oak Island through a summer or two, you already know the texture of this problem even if you've never seen a council agenda. Golf carts stack up behind slower traffic on the way to the beach. Walkers wait a beat too long at a crossing that has no signal. Rental outfits like Intercoastal Carts deliver a steady stream of six-seaters to driveways all over the island every week between May and September, and every one of those carts eventually ends up sharing a lane with a pickup truck doing 45. The town has spent the past year trying to sort out which streets deserve a lower limit and which crossings deserve a signal. It got about halfway there.
What actually changed
The clearest, most finished piece of this story sits on East Oak Island Drive between 19th and 38th Streets, a stretch with enough S-curves that the Recreation Center sits right in the middle of it. Council voted unanimously this spring to drop the speed limit there from 45 to 35 mph. The justification wasn't abstract. Two of the island's four traffic fatalities last year happened in that exact stretch, and a 45 mph zone doesn't allow the town to install a crosswalk at all, regulation prevents it. Lowering the limit was the only way to open the door to crosswalks in that section going forward.
That vote came out of a longer process. Back in August 2025, councilmember Bob Ciullo asked for a Blue Ribbon Summit, a panel of local officials and residents tasked with looking hard at traffic and pedestrian safety islandwide. Police Chief Charles Morris brought the panel's findings to council this spring, and the recommendations went well beyond the 19th-to-38th fix. The panel wanted Yacht Drive down to 25 mph. It wanted the stretch of Oak Island Drive from Middleton Avenue to Country Club Drive slowed and its business district capped at 25. It wanted low-speed vehicles like golf carts kept off Middleton to 32nd Street entirely, and it flagged four more intersections, at 9th, 20th, 31st, and 40th Streets, as candidates for new crosswalks.
Council said yes to the narrowest version of that plan and no to the rest. A motion to lower Yacht Drive failed 3-2. A separate motion to make all of East Oak Island Drive a 35 mph zone, not just the curvy middle section, also failed 3-2. Councilmembers Tommy Brown and Ciullo voted for both. Chasey Bynum, Bill Craft, and Cartner voted against both. The math split neatly along the same line each time: the town would fix the curves, not the whole road.
The street the vote left alone
Here's what makes Yacht Drive worth watching if you drive one regularly. It isn't a side street. Under Oak Island's own low-speed-vehicle rules, Yacht Drive is one of the designated 35 mph alternates that golf cart drivers are told to use specifically because so much of Oak Island Drive runs at 45, a speed no LSV can legally travel. Beach Drive, Holly Drive, and Ocean Drive fill the same role. Every golf cart on the island that isn't cutting through a neighborhood is funneled onto one of these four roads, and Yacht Drive draws an outsized share of that traffic because of where it connects to the bridge and the west end beach accesses.
The Blue Ribbon panel's own language on Yacht Drive named both problems at once: speeding and congestion. Those two issues don't usually travel together, a road is either too fast or too clogged, but Yacht Drive apparently manages both, likely because it's carrying regular car traffic and a steady stream of slower LSVs on the same lanes at the same time. The panel's answer was to slow the posted limit to match the actual mixed traffic. Council disagreed, and for now the posted limit stays where it was.
Here's the current state of the three roads at the center of this debate, as of this spring's council votes:
| Road / Segment | Limit Before This Year | Status Now |
|---|---|---|
| E. Oak Island Drive, 19th to 38th Streets | 45 mph | Lowered to 35 mph, passed unanimously |
| E. Oak Island Drive, remaining corridor | 45 mph | Stays 45 mph, motion to extend 35 mph failed 3-2 |
| Yacht Drive | 35 mph | Stays 35 mph, motion to lower to 25 mph failed 3-2 |
What's finished, what's still coming
Separate from the speed-limit fight, the town has been steadily building out sidewalks and crosswalks along East Oak Island Drive under what it calls the Commercial Area Sidewalk Improvement Project. Phase I wrapped in March 2026 with a new lighted, state-approved crosswalk at NE 51st Street and more than 1,700 feet of new sidewalk running from NE 46th to NE 56th Street. The town said it expected to finalize Phase II plans by late June, extending the sidewalk out to NE 59th Street and adding a crosswalk there. A Phase III is on the books after that, a new traffic signal and crosswalk planned for NE 79th Street, though no completion date has been set.
That project runs alongside a separate round of lighted crosswalks the town finished last year along Beach Drive, at spots including 19th Place East, 57th Place West, and several numbered streets in between. NCDOT also committed to installing speed and volume monitoring equipment on Oak Island Drive as part of an ongoing assessment, which is likely where any future case for slowing the rest of the corridor, or Yacht Drive, will have to start. Council didn't set a timeline for petitioning the state on any of the roads still under discussion. The town has said it will post updates before any new limit takes effect, which for residents means the honest answer right now is: watch the town's own notices, not word of mouth.
What this means for your daily loop
If you're walking to the beach, biking to a friend's dock, or running a golf cart down to the marina most weekends, the practical takeaway is narrower than the politics. The 19th-to-38th stretch of Oak Island Drive is genuinely different now, slower, and eventually with crosswalks that weren't legally possible before this year. Yacht Drive is not different. It carries the same mix of cars and carts at the same posted speed it always has, and the town's own guidance still routes low-speed vehicles onto it as the primary alternate to the 45 mph sections of Oak Island Drive.
The one intersection the town explicitly warns cart drivers away from is Middleton Avenue and Oak Island Drive, a 45 mph zone where LSVs aren't permitted. The suggested workaround on the west end is to take West Yacht Drive to NW 1st Street, cross West Oak Island Drive there, and pick up White Lane SW, which sits in a 35 mph zone the whole way. It's a longer route than cutting straight across Middleton, but it's the one the town has actually built its rules around, and it's worth knowing before the first time you're stuck waiting for a gap in 45 mph traffic with a cart full of beach chairs.
None of this is settled in any final sense. The panel's recommendations for Yacht Drive and the rest of Oak Island Drive are still sitting on the table, and a 3-2 vote this spring isn't the same as a closed case, council composition changes, incident data accumulates, and the DOT monitoring equipment on Oak Island Drive may eventually hand someone a stronger argument than "the curves are dangerous." For now, the island has one meaningfully safer stretch of road and one heavily used, congestion-prone street that stayed exactly as it was.
If you're weighing a move to Oak Island, or already own here and are curious what else has shifted on the ground this year, the team at Vic's Picks spends its days in these neighborhoods and is glad to talk through what local changes like this one actually mean for day-to-day life on the island.
