Over the last four days, people in a west Cary neighborhood have mounted a growing campaign for some major changes to an intersection where a teenager was killed in a hit-and-run.

Kailee Birdsong, 16, was killed after a tan SUV or van clipped the car she was riding in Monday at Green Level to Durham Road and Cary Glen Boulevard.

She was not wearing a seatbelt.

Neighbors are demanding a traffic light now, and took their case from a sidewalk protest to the Cary Town Council on Thursday.

"We need your hand behind ours and holding it with us so that we can help our children be safe," said Peggy Payne, a Cary resident whose daughter was involved in a separate accident one intersection over.

Hundreds of people have signed petitions and sent letters to elected officials asking for a traffic light.

There will likely be some sort of change, but experts say it might not be exactly what those neighbors want.

"Unless there's a clear need, usually you don't want to install a signal," said Tim Bailey, Cary's Director of Engineering. "Because it's going to result in more crashes, more property damage and those types of things."

That "clear need" depends on a lot of factors that North Carolina's Department of Transportation plugs into complex formulas designed to figure out what's most appropriate.

"The big thing is looking at the volume, the traffic volume," said NCDOT Deputy Division Engineer Joey Hopkins. "And so we'll be taking counts out there over the next few weeks."

Hopkins said he knows it's a bad intersection, and while a traffic light is still one option, they're also considering others.

"We may could better delineate that median there so folks could know they could go halfway across instead of trying to go across all those lanes," suggested Hopkins.

It can be tough to take the emotion out of these types of decisions, though, especially for neighbors.

"Traffic counts are great," said Cary resident Steve Scarbel. "But when we start talking about death counts there shouldn't be any question about doing something drastic to fix a problem."

Cary and the DOT could have recommendations ready to discuss within a couple weeks; Hopkins said if the traffic count does not warrant a light right now, they could go back and look at things again in the fall when school traffic could make a big difference.

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