Which stoplight is not controlled by NCDOT?

As Burke County trivia questions go, it’s a true stumper, one befitting Final Jeopardy:

Of the nearly 100 stoplights in Burke County, only one between Glen Alpine and Rutherford College is locally controlled.

Where is it?

We’ll give you one clue: It’s in the city limits of Morganton.

While you’re formulating a guess, let’s dive into — or drive into, as the case may be — the reasons why the city only has one stoplight under its jurisdiction, a fact that surprises some people.

“People are always amazed when they hear that the City of Morganton Streets Department operates exactly one stoplight,” outgoing City Attorney Louis Vinay said with a laugh.

The primary reason is fairly simple and straightforward.

Downtown Morganton is unique in that most of its streets are also state or federal highways: Union Street is U.S. 70; Avery Avenue is U.S. 64; North Green Street is N.C. 181; South Sterling Street is U.S. 18; and so on.

As a result, all the stops along those roads, whether they intersect with city streets or not, are the province of the Department of Transportation. That’s true across the rest of North Carolina as well, with the exception of a few lights on military bases and national parks, which are the responsibility of the Federal Government.

Smaller communities with fewer streets, like Glen Alpine, Valdese, and Drexel, have U.S. 70 as a main thoroughfare, so their lights are all DOT-controlled as well.

Countywide, the DOT operates 96 traffic signals, with 68 of them inside the Morganton City limits. There are more than 9,000 red lights in the state.

Until 2021, the city also maintained a stoplight at the corner of South College and West Concord streets. But in July of that year, the light quit working. Morganton put up a four-way stop at the intersection. The arrangement worked out well, and a few months later, the City Council voted to make it permanent.

And then there was one.

We invited readers on Wednesday to submit their location guesses. As it turned out, two responded correctly in the Final Jeopardy round.

Eric Calhoun, a self-described “NCDOT watchdog,” and Barry Stock both identified the location of the stop light: The corner of Collett and North King streets in downtown Morganton.

The outcome, it seems, would depend on how much each player wagered.