gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- Don't go counting the extra lanes before they're hatched, but engineers at the N.C. Department of Transportation agree with commuters that N.C. 54 between Interstate 40 and N.C. 55 near the Parkwood neighborhood needs some work.
In fact, staff at DOT believes a road-improvement project of some sort targeting that two-lane, 2-mile stretch of blacktop would offer such a boost to mobility in the Triangle that it merits attention as a No. 1 priority for all of North Carolina.
N.C. 54's prospective accession to that status stems from the agency's attempt to examine and rank the full range of road projects cities, towns and counties would like it to take from 2015 to 2020.
The new ranking system is supposed to take some of the politics out of road-building decisions, and will feed later this year into the draft of DOT's next multi-year transportation improvement program.
Durham officials got word of the ranking over the weekend and by Tuesday were crowing a bit about how well N.C. 54 had fared in it.
While there's no design and no agreement on what an improvement to the corridor might look like, they think the ranking will induce DOT officials to earmark money to start planning one.
N.C. 54's proper functioning is critical because "you need a decent parallel road to I-40 that drives right through the heart of one of the state's economic engines, RTP," said City Councilman Mike Woodard, who chairs a joint transportation group for counties in the western Triangle.
"If we want RTP to continue humming along as an economic engine, and want to promote people living in close proximity to RTP, we've got to provide them solid alternatives to using I-40 exclusively," Woodard added.
DOT officials, however, have been cautioning local governments that funding decisions will be influenced as much by revenue shortfalls as the rankings.
The new rankings took more than 1,100 road projects, not including urban "loops" like Durham's proposed East End Connector that engineers are evaluating separately, or projects like the Alston Avenue widening that are almost ready to go.
The 1,100-some future projects would cost more than $45 billion, DOT says.
But the agency is only likely to have $9 billion to spend on them from 2015 to 2020.
Agency leaders still have to figure out how much of that money to commit to region-level improvements, as opposed to local-only projects or "strategic highway corridors" like the interstates and federal-numbered surface roads that promise statewide impact.
State Transportation Secretary Gene Conti has the leeway to tinker with the rankings a bit, and officials also have to decide on a split of money between projects likely to boost mobility, projects addressing safety and projects that mostly involve repairs.
Local officials had listed the Parkwood stretch of N.C. 54 high on the list of 25 road projects they'd like to see the state address in the second half of this decade.
They envision a widened, divided road that includes "transit accommodations, bike lanes and sidewalks," making it a true "multimodal project" in the argot of the planning trade, city Transportation Director Mark Ahrendsen said.
Also appearing on the state's regional mobility list, at No. 17, are improvements to another stretch of N.C. 54, the one on the Durham/Chapel Hill border from I-40 west to Barbee Chapel Road.
That segment already has four travel lanes, but officials agree it's not likely to continue handling the load as the area grows. A locally funded planning effort is already under way, and is looking at how land-use decisions would shape needs for extra lanes and transit.
Ahrendsen noted that the second in a series of public workshops on the border segments of N.C. 54 is coming up Thursday, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill.
