Among the dozens of road and highway construction projects in the Triangle the North Carolina Department of Transportation has recently delayed is one of great interest to Wake Forest residents – the conversion of Capital Boulevard (U.S. 1) to a freeway from the I-540 intersection to, ultimately, the Wake-Franklin county line.
On Oct. 6, the Raleigh News & Observer reported NCDOT officials were announcing the start of construction for the first of three segments – from I-540 to Durant Road – would be delayed by three years from 2022 to 2025. The second leg – from Durant Road to the N.C. 98 Bypass in Wake Forest has also been delayed by three years, from 2024 to 2027. There is no projected start date for the third segment – from the bypass to Purnell Road – mentioned in the announcement.
In 2018 NCDOT were ready to delay the entire project along with a host of other Triangle projects but by September of 2019 the plan was to start construction on that first leg in 2022. At that time the first leg, about a mile and a half was estimated to cost $124.7 million. Construction of the next two segments would not begin until 2024.
All these latest delays have been approved by the state Board of Transportation and are included in the State Transportation Program, the latest version of NCDOT’s 10-year plan. Projects already underway will be completed.
“We are disappointed, of course, but we will do what we can to deal with it,” Wake Forest Mayor Vivian Jones said after hearing the news.
As the article in the N&O points out, some of the trouble began in 2017 when the department had over $2 billion in hand and there was pressure from legislators and others to spend it. As NCDOT began spending, Hurricane Florence hit the state in the fall of 2018, forcing the department to spend over $300 million in cleanup and repairs.
An old law, the Map Act was found unconstitutional at about the same time, meaning the department had to pay landowners who had been forced to keep their land for future road use even though NCDOT never bought their property. That has already resulted in about $700 million the department has spent to settle the resulting suits.
Then there was mismanagement. An audit completed in May found the department had spent $742 million more than it expected to because of internal problems.
The coronavirus was another blow. Gas tax revenue fell down a cliff last spring and has not recovered fully. DMV offices were closed so the revenue from licenses and registrations was not available.
The General Assembly cut NCDOT’s budget by half a billion dollars for the fiscal year that began July 1.
The department now estimates it will have $2 billion less to spend on road construction over the next 10 years at the same time it projects construction costs will rise by $3 billion because of higher property values in urban areas.
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In another transportation matter which will take even longer to be effective, NCDOT announced in September that it has received a $47.5-million federal grant to purchase the S-Line rail corridor between Raleigh and Ridgeway in Warren County.
That is the rail line now owned by CSX that is freight-only with one train going north from Raleigh each morning and coming south each afternoon or night. It was not clear in the announcement if CSX would continue that freight service to several businesses to the north of Raleigh.
The sale is part of a slow-moving effort to provide passenger and freight service directly between Washington, D.C., Richmond and Petersburg in Virginia and Raleigh as well as cities to the south.
The current investment is in protecting that Southeast Corridor until there is funding for the planned Southeast High Speed Rail. The route was discussed during public hearings in 2012 when some people in Wake Forest were upset to learn that the Elm Avenue railroad crossing would be closed. Access in that area from east to west would be through an underpass farther south.
One of the very real stumbling blocks is that CSX sold off portions of the rail line’s right-of-way in the 1980s and also tore up the tracks in other sections.
In 1992, the U.S. Department of Transportation named the Southeast Corridor as one of the first five federally designated higher speed rail corridors in the country. The corridor is a network of passenger and freight rail that runs from Washington, D.C. to Jacksonville, Fla., encompassing D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.
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