Some good news on the East End Connector

Ray Gronberg reports in the Herald-Sun:

The newest version of the state's road-construction plan will include $32 million more for Durham's long-planned East End Connector, the city's delegate on the N.C. Board of Transportation says.

That allocation follows earlier commitments of nearly $100 million and keeps the project on track for a 2013 construction start, board member and Durham lawyer Ken Spaulding said Wednesday.

That's a year later than the current schedule lists, but a year better than planners in the N.C. Department of Transportation proposed in their initial draft of the 2009-15 state road plan.

"The only other recourse would be to let it slip again," Spaulding said in advance of a scheduled vote today on the statewide road plan. "And I have found that once these projects start slipping, they never get built."

The EEC will help to divert traffic from neighborhood surface streets that is traveling between north Durham and RTP, the airport, and Raleigh by providing an alternative route that connects NC 147 and US 70 at their closest point. I'm still not sanguine about the remaining money actually being allocated in time for construction to start in five years. But this is better than nothing.

I'm a little concerned by this, though:

To save money DOT engineers are also considering building the connector with four travel lanes instead of the planned six. Their thinking is that four lanes would dovetail better with the area's existing road network, particularly with the four-lane Durham Freeway.

The agency would still reserve space for additional travel lanes, and build them eventually, after demand justifies widening the Durham Freeway itself, Ahrendsen said.

If four lanes are good enough for now, let's go ahead and build them, and then take the money saved and start thinking about transit options, both in Durham and between Durham and the rest of the Triangle. In their reporting on the release of the Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP), the N&O notes:

The seven-year plan also earmarks money for preliminary work to relieve congestion on a third section of I-40 in southeastern Wake County.

This new project, estimated to cost $215 million, will add lanes to nine miles of I-40 from the Raleigh Beltline to the new U.S. 70 Clayton Bypass at the Wake-Johnston County line. Land acquisition is set to begin in 2014, with construction starting sometime after 2015.

Widening highways seems to be the only tool in the belt for the NCDOT. And as we've all seen with I-40, adding lanes is at best a temporary fix. As long as developers are encouraged to build along these highway corridors, with no other transportation alternatives, our highways will never be wide enough.

Time for the NCDOT to start acting like they realize the T in their name stands for transportation, and that they're no longer just the Highway Department.