RTA members,
For this week’s briefing, we highlight our advocacy priority for upgrading the US 70 corridor to a junior freeway between Durham and Raleigh, and we provide a registration and schedule update for our US 401 North field visit later this month. See brief articles below.
Thank you for your membership, as always, and have a great weekend.
Let’s get moving,
Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA executive director
Junior freeways — a multimodal solution, whose time has come
As noted in our approved 2026-27 RTA Business Plan, the regional business community will “seek consensus on a junior freeway alternative between Durham and Raleigh” for the US 70 corridor.
We have elevated the potential of a junior freeway alternative for US 70 from time to time, including the benefits to multimodal travel. We have also learned more about junior freeways first hand this year, including our July 2026 field visit to the US 50 junior freeway corridor in Maryland.
Given the importance to regional mobility of US 70, including providing a viable relief roadway to I-40 for travel resilience, RTA will continue to highlight the opportunity and urgency of identifying a solution for the corridor. While there is no particular junior freeway design for US 70 that we favor, we will encourage our elected and transportation leaders to quickly move to a consensus plan that is fundable and deliverable.
Learn more in this week’s blog.
US 401 North Field Visit moving to one week later; registration re-opened.
We are going to move the RTA US 401 North Field Visit to Monday, October 19 at 1 pm (instead of next Monday, October 12). If you have already registered for the prior date, you have received communication from my colleague Jacob, asking you to reconfirm.
We look forward to our visit to this excellent and innovative travel solution later this month, and we applaud our partners at NCDOT for making it an accelerated reality.
If you have not registered for the visit, and would like to go, we have reopened registration via this link. There is limited capacity, so if you would like to attend and the event appears full you can request to be added to the waitlist.
