35 miles, 7810 days, one incredible alternative to I-40
- September 26, 2024
- Posted by: Joe Milazzo II
- Category: Blog
RTA members and partners,
“Complete 540” phase one — from NC 55 in Apex to I-40 and future I-42 in Garner — opened on Wednesday morning at 6 am. This is 18 miles of new turnpike freeway, which essentially doubled our current mileage in our region.
As I mentioned last week, the opening of the 540 southern Wake freeway will provide incredible mobility and safety benefits to our members, their associates, and their families. Of course, our entire extended metropolitan area will increasingly benefit from this new corridor for literally decades to come.
Last year, I was quoted in the Triangle Business Journal, when I noted that “You cannot overstate the impact of completing multimodal freeway infrastructure on the success of our region, and our region’s businesses – both now and for the future of business and commerce.”
The opening of the 540 southern Wake freeway now allows more areas in the metropolitan Triangle to become unified from a commerce, accessibility, and mobility standpoint. The new freeway in southern Wake County has created connectivity and resiliency benefits — it will link current and future jobs, workers, suppliers, and customers.
The regional business community is thrilled with the sustained, purposeful efforts over many years of NCDOT, NC Turnpike Authority, CAMPO, and many other partners to bring this vital multimodal infrastructure to the reality.
This is also a triumph for the regional business community’s sustained advocacy efforts to support the use of toll revenue to accelerate freeway infrastructure over more than two decades. We began work on this topic in May 2003, with our initial discussions on the Triangle Parkway, which became the first modern toll road in North Carolina when it opened in 2011. The road is now numbered NC 885.
This past Wednesday — 7810 days later — the entire southwestern portion of the toll 540/885 freeway network opened to traffic, creating the first complete bypass of I-40 in Wake and Durham counties, with the southeastern terminus at the Johnston County line / future I-42 interchange.
We still have 10 more miles to go — the 540 eastern Wake freeway is currently under construction, with completion in 2028 — but we have now linked I-40 to itself, and made the most significant link in our resilient multimodal freeway infrastructure in a generation.
This is a great week for North Carolina, NCDOT, the Turnpike Authority, and all of our partners. And, we are just getting started.
