This past week, I noticed a house was suddenly gone from NC 50, a little north of Cleveland School Rd. As far as I could tell, one day it was there, and the next day it was gone. While the mailbox is still out at the road, all the land (even the driveway) was restored to undeveloped earth. I meant to look up and see who owned that land, but forgot about it until I saw an article on WRAL about homeowners not being able to do anything with their land because of the 540 protected corridor. I looked up this piece of land on NC 50 and was surprised to find that NC DOT owns that piece of land and much of the land around it, on both sides of the road. I guess it's obvious that I-540 (or NC-540, depending on how it's funded) will cross NC 50 at that point (between Cleveland School Rd and Grissom Farm Rd).
well hopefully there will be entrance and exit ramps onto 540 there if that is the case. That will be a Godsend to get people off the local roads and onto the highway to get to work faster?? when is the 540 supposed to be completed there??
Be careful of what you wish for, entrance and exit ramps will mean road widening and then commercial development, ie. strip malls and big box stores(just look at 55 were 540 crosses). then comes congestion. I would much rather see them spend the money to widen 40 at 540 and leave us off the beaten track.
I doubt that many Johnstonians are going to pay these kind of rates to get to work faster. http://www.ncdot.gov/turnpike/tolls/download/Toll_Rates.pdf It is interesting that the northern part of 540 was built without tolls, but the southern part will be. Does money=influence? "Them that's got shall get."
According to this map, there will be exits at I-40, NC 50, Old Stage Rd, US 401 at Wake Tech, Bells Lake Rd (seems an odd road for a major freeway interchange), and Holly Springs Rd at Kildaire Farm Rd. I don't know if these are part of just one proposed route, but I don't see any other routes mentioned on their web site. Even with tolls, I think this section of 540 would help a lot in clearing some traffic off I-40. If a bunch of people headed for RTP or Durham decide to take 540, that's less traffic for the rest of us on I-40, right? That Dollar General knew exactly what they were getting into, and got into the game while the land was cheap!
I agree. I cross the Toll 540 at the overpass a mile south of the HWY 55 ramp near Apex every day during rush hour. It's virtually empty. And that's in a wealthy area. Putting tolls on every portion except the portion that see's the most traffic is wrong. They know it, and the people do nothing about it. C'est la vie
Yes, we've known this for several years as we know some of the folks who own houses around there and will be impacted. A lot of those houses have become rental properties because they couldn't sell them.
I know one time during Easley's term he took money from all the counties to balance the state budget, and another time he took money from the highway trust fund to balance the budget. In both cases he never put the money back. So we can actually thank him for the tolls on I-540. But if you notice they are building loops around both Charolette and Fayetteville at breakneck speed compared to the speed in which they are building the outer loop around Raleigh. And neither of the other loops have tolls on them.
Highway trust fund Which is where all the Interstates are suppose to get their funding from. The United States Highway Trust Fund is a transportation fund which receives money from a federal fuel tax of 18.3 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon of diesel fuel and related excise taxes. I-485 I-295 I-540 (to be I-640 once completed) are all covered under the trust fund
Yet somehow they said recently that they are roughly double their predicted usage and income. And projected to pay off the debt sooner than they thought, and therefore take down the tolls earlier (yeah right, we all know they will be permanent).
Much of what is considered to be I-540 is actually NC 540 because it is being built with state funding
I lived in Florida when their turnpike was paid off. Their legislators had said the same thing about taking down the tolls once it was paid off. But when it was paid off they said they were keeping the tolls to keep up the road. all they did was to put tolls in different places.
Don't forget he also took over $150 million from the State Retirement system in 2001. However that got paid back when some of us filed suit and the courts agreed with us.
This shows some of the routes: http://blogs.newsobserver.com/category/tags/540-Outer-Loop This is a community organization that follows the project. Not sure how up to date it is, but the Google map is interactive so you can more easily see the effects of each route. http://movetheloop.org/wp/?page_id=45 I believe the OP map shows the orange route.
