The race to catch up.

• Author: Mildenberg, David
• Position: North Carolina's highway investment program

We are now paying a hefty price for the years transportation officials were asleep at the wheel.

On this cluttered stretch of doubled-up superhighway, where the fluorescent orange of barrier barrels, raw red of scraped dirt and weathered yellow of heavy construction equipment add a consistent color scheme to the landscape, stand two green signs. One is on the county line with Guilford to the west, the other at the border of Orange on the east. They read: "Alamance County. Your link to the future."

They smack of boosterism, to be sure. Alamance does lie between two of the state's economic centers, and this highway connects the Triad to the Triangle. But the immediate future, at least, is mired in millions of dollars that must be spent to pay for past sins of omission.

Often, traffic along this stretch of Interstate 85/40 moves at the pace of buggies on an old dirt road. One of the worst tie-ups occurred the Sunday after last Thanksgiving, when it took hours to get from "Death Valley," where I-85 and I-40 merge in Greensboro, to just west of Hillsborough, where they split apart again in Orange County.

"You've got two interstates funneling into one and four lanes of traffic funneling into two," says Sgt. Robert Taylor of the state Highway Patrol, in Burlington. "It's just a classic bottleneck, a 30-mile bottleneck."

The traffic is such that workers at AT&T's Guilford Center plant frequently bypass the interstate and use state and county roads for commutes. "Sometimes you're inching along and you think there must be some accident slowing things up, but then you find out there never was any accident. It was just extraordinary traffic," says David Arneke, a public-relations manager.

That the state's traffic planners allowed this to happen illustrates the shortcomings in the slow, cumbersome and often politically charged process of road building. With the federal government putting up 90% of the money, the state is spending $132 million to widen from four lanes to eight the 35.4 miles where I-85 and I-40 intertwine.

Though just a fraction of the state's total spending on roads, the project exemplifies what's going on in each of North Carolina's major urban areas as commuters' expectations for safe, less-congested roads have forced the politicians' hands. For example, building an I-40 bypass through 21 miles of Forsyth County south of Winston-Salem cost $170 million, including $35 million to buy land. At a cost of more than $8 million a mile, the...