Rural southeast Wake County has been changing for years, as new homes and subdivisions rise amid patches of forest and fields of hay and soybeans.
Now even bigger changes are underway, as enormous piles of downed trees, rows of pipes and a 10-mile strip of bare earth mark the future path of the Triangle Expressway.
Work began last year on the final leg of N.C. 540, which will run 10 miles between Interstate 87 near Knightdale and Interstate 40 south of Garner. When this section opens in late 2028, the 70-mile outer loop around Raleigh will be complete, more than 35 years after construction began near Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
Those final 10 miles of highway will cost about $737 million. The N.C. Turnpike Authority, an arm of the N.C. Department of Transportation, will pay for the road through tolls it collects from drivers who use it.
NCDOT and the Turnpike Authority split the work into two contracts, to make it easier for more companies to compete. A joint venture of Wilson-based S.T. Wooten and Branch Civil of Roanoke, Virginia, will receive $287 million to build the section from I-40 north to near Rock Quarry Road. A second $450 million contract for the northern section, including a bridge over the Neuse River, went to a joint venture of the Fred Smith Company of Raleigh and Flatiron Construction, a Colorado company with an East Coast division based in Morrisville.
The project includes five interchanges, at White Oak Road, U.S. 70, Rock Quarry Road, Auburn-Knightdale Road and Poole Road.
Work began last year after a groundbreaking ceremony in May. So far, contractors have focused on clearing trees, moving utilities such as power, sewer and gas lines, and getting started on some of the bridges, said Brian Narron, project manager for S.T. Wooten.
“Things that take longer to build than just grading the roadway,” Narron said. “We kind of picked priority areas based on structures and utility relocation work.”
Workers have placed the concrete spans for the longest bridge in the southern section, over a swampy stream called Bushy Branch. The 460-foot bridge is a few hundred yards from the big turbine interchange where N.C. 540 meets I-40 and I-42, the Clayton Bypass.
With two sets of contractors building one road, there’s a chance they may not finish at the same time. But so far both teams are on schedule, said Cameron Richards of WSP, the firm overseeing the project for the Turnpike Authority.
“They’re both right in line with each other,” Richards said.
A freeway in northern Wake; a toll road in the south
Some version of a loop highway around Raleigh has appeared on planning maps since the 1980s. Construction on the first segment began in 1992, and the first few miles, between U.S. 70 and Leesville Road, opened seven years later.
The northern half of the loop between Knightdale and Research Triangle Park became Interstate 540 and is not a toll road. In late 2005, when it appeared the state would not have enough money to build the southern loop for many years, local officials asked the Turnpike Authority to build it as a toll road.
By 2012, the Triangle Expressway, also known as N.C. 540, was open from I-40 to N.C. 55 in Apex, near Holly Springs. Last September, another 18 miles of the toll road opened across southern Wake to connect with I-40 near Johnston County
The Triangle Expressway allows people to bypass Raleigh, but that’s not how the vast majority of drivers use it, according to the Turnpike Authority. Of the 867,000 people who have driven on the southern section since it opened last summer, less than 3% made the full 36-mile trip between RTP and Johnston County.
