From Raleigh 75 miles south to the Richmond County line, U.S. 1 is at least a four-lane road. Efforts are in the way to complete that project all the way to U.S. 74 Bypass by 2019.

The $40 million project to open up a bottleneck on U.S. 1 hasn’t come without a hidden price tag.

Businesses along the road in Rockingham have reported a drop in sales as a result of construction delays caused by the widening of U.S. 1.

For Tommy Ritter, store manager of the Food Lion at 2124 Fayetteville Road, it’s meant cutting back the hours of more than half of the store’s 39 employees.

“We determine the number of hours (people work) by sales, so when sales are down we have to reduce hours,” Ritter said.

Employees who were used to a 40-hour a week paycheck were cut down to 30 hours. A few, he said, couldn’t live with the smaller checks and found other work. Ritter said all of the long-term employees have stayed on.

“It’s been hard on us,” Ritter said. “Full-time is 40 hours, but you are only guaranteed 30,” Ritter said. “If sales are down you have to tell that department head that you’ve got to cut back.”

Overall sales are down about 5 percent for the local store. Sales have started to pick up now that construction has shifted to the other side of the street, but Ritter remains worried.

“There are a lot of elderly people that come to our store. Once you get people used to not going somewhere it may be harder to get them back.”

Ritter went to DOT and the contractor, Boggs Paving, to plead his case. He said he asked that they put a flagman out by the road when work was going on, but the contractor said he couldn’t afford to do that.

“People could not get in or out a lot of days,” Ritter said.

While he admits the traffic snarls have hurt business at Eastside Auto Sales, owner Curtis Driggers takes it in stride.

“I would be reluctant to second guess anything they’ve done,” Driggers said. “When you talk to the employees, as I have, you can see they are pretty much committed to doing a good job. It’s very refreshing. If you’ve got an issue that’s legitimate, and it’s something they created, they seem to want to work with you on it.”

“You can always question what they’re doing, but these guys have been doing this for decades. They know what’s going to cause the least amount of problems.”

The Southern Part

According to the contract, Boggs Paving Inc. has until Aug. 15, 2010, to complete work on U.S. 1 from Rockingham to Wiregrass Road. However NCDOT says nearly 78 of the work has been done, and the road could be finished by the end of this year.

A big part of the job was bulldozing a hill to improve visibility.

DOT tries to work with property owners as much as possible before and during a construction project. He admits you can’t please everywhere.

“Normally what happens is right-of-way folks come out and start talking to the property owners,” said Gary Phillips, a DOT engineer. “Sometimes they have a preliminary set of plans and they try and set down ‘this is where the driveway is going to be, and this is what the slope will be.’ On the other side is construction, sometimes some things don’t go like the plans. We try and accommodate folks, and sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t.”

The more urban the setting, the harder the task is, Phillips said.

“Now they’re at a point where it’s going to be slow and tedious work,” Phillips said. “The goal right now is to get the intersection at Wiregrass and Roberdel done and then switch traffic to the northbound lanes. The very last phase of that job will be to split the traffic north and south and do the final paving.”

The contract is approximately 6 percent over the budgeted contract amount due primarily to price adjustments for fuel and liquid asphalt cement because of the increase price of oil over the past years.

The Northern Part

R. E. Goodson Construction Company has until Nov. 15, 2011, to complete work on U.S. 1 widening from Marston to Moore County. NCDOT reports that work was scheduled to have been 20 percent complete at this time but as of June 30 only 12.41 percent of the job was complete.

U.S. 1 from Old Coach Lane in Marston to Moore County involves making four lanes of traffic, which at times will be separated with a median for two lanes each way.

Utility work has taken time as new water lines and overhead utilities have had to be moved.

“This project is slightly behind schedule but work has picked up on the project,” said John Olinger, division construction engineer based in Aberdeen. “The contractor has had to work around existing utilities that are currently being relocated. The contract completion date is Nov. 15, 2011 and should be completed on time. The contractor is focusing their efforts on the south end of the project and progressing north while construction is being performed on the southbound bridge at Drowning Creek.”

The contract amount is $26.6 million. The contract was let on Oct. 21, 2008; and work began Dec. 8, 2008.

The approach to the new bridge over Drowning Creek is being prepared. Once this bridge is completed, traffic will be diverted to that bridge while the northbound bridge is removed and replaced in the same location.

The Future

Once the northern section of U.S. 1 is complete, there may be a lull of a few years before construction picks back up again, but when it does it will dwarf the work that is going on right now.

A U.S. 1 Bypass is expected to cost at least $140 million and will link the area north of Rockingham Speedway with the U.S. 74 Bypass between Rockingham and Hamlet. That’s more than three times the cost of the two U.S. 1 projects underway right now and involves 14 miles of interstate highway.

Work is now scheduled to start on the northern end of the bypass near Rockingham Speedway around 2014. Soon after that work on the other two sections is slated to start. At this point, DOT expects all three phases should be finished by 2019.

But nobody knows for sure.

“It could be pushed back if the money isn’t there,” Olinger said.

“It used to be the Transportation Improvement Plan would look out 15 or 20 years,” Philips said. “But as money got tight, we’ve been looking at five years. If it’s within five years and we’ve got the funding for it, it’s most likely going to be built. Anything beyond five years and it gets kind of iffy.”