As the State Fair ends, long-awaited Blue Ridge Road construction project will begin

Just after this year’s State Fair winds down on Sunday night, workers will start closing off Blue Ridge Road south of Hillsborough Street to start overhauling one of North Carolina’s most complex intersections.

Over the next two years, contractors for the N.C. Department of Transportation will build an underpass that will carry Blue Ridge Road under Hillsborough Street, Beryl Road and the N.C. Railroad tracks that all meet at the southeast corner of the State Fairgrounds.

The project entails not only digging down for the new section of Blue Ridge but also building new parallel bridges for Hillsborough, Beryl and the railroad tracks. That includes building a temporary set of tracks to keep trains moving throughout the project.

At the same time, workers will create a new connector road in the northeast corner of the intersection, near the N.C. State University College of Veterinary Medicine, to take drivers between Blue Ridge and Hillsborough, with new traffic lights at each end.

Workers will begin Monday morning by closing Blue Ridge on either side of the railroad tracks, just south of Hillsborough. Eventually, they’ll need to close Blue Ridge north of Hillsborough and close Hillsborough itself for several months starting in early 2023.

The underpass will replace the complex set of signals that now manage traffic where three roads and the railroad tracks come together. That traffic gets clogged more than usual during big events at the fairgrounds and nearby Carter-Finley Stadium and PNC Arena, when crowds descend on West Raleigh and people try to cross the streets on foot.

When the underpass is done, both Blue Ridge and Hillsborough will have sidewalks for the first time.

The project is expected to take two years to complete, meaning the intersection will at least be partially closed during next year’s State Fair and N.C. State University’s 2023 football season.

The City of Raleigh cited the need to reduce congestion at the intersection in 2001, and by 2010 NCDOT had begun studying its options. It eventually chose the underpass, and the project qualified for state funding in 2015.

But by then NCDOT knew it would overlap with plans to widen a nearby stretch of the Beltline.

So the state awarded a single contract to Lane Construction Corp. to both overhaul Blue Ridge Road and widen the Beltline to six lanes between Wade Avenue and Interstate 40. The Beltline work began in 2019 and won’t be completed until the fall of 2024.