A good portion of the Interstate 77 toll lane project will be done by the end of the year, as the private contractor building the road had planned. But not all of it.
It’s unclear exactly how many miles of the 26-mile toll project will be open by the time 2018 ends. Fines on the private company for finishing the project late won’t kick in until November 2019, instead of in January, as was originally planned.
“It is NCDOT’s understanding the developer anticipates opening lanes on the north section of the project by the end of the year,” Steve Abbott, assistant communications director at the NCDOT, said in a statement.
Officials at the North Carolina Department of Transportation and Spanish infrastructure firm Cintra, which is building the tolls and will collect revenue for 50 years, didn’t provide estimates of how much of the road might open on time, or when the rest would be complete.
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“The northern section is nearing completion,” said Jean Leier, spokeswoman I-77 Mobility Partners, the Cintra subsidiary building the project. But the cold weather now coming in makes paving difficult, and Leier said much of the work yet to be done on the southern section will take place in 2019.
The 26-mile stretch of roadway from uptown to Mooresville is littered with construction equipment. Sections still need paving, especially south of I-485, and the gantries — overhead racks with electronic toll readers and cameras — need to be installed on the southern part of the roadway. Some of the bridges that are supposed to provide direct access to and from parts of the toll lanes are still bare columns and girders, and won’t be complete until next year.
The contract between Cintra and NCDOT originally called for I-77 Mobility Partners to face fines of $10,000 a day if the road wasn’t complete by Jan. 7, 2019. That date’s been shifted, however, and now fines for late completion won’t be assessed unless the road is still not done a year from now.
Both I-77 Mobility Partners and the NCDOT attributed that delay to additional work that has been added by the government to the project since the contract was signed, such as pavement repair the contractor is doing on all the free lanes in addition to the toll lanes. Direct connections from the bridges spanning I-77 at Lakeview Road and Hambright Road, which will give drivers access to and from the toll lanes in both directions at those locations, were requested by the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization and approved in 2017.
Project deadlines and the schedule of milestones were extended to accommodate those changes.
“When work is added to a construction project, more time is needed to complete it,” said NCDOT spokeswoman Jen Thompson.