Junior freeways — a multimodal solution, whose time has come
As noted in our approved 2026-27 RTA Business Plan, the regional business community will “seek consensus on a junior freeway alternative between Durham and Raleigh” for the US 70 corridor.
We have elevated the potential of a junior freeway alternative for US 70 from time to time. See these blogs from 2023 and 2024.
We have also learned more about junior freeways first hand this year. During the July 2026 RTA Leadership Tour to Maryland, we received multiple presentations as well as an extensive field visit of the US 50 junior freeway corridor. In addition, last week’s Chamber For a Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro intercity visit to Charlottesville included brief travel along multiple junior freeway segments.
A junior freeway still contains the primary safety and mobility elements of a larger freeway — at least two lanes of travel, no direct driveway connections along the roadway, and no at-grade crossing intersections. However, the design criteria, including the number of exit points, are modified for either part or all of the corridor, in order to reduce the footprint and the resulting impacts to existing land uses, while improving accessibility. Doing so helps ensure that the roadway itself becomes less of a barrier than a typical freeway design, and with appropriate spacing and design of grade separated crossings for multimodal users, ideally the junior freeway will become less of a barrier than the current corridor.
While speeds are usually lower with a junior freeway compared with a larger or typical freeway design, the roadway can still provide effective regional mobility. By creating or preserving free-flow travel and eliminating all traffic signals, it reduces travel time along a vital regional corridor, particularly during off-peak, while increasing throughput capacity during peak travel periods. In addition, the junior freeway will certainly cost less than a more expansive freeway design — so it reduces impacts to our overall transportation funding budget.
The US 50 junior freeway corridor in Maryland that we visited earlier this year is particularly instructive. It provides a series of low speed exits and adjacent entrances, several within a mile length. In addition, the crossing bridges are not necessarily placed at or adjacent to the location of exits — instead the bridges were sited at locations where impacts were minimized — and there are fewer crossings than exit locations. We could apply this design strategy for an upgrade to US 70, and perhaps other roadways in the metropolitan Triangle.
The junior freeway is also helpful for multimodal travel, for several reasons:
- Creates a faster, more reliable routing for regional through bus travel, by eliminating traffic signals, and creating bus on shoulder system (BOSS) opportunity during peak travel periods
- Encourages trucks and other regional users to use the junior freeway, keeping them off of our local streets and roads
- Lower speeds at exit/entrance ramps improve safety for vulnerable users as well as vehicular traffic
- Reduced footprint width also reduces the costs and simplifies the design of multimodal crossings along the corridor
A junior freeway can either be along an existing roadway alignment or along a new location corridor — whichever provides the best balance of reduced land use and community impacts, as well as costs, while retaining freeway functionality.
Given the importance to regional mobility of US 70, including providing a viable relief roadway to I-40 for travel resilience, RTA will continue to highlight the opportunity and urgency of identifying a solution for the corridor. While there is no particular junior freeway design for US 70 that we favor, we will encourage our elected and transportation leaders to quickly move to a consensus plan that is fundable and deliverable.
Let’s get moving,
Joe
Joe Milazzo II, PE
RTA Executive Director
RTA is the voice of the regional business community on transportation
