When it comes to highway expansion in New Hampshire, the effort to widen Interstate 93 gets most of the headlines.
This week, transportation officials have said the price to widen that road has risen more than sixty percent to nearly seven-hundred million dollars.
Rising costs also plague another planned highway expansion in New Hampshire, on the Seacoast.
There, officials have been working for six years to widen the Spaulding Turnpike.
New Hampshire Public Radio's David Darman has more.
Almost everyone who drives Spaulding Turnpike during weekday rush hours complains that the traffic moves slowly, if at all.
Dick Green commutes daily to his job as executive director of Pease International Tradeport.
And he says his twenty minute trip takes at least ten minutes longer because of the slow speed.
anybody that lives in this area knows that around between 7 and 8 in the morning you can hardly get going south and anytime after 3:30, six, especially on the weekends, you can hardly get out of here and go north because the bottleneck is at the bridge and the traffic has either stopped completely or its moving very slowly.
The state wants to widen the Turnpike in two places.
In Newington, the plan is to widen the bridge over Little Bay, doubling available lanes to 4 each way.
Further north, the Department of Transportation is also looking to widen the roadway in Rochester.
Nearly 70,000 vehicles use the Turnpike every day, nearly twice the capacity it was designed for.
Tom Landry of D-O-T heads up the team working on the northern end of the project.
He says the road was constructed back in the 1950's, and its design is out of date.
as you're trying to merge into traffic on the Spaulding turnpike, you've got to go from stop to traffic that's going 55 miles an hour, if they're doing the speed limit. so in turn we typically like to give traffic a distance to get up to speed, so they can safely merge in with you know the through traffic that's already there.
Many of the pressures driving up the cost of the I-93 project are also pushing up the price of Spaulding turnpike.
Steel and concrete prices have risen, as has the price of asphalt, which is made from petroleum.
These price hikes have driven the cost of the Spaulding project to more than 300 million dollars, about 70 million more than projected just last year.
The state is looking to pay for much of Spaulding's construction with toll money.
Bill Boynton of DOT says that plan looked inadequate a few months ago, but is looking better now that ezpass is in place instead of discontinued highway tokens.
...the revenue picture on the turnpike side has improved pretty significantly in the past year was very flat before that and there was some question as to whether we could do any turnpike improvements.
The widening project is also awaiting environmental approval.
A preliminary draft of an Environmental Impact Statement was issued in July.
The bridge over Little Bay that officials plan to widen spans an inland water way that includes Great Bay and several rivers.
A recent report from the New Hampshire Estuaries Project studied the effects of area development on plant and fish life of the bay and adjoining rivers.
It found that new housing, parking lots, and other development was causing more sand and road salt to flow into the bay.
The report also found increased nitrogen levels in the water, coming from wastewater plants, lawn fertilizers and septic systems.
Phil Trowbridge of the Estuaries Project says if this trend keeps up, the health of the bay could be at risk.
...we do know that if you continue to release nitrogen into the bay indefinitely, eventually we will see a loss of eel grass and a change of the ecosystem of the bay. this is something that's occurred in other estuaries you know most noticeably things like the chesapeake bay and narragansett bay.
Eel grass is important to the bay because it slows down swift flowing water.
It also provides a nursery for several species of fish.
Despite concerns over the environment, there is widespread agreement that the Spaulding is inadequate, and needs to be expanded.
But some planners and environmentalists say they worry that a wider road will enable greater development, only to lead for the need for even more road expansion.
DOT officials say they're opening new Park and Ride lots to get people onto busses or into car pools.
Tom Irwin of the Conservation Law Foundation says the state could do more, and give travelers additional options.
the idea of sort of inter-modal connections, the sort of connections that provide a transit link to the Downeaster, so that you're linking two modes of transportation. that sort of thinking and that kind of planning is critical to ultimately reducing traffic demands.
Commuters and other travelers who are eager for a wider Turnpike will have to wait a while for the sound of jackhammers and paving crews.
The state doesn't plan to start working on the project until 2010.
By then, they hope to have worked out the fiscal and environmental concerns.
