Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 13, 1991 TAG: 9102130494
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Assuming you can handle the curves south of Clearbrook, evade the Camaro police cruiser in Boones Mill and weave through the congestion in Ridgeway, you can be at the state line in an hour and change.
The joyride ends there, at the Virginia-North Carolina border, where the road turns - poof - from a glistening magical coach pulled by horses into a pumpkin on wheels.
Four Virginia lanes suddenly become two Carolina lanes, one in each direction. Apparently, the flow of commerce from Roanoke to the Triad - Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem - is more vital to us than the reverse flow is to them.
On a good day, you still can make it to downtown Greensboro in two hours. More importantly, you still can make it to the airport outside Greensboro in time to catch a flight if you give yourself two hours and 15 minutes.
But not all days are good days on that road. Invariably, there is a stake-body farm truck up ahead, hauling tobacco. It lurches onto U.S. 220, inevitably bound in your direction, always ahead of you, always weaving along a solid yellow no-passing line.
When the farm truck bounces onto a crossroad, a school bus takes its place. A wide load. A driver's education car. You miss your flight, lose the account and Mr. Dithers fires you from your job. On the way home, you get behind the tobacco truck, which has unloaded the tobacco, reloaded with melons and is headed back to the farm.
Wouldn't life be different if North Carolinians spent some dough like we have for the past 30 years to carve a four-lane cruise-o-matic road out of a cattle trail? We've spent tens of millions of dollars to speed travel between the two metropolises. FromRidgeway you can get to Rocky Mount, to Roanoke, to Raphine, to the world!
We have given the world 70 miles of blacktopped bliss. They have contributed 30 Satanic, tortured two-laned miles that impose a 1947 patience on 1991 life.
But there may be a way to improve on this abomination.
Bill Jones of the North Carolina Department of Transportation says a 6 1/2-mile stretch of U.S. 220, about midway between Greensboro and Ridgeway, is being widened to four lanes. It should be done by next year.
Tar Heel transportation mavens plan to begin widening a stretch reaching the Virginia border in late 1992, early 1993.
But that project will draw money from North Carolina's $9.4 billion highway trust fund.
"Sadly," Jones says glumly, "that trust fund is built on the back of taxes built into auto sales, and we all know they've not been doing too well."
You won't hear me suggesting that you buy your next car in Carolina, which would entitle you to pay taxes there, which would enrich the coffers of the Carolina trust fund, which would finance the construction of U.S. 220, which would help all of us breeze quickly to the airport.
But everybody around here seems to have kin or chums down there. Perhaps you could co-sign a loan for your former neighbors in Chapel Hill so they could buy new cars. Or maybe you could finally repay grandmother in Charlotte that money she lent you for your home down payment. Maybe she'd treat herself to a Buick.
She could drive to Virginia on four lanes. No melon trucks.
by CNB