I-77 express lanes proposal killed by Charlotte transit board

CHARLOTTE — A proposal for express lanes on Interstate 77 in Charlotte hit a dead end after a transit board killed its support for the project on Wednesday night.

Channel 9 spent months covering the back and forth about its design and the communities that could be impacted.

There are still a lot of questions about the future of I-77, which was a project decades in the making.

I-77 will remain the same for at least another decade, and now it’s back to the drawing board to figure out what to do about the corridor used by 160,000 vehicles a day.

Wednesday night’s vote was dramatic and stunning.

A supermajority of the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization voted to pull support for the proposal to put toll lanes from Uptown to South Carolina.

That vote effectively killed the project.

Officials with the North Carolina Department of Transportation said they will honor the decision. Any new project now will have to start over. The area is also losing out on $700 million that was set aside for that part of the interstate. Now the money will go to other parts of the state.

It could be 10 years before there is another plan put forward.

The CRTPO’s vote happened despite its own attorney advising against this.

At 5 p.m. on Channel 9, government reporter Joe Bruno will break down the possible legal ramifications.

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