The Raleigh City Council has endorsed charging tolls on Capital Boulevard between Interstate 540 and Wake Forest, but, as some council members made clear, not enthusiastically.
The tolls will allow the N.C. Department of Transportation to accelerate plans to turn the congested four-lane road into a six-lane expressway, with interchanges instead of traffic lights.
Without tolls, NCDOT doesn’t anticipate having money to begin building the expressway until 2031 , a decade later than originally planned. Rising costs and competition from other projects across the state forced the delay, NCDOT officials say; the latest estimate is that converting 10 miles of Capital/U.S. 1 to an expressway would cost $1.34 billion…