Talk about a guilty pleasure. You fire up your favorite buggy -- even if it's an SUV with 300 horses and wheels as big as an earth mover's -- and convince yourself that you just absolutely must travel rapidly east out of Raleigh.

Soon enough, you're tooling along the bypass. Now, for folks who live anywhere near the Capital City no further explanation is needed. We're talking about the brand spanking new U.S. 64/264 bypass around not Raleigh itself, but the booming suburb of Knightdale -- an erstwhile tobacco farming town that has exploded with growth.

The old highway heading out through Raleigh's eastern fringe and then Knightdale had become a teeth-gnashing gauntlet of stoplights. It was the bane of east-west travelers on U.S. 64 and its U.S. 264 sidekick, which together funnel traffic from the state's midsection all the way to Whalebone Junction on the Outer Banks.

(OK -- road fanciers know that U.S. 64 also is the route that exits North Carolina at its extreme southwestern tippy-tip. That makes it the longest single highway in the state. It's also a cross-country route. Keep driving until the familiar "64" shield signs finally peter out and you'll be taking in the sights of Teec Nos Pos, Ariz.)

But back to the bypass. A decade in the making, it's six lanes of gleaming concrete. It runs a dozen miles past woods, fields, a few lonely looking tobacco barns, the backs of farmhouses and some of the new subdivisions that have become this area's crop of choice. It's a motorist's dream.

Too bad the dream can't be enjoyed unless you've tanked up on gasoline that's pushing $3 a gallon.

Step back a bit, and it might be that what we're seeing is the beginning of the end of a long-standing American settlement model, by which any community with developable land on its margins has tended to grow out as much as up, to spread as much as to fill in.

Well, some people will always prefer to live in the suburbs or exurbs, and will have the means to do it even if gas prices continue rising toward European levels. The auto industry, for that matter, could alter the equation if it became serious about building fuel-efficient vehicles. But it's hard to escape the sense that even with magnificent new highways coming on line, we're approaching a point where for many of us -- so accustomed to doing all that driving, at modest cost -- something may be about to give.

In our Tar Heel corner of the world, there are signs. It is becoming easier for people around the Triangle area, for example, to commute by bus, with the regional bus service steadily being upgraded. And if the federal government follows through with investments that already have been made, a commuter rail line linking Raleigh and Durham and serving the Research Triangle Park will join the mix of transit alternatives before the decade is out.

Common sense suggests that rail could become a significant people-mover hereabouts. It looks as though there'd be great potential to Raleigh's southeast, for example, into fast-growing Johnston County, which will remain unserved by the Triangle Transit Authority's current rail project.

That potential hasn't escaped notice among the rail promoters in the state Department of Transportation, who recently recommended commuter service on the line through Clayton that already handles long-distance Amtrak trains. Claytonians now must fight horrendous traffic on U.S. 70 and Interstate 40 to get into Raleigh or beyond to jobs in the research park. Why not let them and other Johnston County folks ride the rails?

It's encouraging that the DOT, even while road-building remains its top priority, continues working to restore passenger trains as a realistic travel option. In that vein the department now is pushing to begin passenger service between Raleigh and tourism-oriented Wilmington.

In fact, the dilemma had been which of two routes to the coastal city to choose. The DOT solved that by recommending both, one through Goldsboro and the other through Fayetteville. For folks in those towns, the more trains the merrier. Now it's just a question of finding the money.

An even more ambitious train venture involving North Carolina is the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor, which would route fast passenger trains between Washington and Charlotte, via Richmond, Petersburg, Henderson, Raleigh and Durham. The project is undergoing environmental reviews.

Travelers between Raleigh and Washington now can take advantage of the U.S. 64 bypass to cut almost a half-hour off their travel time, down to not much more than four hours. High speed rail service would be even quicker. The open highway undeniably has its allure -- but so does a train trip that gets you want where you want to go without pumping a single drop of liquid gold.

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