A section of Old Stage Road will be widened and get new traffic lights
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- NCDOT will widen Old Stage Road from two lanes to four south of NC 540.
- Project will realign Old Stage to meet Rock Service Station at a T, with a traffic light.
- The Fred Smith Co. won a nearly $7 million contract and will begin work next week.
Work will soon begin on a project to widen a section of Old Stage Road south of Garner and install a traffic light at a busy intersection that doesn’t have one now.
The N.C. Department of Transportation will widen Old Stage from two lanes to four from the N.C. 540 interchange south to Rock Service Station Road. NCDOT engineers expect traffic on this one-mile stretch of road will roughly double by 2045, fed in part by drivers going to and from 540, the Triangle Expressway.
The project also includes realigning the intersection of Old Stage and Rock Service Station roads and installing a traffic light. Instead of a Y intersection, Old Stage will be shifted, away from the Community Mart gas station and store, so that it meets Rock Service Station at a T.
NCDOT plans another new traffic light just up the road to help northbound drivers make left turns onto Banks Road.
A new concrete median will prevent left turns into driveways along this stretch of Old Stage. Instead, drivers who want to get across the road will proceed to one of three places where they can make U-turns.
The nearly $7 million construction contract went to the Fred Smith Co. of Raleigh, which is expected to begin work next week and finish by the fall of 2027.
NCDOT engineers presented their Old Stage Road plans to the public more than three years ago and made some changes based in part on feedback they received.
They eliminated a multi-use path planned for one side of the road and a sidewalk on the other. Those changes reduced the road’s footprint and the amount of property the state needed to buy.
Old Stage is one of five interchanges along an 18-mile section of N.C. 540 that opened across southern Wake County in September 2024. Construction of the final leg of the six-lane toll road, between I-40 south of Garner and I-87 near Knightdale, also began in 2024 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2028.
