VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WVEC) -- If you've gone shopping to the Hilltop section of Virginia Beach, you've probably become intimately familiar with Laskin Road and its confusing, frustrating, and congested feeder lanes.
Laskin Road is already a busy street with more than 31,000 vehicles traveling up and down it every day, and its feeder lanes have created more hassle to access local businesses. Because of the confusion, removing these outside lanes have become a major goal for the city.
"This project's been a long-standing urban project in the city that we've had for years, and it just has never been funded for construction," Phillip Pullen, the Public Works Transportation Division Manager for the City of Virginia Beach, told us last year.
But now that funding has been secured, Pullen tells 13News Now.
The roughly $50 million construction project, funded by both the state and the city, will expand the four main lanes of Laskin Road between First Colonial Road and the Laskin Road Bridge with six to eight lanes, adding outside bike paths and sidewalks. That covers about 1.5 miles of roadway.
An additional half mile of work from Red Robin Road to Oriole Drive will be revamped at a later date, project manager Bll Haggerty told our partners at The Virginian-Pilot.
While those feeder lanes' days may be numbered, groundbreaking isn't expected to begin until fall of 2018.