I think part of it is because W-S (and the Triad in general) doesn’t outgrow its infrastructure as quickly as Raleigh. However, it’s always felt like the Triad in general gets preferential treatment from the DOT over Raleigh and definitely Charlotte.
I still contend that US 421/Salem Pkwy should have been removed from downtown W-S a few years back instead of being rebuilt though. It was closed for about two years with no apparent negative surrounding traffic impact.
The infrastructure in Greensboro is insane for its population and growth rate, and nothing is toll roads. It’s absolutely ridiculous IMO.
Also Winston-Salem and Greensboro were booming industrial cities while Raleigh was still a Podunk state capital AND before Charlotte got its boom as a banking center. In the early 1900s Winston was the largest city in the state thanks to all it’s heavy industry (a lot of which has shut down and moved south of the border) and banks before they moved to Charlotte (Wachovia anyone??). This is a big reason I didn’t move back after college 20+ years ago, jobs were in Charlotte and Raleigh, industry and supporting jobs were declining in the Triad.
I do love Winston as my second home town, but the severe overbuilding of Greensboro is a bit ridiculous other than it is sits at a crossroads halfway between Raleigh and Charlotte. I had the joy of driving back and forth through Greensboro (between Mayberry and Raleigh) during the rebuilding of I-40 in my college years…. UGH, no thank you!
That choke point in Greensboro where I-40 joined up with I-85, before they built the I-85 bypass, was horrendous. It’s much better now. But overall I agree, they just keep building more and more bypasses all over the place in the Triad.
Before that bottleneck was improved, we referred to it as “Death Valley”. Lots of accidents.
I considered mentioning that in my previous comment, but realistically what I think @BoringRaleigh was talking about mainly refers to the much more recent construction of I-73, I-74, I-285, and I-840, not to mention additional future interstates such as I-685 as well as the Winston-Salem Western Loop. Some of those are/will be upgrades to already existing non-interstate highways, and in the early days of highway/interstate construction it’s not as surprising how much was built around the Triad, but the more recent stuff seems like an incredibly outsized amount of investment considering the amount of population in that part of the state.
Meanwhile there are still not direct interstate connections from Asheville-Charlotte or Charlotte-Wilmington, despite the painfully obvious existence of US 74 that would be (relatively) easy to upgrade to an actual interstate. It is at least very slowly taking shape in bits and pieces thanks to the bypasses around Monroe, Rockingham/Hamlet, and Laurinburg, plus the Shelby Bypass which is still under construction (side note - it’s ridiculous that ANOTHER bypass is having to be built around Shelby) and the eventual planned Wadesboro bypass, but there are still a ton of gaps that will need to be upgraded, and I don’t get the impression those are anywhere close to the top of NCDOT’s priorities.
From your description, it sounds like instead of building or upgrading one freeway, they’re just building a ”bypass” around every town between 2 points and sort of merging them at the end. Seems weird, but I could imagine it makes the politics of it easier.
Speaking of small/mid-sized venues, Greensboro has a new venue of 1,000 people opening up. We’re actually taking a train trip out there in 2 months to see a band I’ve previously seen in Raleigh at The Ritz.
Looks to be a nice space, with a full-time cocktail bar and right downtown.
Ultimately, since the DOT didn’t build the current alignment of US 74 between I-26 and Wilmington as a limited access highway initially, and then basically completely ignored the entire corridor once construction was finally complete, too much development has sprung up around the small towns to justify upgrading the existing highway to interstate standards in a lot of areas. So expensive new bypasses have to be built instead. @kjhburg should be able to confirm but I have read that the ~55 mile stretch between Kings Mtn/I-85 and Columbus/I-26 took nearly 20 years to build (and includes the aforementioned initial Shelby bypass that is now being bypassed again). It’s really frustrating when you look around at other highways that were built around the same time to much less significant cities such as US 220 from Greensboro to Rockingham, US 421 from Greensboro to Siler City, US 421 from Winston-Salem to Wilkesboro, etc, the initial construction of those routes were built to full limited-access freeway standards which have been/will be substantially easier to upgrade to interstates. When US 64 between Knightdale and Williamston, and US 264 between Zebulon and Greenville, were realigned, they were built as fully limited-access highways that made the upgrade to I-87 and I-587 much easier.
I will add that the NCDOT has made a lot of progress on freewaying US 74 from I-95 east towards Wilmington. It seems a painfully slow process. I’ve been driving this stretch for a little more than a decade, but year by year they close off the cross streets for overpasses.
The massive investment in freeways around the Triad always puzzles me, but I figure this is about legislative influence, the demand to spread out road dollars, to help jump start what was an area suffering sever industrial decline after the collapse of textiles and tobacco.
At one point, in the late 1990s, they were intent on by-passing every town of any decent size - PIttsboro, Siler City, etc.
Here in Alabama we are in a big old political fight over widening I-65 to Mobile for the beach traffic (tourists) or widening the old US HWY from Tuscaloosa to Mobile in effort to spark development in the poorest part of the state. So road battles and politics - I guess they are like death and taxes, you can always rely on them.
A week or so ago I was in Nashville. As I have said repeatedly, I would rather live in Raleigh 7 days a week and twice on Sunday before ever moving to this “IT” city. Raleigh is better planned, has better transportation options and highways, better landscaping, better parks, more greenways and just is so much more livable. And yes Wallethub agrees with me.
https://wallethub.com/edu/best-state-capitals/19030
Nashville has a much better skyline than Raleigh and a slightly bigger airport (but guess who has more international flight that would be RDU) anyway here are some photos I took. Love to visit would never live there. Domed stadium for the Ttians under construction and their hotels are beautiful and plentiful. Parking is very high especially no other way to get downtown. Parking much more than uptown Charlotte for example.
Nashvegas a few more. Tons of tourists day drinking! And I love country music but all the multistory bars don’t really do anything for me. Nor do the tractors pulling drunks through downtown LOL or the buses with screaming bachelors and bachelorettes! Along Broadway they consume more alcohol than most of Raleigh does.
I’m already in a tourist town when I’m not in Raleigh. The last place I’d want to also live is another tourist town filled with drunk bachelor and bachelorette parties. No thanks!
Look what is proposed in Dallas… Why can’t we have nice things here (IE better/more diverse architecture). Maybe it will come as Raleigh matures as a city.
Here’s the blood moon over Miami at 6AM today. For a minute there, I thought it would be completely blocked by that cloud. Thankfully the cloud moved after a couple of minutes in time for me to grab a few shots. 
Absolutely not. Waymo is not welcome here. Shouldn’t be welcome anywhere. Humans, please. I like humans.
https://www.axios.com/local/austin/2026/03/02/waymo-vehicle-blocks-ems-austin-mass-shooting
Glass half full on this issue: at least the Waymos come to a full stop at stop signs and red lights before turning right. I’ve been watching them drive all over Miami Beach this Winter to learn, including this morning at 6AM when I was taking photos of the blood moon before the sun rose.
Jake, there is no perfect solution in life, only trade-offs. I think it’s important to look at everything in prospective and ask yourself, does this new technology reduce overall harm compared to the status quo?
Every real-world system has failure modes, especially humans - in fact, human drivers kill 1.3 million people globally every year, so let’s not compare a Waymo making some mistakes against humans who make lots of mistakes as the reason to keep humans behind the wheel.
At the end of the day, if autonomous vehicles end up resulting in 5,000 deaths per year, which is tragic, but it means preventing 100,000 deaths from human driving activity, it is ethically indefensible to reject autonomous vehicles and accept 95,000 additional preventable deaths just because the system isn’t perfect.
If I think back to the Fall where a driver in downtown didn’t see me crossing a crosswalk at a red light, and the fact that the driver was in the throws of turning right on red in a location where it was not allowed, I can see myself feeling safer on the crosswalk with an autonomous vehicle that learned the rules of the road. Also, an autonomous vehicle wouldn’t spit at me like the driver did that day.
Waymo is coming to Charlotte and I am excited about it. We had this debate on Charlotte UP and my research and NTSB 2 people have been killed by a FULLY automated vehicle with no driver. LeMelo Ball being a distracted driver hit another car by crossing into its lane thankfully no one was hurt in the heart of uptown. Waymo vs LeMelo I will take a Waymo anyday.
Saw them all over Austin last summer even though I thought one was following me I figured it was doing loops until it had a passenger.
