Route:	Begins where Blue Ridge Road splits off to head northeast toward Crabtree Valley Mall. Ends at US 70 (Glenwood Ave), where it becomes West Millbrook Road.
Attractions:	Lots of really expensive houses in Olde Raleigh -- look to the east between Crabtree Creek and Ebenezer Church Rd. Also, Duraleigh isn't far from Rex Hospital, though it's actually on the side of Blue Ridge -- but the affiliated doctors' offices spread as far north as Edwards Mill Road.
Major Intersections: (south to north)	Not many, for a major road...Blue Ridge, Edwards Mill, and US 70 are about all there are.
Notes:	This road probably wouldn't make it onto the list of major roads (it's fairly boring, really) if not for a major controversy that pitted environmental activists against city and state government for more than a decade. The "Duraleigh Connector" was designed to serve as a major conduit to take traffic bound from northwest Raleigh to RTP and Cary off the Beltline -- which, even in the early '70s, was a traffic mess at rush hour -- and onto what was originally planned to be a 4-lane limited access spur of I-40. Umstead State Park sits in the middle of land that would normally contain two or three connector routes between Glenwood Ave. and I-40; the presence of the park (and NC State's Schenck Forest right next door) limited travel between the two key routes to either the Beltline or two-lane roads near the airport. Neither option was designed to handle the traffic it was carrying, and the Duraleigh Connector was the city's attempt to mitigate the traffic nightmare that occurred twice daily. Everything was moving along well -- from the first time the connector was placed on the map in 1971 (even before I-40 around the south side of Raleigh was completed) the road had the support of city, county, and state governments, and even officials of the state park had an interest in seeing the road built. A master plan for the park, released in 1974, showed a proposed entrance to the park off the proposed Duraleigh connector1. But in the time it took city and state (the state was involved since Duraleigh was, and is, a state highway) officials to figure out exactly where the road was to go, up popped a group calling itself the Umstead Coalition. The group started making inroads at City Council and County Commission meetings in late 1990, and ultimately convinced Umstead Park officials to scrap their plans for an eastern entrance to the park. Eventually the Coalition's work paid off, as the Wake County commissioners voted in April 1991 against transferring part of the park to state control in order to build the road2. So by now the Umstead Coalition claimed victory...but then four years later the Connector rose from the ashes, and this time had steam -- in a reversal of what happened four years earlier, the County Commission gave their approval to the plan to build the road. This meant that once again the city, county, and state were united in approval of the road. But the Umstead Coalition never gave up. Still intent on scrapping the Connector, they instead lobbied for an extension of Edwards Mill Rd. south to Wade Ave., which was eventually built using city money, and a widening of Duraleigh itself. When they got nowhere with the local governments, they went to the state, asking then-Gov. Jim Hunt in April 1996 to do what he could to halt the construction of the road3. At that point the avalanche started...first an influential state senator (who was uncovered as having interests in a land deal tied to the connector4) was defeated in the 1996 Democratic primary. Then in November, NC State -- which had originally championed the connector as a way to get traffic to and from Carter-Finley Stadium quicker -- came out publicly against its construction. The final nail in the connector's coffin came on December 6, 1996 when Gov. Hunt halted state funding to the project. Without the state's blessing, the road would never be built, as neither the city nor the county on their own could afford to do it themselves. The road didn't officially die, though, until October of 2002. The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization had left the road on Raleigh's planning map as a technicality -- anytime a major artery was removed from the planning map, federal law required CAMPO to recalculate the effects of air pollution caused by the road's construction5. It wasn't until early 2002 that the air pollution maps were redesigned to reflect the deletion of the connector, so it lived on as a true ghost road for six years after its demise. Traces of what would have been an interchange at I-40 and Wade Ave. are found in today's interchange -- there is still a small clearing to the left on the ramp from westbound Wade to eastbound 40, and the Trenton Rd. bridge at the east end of the interchange is designed to cross a ramp that was never built. Today, Duraleigh is a 4-lane divided or 5-lane undivided road for its entire length, as proposed in the alternative offered by the Umstead Coalition; the connector would have tied into the existing road just south of the Crabtree Creek bridges. The Edwards Mill extension, which was completed in late 2002, does not carry much traffic except on game days at Carter-Finley or the RBC Center. Ultimately, a lot of the traffic that would have taken the Duraleigh Connector is instead taking I-540 today, which is better engineered than the connector was ever planned to be, so the absence of the connector isn't as much of a traffic generator elsewhere than it was originally thought to be.

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