The new year is not starting off great for folks who cheered the end of Interstate 45 construction north of Conroe, but in a few years the hop to Huntsville will be much quicker.

Transportation officials in Austin on Wednesday opened bids on the next phase of widening I-45 from northern Montgomery County to Vick Spring Road just south of Huntsville – a distance of 6.5 miles -to three lanes in each direction. Webber LLC, familiar to Houston area drivers as one of the companies widening U.S. 290, was the apparent low bidder at $128.2 million.

The work will make the freeway three lanes in each direction from where it constricts to two lanes north of Conroe. Interchanges along the route also will be rebuilt, said Bobby Colwell, spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation for the Bryan District, which includes Walker County.

“New access ramps will be constructed and some partial addition of frontage roads will be included,” Colwell wrote in a Dec. 6 email, shortly before opening of the bid was delayed by a technical error.

Officials have set a preliminary estimate that the work will take 1,368 days, which could change as work proceeds. If the estimate holds, that’s more than six years of work on bridges and culverts and adding the lanes.

Growth in Montgomery County and Huntsville has made the area a common bottleneck, especially for Houston-and-Dallas-bound interstate travel. From the Montgomery County line to Huntsville, I-45 typically carries 48,000 vehicles per day, according to 2015 traffic counts by TxDOT.