Honestly, I'm really not looking forward to driving locally for the next — oh, I don't know — let's say 10 years or so.

If you haven't noticed, our roadways have gotten more and more crowded in recent years, thanks in part to the 11 million tourists we draw annually, and in part thanks to steadily growing populations in outlying areas that mean more commuters plying the highways.

And now, the commute is about to get really ugly, at least for me. As a Fletcher resident who works in downtown Asheville, I'm pretty much a daily driver of Interstate 26 and have been for 21 years.

During the best of times, it's a crowded thoroughfare, carrying 84,000 vehicles a day near I-40 and about 82,000 vehicles a day in southern Buncombe County. The number drops to 67,000 in Henderson County, but it's still prone to congestion.

During the worst of times, i.e. the morning and afternoon commutes during leaf season, it's like "Mad Max" meets "Talladega Nights," but with less humor — cars flipping and bursting into flames, angry drivers wielding blunderbusses, tractor-trailers swerving through traffic with heavy metal guitarists as hood ornaments.

Perhaps I exaggerate a tad, but not by much.

And now that the North Carolina DOT is going to widen the road all the way from the Brevard Road interchange in Buncombe County down to Four Seasons Boulevard (U.S. 64 in Henderson), an 18-mile stretch, we're really going to have some fun. The past couple of years might soon seem like the halcyon driving days of yore, when your worst nightmare was the Conestoga wagon in front of you breaking an axle, or maybe a mule going flat.

Seriously, this $534 million project is going to last from now to April 2024, and that's if the contractors don't run into problems.

It's a honker of a project. The widening will increase I-26 from four lanes to eight lanes from Brevard Road to the Fletcher/Mountain Home interchange at U.S. 25, and then from four lanes to six down to Four Seasons Boulevard.

And may I remind you of how smoothly other recent projects along I-26 have gone, including the Pond Road bridge replacements, which took a year longer than it was supposed to? It started in 2012 and wrapped up in 2017, delayed in part by a contractor who just walked off the job.

The traffic shift through the work zone was also notorious for wrecks. The 1.8 mile stretch of work zone generated 301 wrecks over five years, including five fatalities.

More:Long-delayed I-26 bridge project nears completion

More: Answer Man: I-26 bridge work over Pond Road halted?

More: Answer Man: 301 wrecks at I-26 work site at Pond Road?

As I reported in a May 2016 Answer Man column, the most common type of wreck by far was rear-end accidents, totaling 133, compared to 63 for running off the road and hitting a fixed object and 65 for sideswipe wrecks.

That work zone's zig-zag pattern was particularly tricky, but work zones wrecks are all too common, both in North Carolina and nationwide. I'll try not to bore you with stats, but please digest a few from a Federal Highway Administration publication updated in April:

• During the past five years in work zone crashes more than 4,400 people died, with 85% of those being the driver or passenger, and 200,000 people were injured.

• Drivers are the most frequent fatality in work zone crashes, and most work zone fatalities involve working-age adults

• Rear-end crashes — running into the rear of a slowing or stopping vehicle — are the most common type of work zone crash.

• Fatal work zone crashes occur most often in summer and fall, and the majority of fatal work zone crashes occurred on roads with speed limits greater than 50 mph.

The North Carolina DOT stats are equally cheery. One quick sample gets the message across:

• From 2012-2018, there were more than 35,600 crashes and 173 deaths in work zones across North Carolina. In 2018, alone, 32 people died.

This I-26 widening project will involve jersey barriers, narrowed lanes and traffic shifts, many of the same elements of the Pond Road project and the Brevard Road interchange work now going on, so I'm fully expecting more wrecks. This project differs in one regard, though — on the inside lanes in many places, jersey barriers will not be used, so you'll continue to drive by the guard rails or median.

So, what to do? First of all, for the love of uncrumpled sheet metal, please, please, please pay attention!

"For the next four years, what we would ask of the citizens who use this (highway) every day, and the citizens who travel through our area — whether it be for commerce or recreation — is that they pay attention, that they put away their cellular devices and (avoid) those distractions in their vehicle," said Brian Burch, the N.C. DOT's division engineer for Division 14, which includes Henderson County. "Realize the lanes are going to be narrowed. There’s going to be barrels out there. There’s going to be shifts in traffic, so each day things may change, and they need to be mindful of that as they travel through here.”

The speed limit through the entire work zone will be 55 mph, and that's a key element here. I can tell you from personal experience in the current work zone that a lot of folks either go sailing through these tricky zones at 70 mph, or they slow down to a 45 mph crawl.

Both are bad ideas.

"I don't think we have have speed data breakouts, but I can tell you that keeping up with traffic is just as important as not going too fast," said Nathan Moneyham, the N.C. DOT's assistant construction engineer for Division 13, which includes Buncombe County. "We really want to get that message out that people have got to follow that speed limit."

I'm also personally astounded at how many drivers I see texting or apparently otherwise reading their phones while in the current I-26 work zone. This summer I saw a young guy driving a pest control truck just texting away at about 50 mph as he went through the work zone, traffic backing up behind him.

Also, please don't tailgate. It's annoying, and really dangerous.

The federal and state governmental sites offer a few other tips to help minimize incidents, including the ones mentioned above, as well as suggestions to keep your headlights on, watch carefully for brake lights ahead of you indicating slowdowns, and change lanes safely and only where the pavement markings indicate it's OK.

Here's a key suggestion: "Be patient." That's going to be a tough one for all of us.

The highway folks also recommend taking an alternate route to avoid the backups, but let's face it: we don't have great choices here anymore. Hendersonville Road (U.S. 25) is always backed up, Sweeten Creek (25A) isn't much better and Brevard Road is two lanes most of the way and gets huge backups itself.

To help keep traffic moving on I-26, the DOT has already contracted with wrecker companies to remove damaged vehicles quickly.

The DOT also will employ "incident management investigation areas" to help with more minor wrecks. These will eventually be placed along the length of the project, at intervals of about a mile-1.5 miles.

"In sections that have safety barriers, we will install a wide shoulder for about a thousand feet, and there will be signs that say, 'Emergency pull off 1,000 feet ahead,'" Moneyham said.

The idea is, if you have a minor incident, "Don’t stop in the middle of road," Moneyham said. "Stop at one of those for safety."

The DOT also will eventually have cameras monitoring the length of the project, with local DOT workers monitoring them from 6 a.m.-10 p.m. and then workers from the DOT in Raleigh overnight. That will help get wreckers on site quickly, and Moneyham noted that the companies have incentives in their contracts to arrive on site within 20 minutes.

As Moneyham says, the goal is to have zero accidents, zero deaths, over the course of the work.

But everyone knows wrecks are inevitable.

"The only thing I might add for people is to stress that they’re paying attention," Moneyham said. "This is going to be a long process. Just make people aware of that. Don’t get complacent."

Let the fun begin!

This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at 828-232-5847 or jboyle@citizentimes.com.