The A29 Coleraine Ring Road is a very busy road, and the Lodge Road roundabout is the busiest of the lot, taking all traffic from the Belfast direction and dispersing it towards Portrush/Portstewart to the north, Coleraine town itself and Limavady to the west, it is a very busy part of the town. The Ring Road south west of Lodge Road roundabout is already dual-carriagway standard, but the Ring Road to the north east is two lane single-carriageway. This scheme will see the first mile of this part of the Ring Road widened to four lane single-carriageway standard, ie two lanes each way separated by a white line. The map below highlights the extent of the upgrade:

The work will be carried out "within the existing kerb line", ie without needing any extra land. This is possible because in the 1970s the road was built with hard shoulders (see here, for example) which will be removed in order to add the extra lanes. It is also not clear what will happen to the short stretch of dual-carriageway at the Lodge Road end of the stretch.

Updates

7 Dec 2014: According to local news reports, the second lane of this scheme opened to traffic on 1 December. While I have not been in the locality to confirm whether all the works are completed, this likely means that the bulk of work is complete, on schedule. This has been a good example of a scheme to re-allocate existing road space (in this case, hard shoulders) more efficiently in order to bring benefits to road users at relatively low cost and with little disruption. The scheme should also impact positively on the congested Lodge Road roundabout since twice as many vehicles will be able to exit the roundabout north during each traffic light sequence.

5 Sep 2014: It was confirmed in a press release that the contractor, Patrick Bradley Ltd, began work on the ground on or around 2 September with work due to be completed by "the end of November", rather than Christmas as I had anticipated in the previous update. Interestingly, the press release says "Since the initial announcement of this particular scheme, three additional packages of work have been bought forward by Transport NI". The first of these is a new shared cycleway/footway along this stretch of road. The second is that they're now going to signalise the existing priority T-junctions at Asda and at Newmills Road. The third is that they're upgrading the street lights to a more modern, and more easily maintained, type. However the main effect of the works remains that the upgraded road will have two lanes each way between Lodge Road and Ballycastle Road, compared to the current one lane, which will increase capacity and also help flows on the congested Lodge Road roundabout itself by allowing two lanes to exit onto the ring road simultaneously, rather than the current one. The picture below was released with the DRD press release and shows works getting underway on the A29 Coleraine Ring Road along with (from left) Tommy Henry, contractors Patrick Bradley Ltd; Deidre Mackle, DRD Transport NI Divisional Roads Manager; DRD Minister Danny Kennedy; and Bryan Daly, DRD TransportNI Consultancy. (TransportNI is the new name for Roads Service).

16 Aug 2014: The scheme went out to tender in June and the construction contract was awarded three days ago (13 Aug) to Patrick Bradley Ltd. The same date saw publication by the DRD of notice of a temporary speed limit on the relevant section of the Coleraine Ring Road to last for 18 weeks from 25 August 2014. This can only refer to the same scheme, suggesting that work will commence either at the very end of August or early September. The 18 weeks takes up to 29 December, so on this timescale we can anticipate that the work will be complete by around Christmas 2014, at which point road users will welcome the extra capacity on this stretch of the Coleraine Ring Road.

25 Mar 2014: This scheme has sneaked up on us - it was not mentioned in the most recent report to Coleraine Borough Council (November 2013) although it did make a reference to the DRD "considering the possibility of the introduction of a 2-lane exit off the [Lodge Road] roundabout towards Portrush", which this scheme would do. Perhaps DRD are taking advantage of some late funding availability. Currently the scheme is lisited on the DRD web site as due to put out to tender in May 2014. No cost estimate is currently given.