The Road Development Authority says steps will be taken to improve all connecting roads leading to expressway entrances and exits, in an effort to reduce congestion at the interchanges.
Director General Anuradha Hettiarachchi told NewsFirst that the work is aimed at easing traffic on those approach roads.
Reconstruction has also now begun on all major roads that have not been repaired in the past 10 years, the Director General said.
The bottleneck the plan targets
Sri Lanka’s expressway network has been extended steadily while the ordinary roads feeding it have not kept pace. The result is that traffic moves at expressway speed until it reaches an interchange, then meets a local road built for far less volume — the point at which queues form.
The pressure is measurable. Expressway traffic has been setting records at holidays, with Rs. 355 million in tolls collected over a single five-day weekend in August and congestion reported across the network on those days.
Where it sits against the wider programme
The announcement follows the President’s instruction in August to resume road projects halted since 2022, and comes as the authority works through a build programme that includes the Potuhera–Rambukkana section due to open by March 2027 and the restarted Ruwanpura Expressway.
The RDA is doing this against a strained balance sheet. Cabinet approved Rs. 1.2 billion for an expressway maintenance fleet in August, and the authority has this year faced questions over its prequalification process after bids came in well over estimate.
Hettiarachchi did not give a cost, a list of the interchanges to be treated, or a timeline for completion, and no other newsroom had reported the remarks at the time of writing.
