Local residents have questions about what will happen on Route 60 now that state Sen. Catharine Young, R-Olean, has helped secure funding to expand parts of the road into four-lane highway.

Where will the land come from for the expansion? Will it make it harder for people who live on Route 60 to get in and out of their driveways? Will adding passing lanes make the road even more dangerous because more people are speeding?

They are all good questions that don’t have answers yet. The New York State Department of Transportation will manage the project from preliminary designing and bidding to construction. Land and right-of-way acquisitions will likely be needed in order to add passing lanes. A study by the DOT will determine where passing lanes would be added. Public meetings would also be held to inform the public, and any kind of impact to residences nearby would be minimized by the DOT, according to George Spanos, county public facilities director. Actual construction isn’t expected until 2019 or 2020.

That means area residents have a couple of years to fashion Route 60 into the road it needs both to keep people safe during their daily travels and to efficiently move traffic between the county’s two biggest population centers. We hope people are as engaged in this planning process as they have been in discussions of a now-discarded roundabout on Route 60 in Dunkirk.