Community leaders are hoping to convince the Executive Council and Gov. John Lynch to give widening Route 101 another look for inclusion on the 2010 Ten Year Transportation Improvement Plan.

“You’ve got a 1950s road trying to serve 2010 and beyond,” Town Councilor Bill Dermody said Monday, when he sat down with other leaders from the town to plan a strategy for getting the project noticed again.

Widening Route 101 from Constitution Drive to Wallace Road from one lane in each direction to four has been on the radar of the town and the state for years, Planning Board Chairman Paul Golderg said. It was on the master plan in 2004 and 2006, he said, before being knocked off in 2008.

At that time, in his letter to the legislature introducing the plan, Lynch mentioned the project as one of importance for the future.

“I recognize that communities are concerned that projects not in the current 10-year-plan will be forgotten. That is not the case, and I have asked the Department of Transportation to begin developing a list of projects, such as Exit 4A in Derry, Route 101 in Bedford, the Dover side of the Little Bay Bridge project and the remainder of the I-93 expansion,” Lynch wrote in 2008.

But Bedford officials are feeling forgotten. The project was left off this year’s 10-year plan, despite being ranked the top project left off the 2008 plan by the DOT, and the most important project in southern New Hampshire by the Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission.

“What happened since then?” Goldberg asked. “Who knows.”

The road sees traffic snarls daily in the morning and in the afternoon, and it is the only east-to-west highway in the southern part of the state, meaning other towns, other commuters and other business people -- not just those in Bedford – have a stake in the project, Dermody said.

“They’re all bottlenecked right here in Bedford, so the Department of Transportation isn’t being asked to do something just on behalf of Bedford,” he said.

Executive Councilor Raymond J. Wieczorek said he supported getting the project back on the plan.

“Nobody has to tell me how bad that road is, because I’ve been on that road,” he said. Wieczorek said the cuts were made in 2008 because the plan had become unwieldy and expensive.

“That thing became instead of a 10-year plan, a 30-year plan,” he said. “They had to take out about two-thirds of the projects that were in there.”

But now, Wieczorek said, bids for state projects are coming in low and construction is cheaper than it has been in the past, making it a good time to get the Bedford project back on the agenda.

“Road contracts, bridge repairs, paving, these bids that the coming in are for better than our estimates,” he said. He said in the past there was talk of cutting back to three lanes to save money, but said he would not support that.

“With four lanes, you’re on your way to obsolescence. With three, it’s obsolete before you even start,” he said. After all of the governor’s GACIT committee meetings have been held across the state, the Executive Council will hold a public meeting in Concord on Wednesday, Nov. 18.

Wieczorek said he hopes to get the Bedford project back into the plan before it is submitted to the governor, who will then submit it to the legislature. “I’d like to talk to the governor, if it’s in there that it stays in the plan, and if it’s not in there, that it gets in the plan,” he said.

In Bedford, the road’s problems have caused safety and economic concerns for business owners along the road and have turned others off from developing land there. “If the guy figures his main highway here is a parking lot, he can’t be too enthused,” Wieczorek said.

Meanwhile, as people realize that Route 101 is not a quick ride, traffic has been growing on secondary roads, Goldberg said.

“You’re going to find people getting a lot more creative,” he said.

The stretch of road includes at least one failed intersection, Dermody said, at Meetinghouse Road, and it is difficult to cross the route by car and nearly impossibly by foot. “That road, in more ways than one, does split the community,” he said.

The public can send comments to Bill Cass at the DOT before Nov. 13 at 7 Hazen Drive, P.O. Box 483, Concord, NH 03301-0483, or send e-mail to bvass@dot.state.nh.us.