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Cost: $134 million

What it's for: A long list of road improvements and streetscape projects.

Pros: These bonds would address overdue fixes for problem roads and intersections throughout the city.

Cons: These bonds are easily the costliest on the Nov. 4 ballot, comprising more than half of the total $205 million package.

Out take: Anyone who has waited -- and waited -- in snarled traffic on Horse Pen Creek Road knows how desperately that tortured strip needs relief. Yesterday.

The transportation bonds include $26 million for adding lanes and sidewalks to the infamous stretch from New Garden Road to Battleground Avenue.

Bond money also would go to a wide variety of street improvements throughout the city, some as parts of larger revitalization efforts. From even a partial list of planned improvements -- North Elm Street, Alamance Church Road, Florida Street Extension, Summit Avenue -- it's easy to see the broad impact of these projects.

For example, the package includes streetscaping for High Point Road, which offers a less-than-dazzling first impression to out-of-town visitors. The changes would include wider sidewalks and "bulbouts," in which sidewalks jut out at intersections to decrease distances needed to cross the street. The end result, says Adam Fischer, the city's acting transportation director, is "a nicer connection between the Four Seasons mall/Sheraton hotel and the coliseum."

Also included in the bond package are bridge repairs, intersection upgrades, greenways and sidewalks in a city where 600 miles of roads still lack sidewalks.

Among the greenway projects is $7 million in partial finding for the planned 4.8-mile Downtown Greenway, which, when completed, would provide a landscaped path for walkers, bicyclists and joggers that circles the center city and connects neighborhoods.

As for the total package, a safe and efficient transportation network, for vehicles and for people, is essential to commerce and quality of life.