Gastonia is generally not as heavy as traffic on southbound 321 north of I-85, where it may back up for a couple of miles as drivers wait to turn onto I-85. The road becomes a freeway at C. Grier Beam Boulevard in Gastonia, just south of NC 275/NC 279. It remains a freeway until just north of its junction with US 70 in Hickory. The freeway bypasses a number of cities that the old US 321 route once passed through. Today, US 321 Business follows the original route, which serves Maiden, Newton, and Conover, but the freeway is a more direct route to the mountains, and the business route is generally used by local traffic only. Traffic is usually heavy between Hickory and Lenoir. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) has a long-term plan to widen the road to six lanes, which is expected to begin after 2020. North of Lenoir, US 321 is a four-lane divided highway, continuing up the steep escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Until early 2018, the road was a narrow two-lane highway from near Patterson through Blowing Rock. Work on this area continued for much of the first two decades of the 21st century. The widening of US 321 through Blowing Rock was and continues to be seen as a controversial project. Many residents of the town felt that a four-lane highway would destroy the character of the small town, and they proposed several bypass alternatives. NCDOT selected the widening as its preferred alternative, but added several features such as underground utilities, sidewalks, landscaping, and rock walls to make the widening more palatable to the residents opposed to it. These features were not present on the two-lane highway that was replaced. The final portion of the widening project, at the steepest part of the road just south of Blowing Rock, began in 2012 and was completed in 2018. Some landscaping work remains which will commence in Fall 2018 as its own project, constructed separately for beautification of the route through town. North of Blowing Rock, US 321 is already a highway of four lanes up to King Street in Boone; thus, US 321 is a four-lane highway from the South Carolina state line to downtown Boone. Currently, US 321 meets US 421 at King Street and overlaps it over King Street to leave town to the west. NCDOT project R-2615 is proposed to