Now it’s time to think about the roads.

After a five-year odyssey ended Tuesday night with Lawrence City Commission’s approval of a new Wal-Mart at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive – and the upcoming Bauer Farms project on the northeast corner of the intersection – northwest Lawrence residents say their streets will need attention.

Wakarusa Drive, built 20 years ago, already handles between 14,000 and 20,000 vehicles a day – a number that’s expected to rise with the new developments.

“It’s a major thoroughfare, and just by the way the streets are laid out in west Lawrence, it’s going to have a lot more traffic,” said Paula Pepin, who lives in the area.

Dena Mezger, the city’s assistant public works director, agreed.

The new developments are “going to add a lot of additional traffic to that, and that pavement just really was never built to handle that kind of traffic load,” she said.

The need for complete reconstruction, she said, is inevitable. But there’s no timetable for rebuilding Wakarusa, and officials say it definitely won’t happen until Wal-Mart and its neighbors start bringing more traffic to the intersection.

“Those are pretty fast-track developments,” Mezger said.

There are other traffic concerns in the area.

Officials have been considering proposals to add traffic signals on Wakarusa at its intersections with Harvard Road and Inverness and Legends drives.

Neighbors are also concerned about the safety of access points to existing shopping centers at Sixth and Wakarusa.

Pepin thinks action on such questions is needed quickly.

“We’d like to see it sooner rather than later,” she said, “for the safety of the people who live around this area.”