Two more years of road work lies ahead for motorists using 10 miles of Highway 99 from the 120 Bypass in Manteca to Arch Road in Stockton.

But when it is finished in the fall of 2015 Manteca will have a new inviting “front door” for southbound Highway 99 traffic.

Work on the new Lathrop Road interchange is 30 percent finished.

When completed, it will replace a narrow 1955-era two-lane bridge with an overpass accommodating four lanes, bike lanes, and sidewalks.

It will have a brick-style façade on the side of the bridge as well as Tidewater-style street lights to dovetail into similar street lights throughout Manteca. It also will have landscaping that ultimately will be maintained by the City of Manteca.

The work also will change driving patterns.

North Main Street will no longer have a direct exit or entrance to Highway 99. Instead traffic coming from Stockton will exit just north of the interchange and then go into North Main at an intersection with Lathrop Road that will be controlled by traffic signals. North Main traffic heading north will access the freeway by going over the bridge. A one-lane flyover that took the same traffic onto Highway 99 was removed in July.

Frontage Road has been curved farther to the west where it is now goes directly into Crestwood Avenue    after intersecting with Lathrop Road.

The French Camp Road interchange improvements are about 40 percent complete. The southbound on ramp has been closed. Southbound freeway traffic has been shifted to the center median as work continues on the bridge deck.

The project will close the Frontage Road on both sides of Little Johns Creek and covert them into cul-de-sacs.

The $159 million project includes widening Highway 99 from four lanes to six lanes from the 120 Bypass to Arch Road. When the project is completed as well as a second concurrent Highway 99 undertaking between Arch Road and the Cross-Town Freeway, Highway 99 will be six lanes from Lodi to a point south of Turlock.

By the time work is completed on various projects in 2016, the Highway 99 corridor through Manteca will be transformed from a bleak 1950s era freeway to arguably the nicest landscaped stretch of the freeway between Red Bluff and Bakersfield. It will also include new sound walls to replace those in various stages of decay.

A separate project will landscape much of the corridor through Manteca.