Traffic relief may be just around the next bend - that one out on the horizon.

Engineers are about to make the first moves toward widening Interstate 215 between Nuevo Road in Perris and the Interstate 15 junction.

The stretch of highway, which sometimes resembles a two-lane, 20-mile parking lot, is Southwest County's only major thoroughfare expected to share nearly $200 million in funding that a state agency designated for highway expansions in Riverside County.

Nearly $40 million of that is expected to help widen I-215 to six lanes. A regional transportation agency agreed Wednesday to spend $13 million for preliminary engineering and environmental work along the highway.

The work by Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan, a nationwide firm with offices in San Diego and Riverside, is expected to include surveying, estimating construction costs and assessing environmental factors such as potential erosion, said John Standiford, a spokesman for the Riverside County Transportation Commission. The work will pave the way for actual construction to begin in 2010 and wrap up in 2012, Standiford said.

Five years seems like an awfully long time, said Jean Bennett, a Sun City resident who works in San Diego's Carmel Valley area.

"Oh, my God," Bennett said. "The traffic on 215 is becoming a nightmare, and it's getting worse almost daily."

Bennett, who processes documents for a law firm, said her work hours, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., allow her to avoid the worst of the freeway traffic, which occurs around 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. But the occasional days when she has to arrive by 9:30 make for stress, she said. On one recent day, Bennett said, her 50-mile commute took nearly 2 1/2 hours.

The borrowing approved by California voters in November included some $4.5 billion for expansions and upgrades of highways. The California Transportation Commission later assigned $195 million of that to Riverside County, where transportation officials had fingered I-215 and Highway 91 as top priorities.

The local agency plans to apply the money to car-pool lanes in the city of Riverside and an extended merge lane on an eastbound section of Highway 91 at the Orange County line. Local commuters could also benefit from the $71 million the state commission designated for an extension of the new eastbound lane on the Orange County side and from the $350 million it approved for express lanes on I-15 in central San Diego County.

The local transportation agency has also put a priority on adding a fourth lane to each side of I-215 between Perris and Riverside after it widens the narrower stretch between Temecula and Perris.

At many points, Standiford said, the new lanes on the southern section could be extended inward from the inside edges of the highway into what is now a wide median. At other points, the new lanes could be added on the outside, he said. Recommending exactly where to put the new lanes is part of the engineering firm's contract.

Standiford said that, while the three years from now until construction begins may seem a long time, it is actually shorter than in a typical case where government agencies have to acquire land and rights-of-way, thanks in part to the wide median the state has already acquired.

"We hope to speed this as quickly as we can," Standiford said.

- Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.