widen/broaden

[moonlike]

Hi
Could you help me with the following sentence?
They intend to ............... this road and make it four lanes instead of three. The answer is widen. I wonder if we can use broaden here as well.
Thanks a million.

 

[emsr2d2]

The meaning wouldn't really change but the standard phrase when talking about adding more lanes to a road is "to widen the road". We rarely refer to the breadth of a road, we refer to the width.

It's a very wide road / It's a very narrow road.

In the UK, a lot of money is spent every year on "road-widening schemes".