DIRT IS FLYING up along the Capitol Beltway for the Interstate 495 High Occupancy Toll lanes project. If you drive in this area, you've seen the substantial changes as workers build two extra traffic lanes along the outer edges of the Beltway from the Springfield Interchange to just beyond the Dulles Toll Road.
I rarely write about lane closures and traffic disruptions for this project, because it's a little too far north of our readership area. But if you work and travel along the Beltway, you may consider signing up to receive traffic updates from VDOT. Go to vamegaprojects.com, and click on "Sign up for Alerts and Updates." VDOT lets you choose which projects you want to receive alerts about, including a bi-weekly newsletter that sums up progress on all big projects in Northern Virginia.
Dear Kelly: Can something be done with the timing of the light at the Falmouth intersection of U.S. 1 and U.S. 17 on Sunday afternoons through the summer? It's only April, and the backup was already there yesterday afternoon.
Traffic backs up northbound all the way into Fredericksburg sometimes as far back as the University of Mary Washington while there is little traffic waiting at the light in the other three directions. This also increases the traffic in downtown Fredericksburg as many locals cut through downtown instead of enduring the long wait on U.S. 1.
--Larry Gross, Spotsylvania
Great question--I think this is what everyone asks themselves as they sit on the Falmouth Bridge every June, July and August.
VDOT sent a crew to inspect the traffic signal at U.S. 1, Butler and Warrenton roads in Stafford to ensure it was working correctly. It decided it was working properly, and VDOT does not plan to lengthen the "green" time for U.S. 1 northbound traffic on Sundays afternoons and evenings.
VDOT has definitely seen the backup you describe. That volume is taken into account when it sets signal timings, said Tina Bundy, VDOT spokeswoman.
A few forces combine to make the Sunday afternoon backup so terrible. First, there is the design of the intersection. Unlike more modern intersections, this spot is narrow and unusually shaped, so only one side can proceed straight at a time, dragging out the wait.
Also, this intersection
This disrupts the normal signal cycle, which can effectively send your side of the intersection to the back of the line. No doubt this is frustrating when you are the one stuck on the bridge, but it is a small price to pay for someone's life being saved by getting to the hospital in time. To show you how often this happens, from April 1 to April 9 there were 91 pre-emptions at the Falmouth intersection, according to VDOT. That averages out to 13 signal disruptions a day.
Someday that will change.
Improvements are planned at the Falmouth intersection, and they are funded for construction. There is $21 million to build some sort of an interchange at the intersection, on a scale similar to the U.S. 1/State Route 3 interchange in Fredericksburg--although the design will be different. Preliminary designs indicate traffic on Warrenton Road/Butler Road would be free-flowing on a raised overpass, while traffic signals would control traffic on U.S. 1. Traffic between U.S. 1 and Warrenton/Butler would flow on and off the roads by interchange ramps.
That solution could be years away. The $21 million is spread out over the state's six year transportation budget, from 2009 to 2014.
For now, VDOT coordinates this Falmouth signal as much as possible with the city of Fredericksburg, which maintains the traffic signals on the other side of the bridge, Bundy said.
She said the weekend U.S. 1 backups are caused by problems on I-95, not the traffic signals.
Whenever traffic is slow on 95, especially on Sunday nights, "they jump on Route 1. Then all that traffic is in the city," Bundy said.
That does push additional traffic into downtown Fredericksburg. I know, because I've personally added to it, crossing the Chatham Bridge and taking a meandering tour of Stafford's secondary roads to pop out on U.S. 1 somewhere north of Falmouth.
The true root of this mess is a lack of what people in the transportation business call "redundancy." That's a fancy way of saying we need multiple routes to arrive at our destinations. Right now we share our main streets, U.S. 1 and I-95, with the rest of the East Coast. It's not working. Every summer weekend I feel like I live in a beach town where the population swells for three months of the year, only there is no consolation prize of actually living at the beach. (Falmouth Beach doesn't count).
People have a lot of ideas to improve our situation--check out the George Washington Regional Commission's 2035 long-range transportation plan at gwre gion.org--but we're a few billion short of paying for it. That's really where the conversation should be. This column is about the smaller things in transportation--the signs, the signals, the turn lanes--but sometimes tinkering with things along the edges doesn't help.
Perhaps lengthening the "green" signal time would clear out the backup on U.S. 1, but odds are good more vehicles would just come along to replace the ones that cycled through--drivers like me, who would return to U.S. 1 now that it's faster.
Kelly Hannon is The Free Lance-Star's transportation reporter. If you have questions, send them to Getting There, c/o The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; or you may fill out the Getting There form on the Web