As many as 130,000 vehicles crowd onto Interstate 66 inside the Beltway daily, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation. The resulting behemoth traffic jams are legendary even for motorists accustomed to the nation’s worst congestion. But there are still no plans — or funds — to widen it.
Instead, local, state and federal officials are spending $6.5 billion on the Dulles Rail project, which, according to a 2010 Federal Transit Administration press release, “is projected to serve 85,700 daily riders by 2030, including an estimated 10,000 new daily transit riders.”
Stuck on I-66 again and want to vent? Call or tweet Arlington Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman. He’s one of the most vocal opponents of widening I-66 inside the Beltway, even though this one 10-mile stretch contains five of Virginia’s 14 worst chokepoints.
You don’t have to be a traffic engineer to know that backups are inevitable when six lanes suddenly bottleneck into four just as I-66 crosses the Beltway. Yet thanks to Zimmerman and his pals, the obvious solution continues to elude the commonwealth.
They even fought a minor attempt to ease congestion: a $10.2 million “spot improvement” connecting the westbound acceleration and deceleration lanes between Fairfax Drive and Sycamore Street, which will finally be completed early next month.
In February 2009, members of the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board — including Zimmerman, Fairfax County Supervisors Linda Smyth and Catherine Hudgins, and Falls Church Council Member David Snyder — voted to remove such minor upgrades from the region’s six-year plan.
At the time, the Arlington Coalition for Sensible Transportation complained that VDOT’s proposal was “merely a thinly disguised scheme to shoehorn three large segments of a third westbound I-66 travel lane.”
If only. Unfortunately, VDOT had no such stealth agenda even though a third travel lane (in both directions) is exactly what’s needed on I-66.
Two additional spot improvements to extend westbound acceleration lanes from Washington Boulevard to the Dulles Access Road and Lee Highway/Spout Run to Glebe Road costing $49.6 million are unfunded and not even on VDOT’s construction schedule, let alone two more lanes.
Arlington officials point to the 1977 Record of Decision signed by then U.S. Transportation Secretary William Coleman that established the current I-66 configuration as some sort of irreversible decision that can never be revisited, no matter what.
This is nonsense. Two more lanes can be added for a tiny fraction of what it will cost to provide mass transit for 10,000 new Metro riders. And a 2009 survey by the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance found that 78 percent of local residents support expanding I-66 if it can be done inside the current sound walls.
There’s enough room, just not enough political will.
I-66 was originally planned to extend into a six-lane tunnel beneath K Street in the District, but intense local opposition to any and all highway construction in 1977 resulted in the mass cancellation of the freeway network that was designed to handle Washington’s current population.
Northern Virginia commuters are not only living with the results of past bad decisions, but current ones as well. Zimmerman and his regional colleagues on the transportation planning board won’t approve any expenditure of federal highway funds on I-66 until completion of a “multi-modal” study, which will not even consider adding new lanes.
Meanwhile, the federal government — which meddles in every aspect of our personal lives, including what we eat and whether or not we buy health insurance — is apparently totally impotent when it comes to the urgent and necessary expansion of a major evacuation route leading directly out of the nation’s capital.
This whole scenario is beyond short-sighted and incompetent. This is insane.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
