The deadline for moving tens of thousands of defense workers around the Washington area came and went Thursday without the cataclysmic traffic problems local officials had been dreading for months. “We didn’t have anything different from business as usual,” said Jody Donaldson, a police spokesman in Alexandria, where workers at the new Mark Center office complex were expected to create a “traffic nightmare.”
The shifting personnel are part of the Pentagon’s Base Closure and Realignment process, which added 19,000 jobs in Maryland. Most of the new personnel were already in place by the deadline at what had been the Bethesda Naval Hospital and is now the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
In Virginia, serious traffic problems were avoided by delaying until next year the move of about 10,000 workers from Arlington to Fort Belvoir and elsewhere, plus about 4,000 of the 6,400 employees who will eventually move to the Mark Center near the intersection of Interstate 395 and Seminary Road.
AAA Mid-Atlantic said the worst of the problems the moves are expected to create are still to come because many of the road improvements needed to accommodate the new commuters have yet to be made.
“You’re talking about 35,000 military service personnel being redeployed and relocated to new sites in the immediate future,” said AAA spokesman John Townsend. “And in another three years, you can expect an additional 20,000 people.”
In Fairfax County, improvements along an already heavily congested Route 1 near Fort Belvoir won’t be done until 2012.
Maryland officials are still trying to find funding for traffic improvements around the expanded medical complex in Bethesda.
And in Alexandria, a ramp connecting I-395 with Seminary Road near the Mark Center won’t be finished until 2015 at the earliest because federal officials must first complete an environmental review.
“Between the DoD and Virginia, we have $100 million worth of improvements that are awaiting approval and have not been able to get started,” Virginia Secretary of Transportation Sean Connaughton told The Washington Examiner earlier.
