VDOT

I like VDOT.  I have friends who have worked there in significant positions.  I like most of the VA highways on which I enjoy travel.  I love their mission statement, "Keep Virginia Moving."  What a great, simple, powerful mission statement.  A model for the private sector.  I love the newly resurfaced roads we enjoy this summer.  I love the Richmond and Lynchburg bypasses.  I've even written a business school case about VDOT.

That said, there are a couple of things that boggle my mind.

1.  Richmond to Newport News.  Every weekend throughout the summer the caribou migrations move down I-64 from Richmond to and beyond Williamsburg on their way to the annual relaxing grounds of OBX.  Every weekend the traffic on I-64 is stop and go.  STOP and GO on a freeway.  It's been that way for 30 years since I've been here.  WHY don't we/they widen that section of I-64?  There seems to be the room to do it.  WHY?  WHY? WHY?  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!

2. The Charlottesville Western By-Pass seems to be a joke.  It is not enough of a bypass, won't solve the problem, and will just postpone the needed solution.  First, if 29 is a major artery (it is), we should stop putting stoplights on it.  We are becoming what Lynchburg was until they built their bypass.  I once counted 29 stoplights on my way south through Lynchburg back in the day.  Now there's only four.  Four too many, but still only four. 

*  NO MORE STOP LIGHTS ON US-29!  Unless they are on the  "business" portion and not the by-pass.  Build interchanges.  Yes they are expensive.  But in the long run, you end up having to build them or a more expensive by-pass anyway.  Think ahead! 

*  Build a real by-pass around Charlottesville, not this piddling little thing, the current proposal.  Of course, the problem is that there is no good place to build a by-pass around Charlottesville, the terrain doesn't invite.  The Eastern Option starting farther north below Ruckersville just above Proffitt Road/Airport Road, run east then south parallel to 20 and around the upper reaches of Trevillian Mountain to connect to I-64 means expensive hillside cutting and blasting and a mess on Pantops.  The Western Option means cutting across the upper reaches of the reservoir, between Charlottesville and Ivy and then connecting with I-64 below US-29 creating a short eastern jog to get back on 29.  I favor the Western Option--but environmentalists don't.  Build the Buck Mountain reservoir.  You can't have too much water.  Run the by-pass from north of Proffitt Road, past the airport linking it better, then looping westerly through farmland, over the upper reaches of the reservoir tributaries and then through Ivy to I-64.  I know, "they" have already examined and discarded these two options.  The current proposal however doesn't really do much.  And it runs next to several schools.  Let's put the trucks by the cows and horses and away from the schools... and build a real by-pass not a little coronary graft that won't do much..