Virginia officials and a private company have arrived at a deal on how to finance new High-Occupancy/Toll lanes along Interstate 95, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Tuesday.
Fluor-Transurban will pay $843 million, and the state will fund $97 million initially to build the HOT lanes along 29 miles of the highway between Edsall Road in Fairfax County and Garrisonville Road in Stafford County. However, the state also said it plans to kick in $200 million more to expand bus service and build more than 3,000 new park-and-ride spaces.
“This is part of our bigger effort in the McDonnell administration to figure out how we can get the most of what we already have, particularly in places like Northern Virginia,” Virginia Secretary of Transportation Sean Connaughton said.
The toll lanes, similar to those being built on the Capital Beltway/Interstate 495, will be restricted to vehicles with multiple passengers who would travel for free or motorists willing to pay to use the less congested lanes. All other vehicles will be relegated to the regular lanes.
Officials will adjust tolls based on the amount of traffic in the lanes, which Fluor-Transurban guarantees will be kept moving at 55 miles per hour, using real-time tolling technology.
But that doesn’t ease the fears of some who worried that the carpool lanes would become too crowded.
“It’s going to introduce all these cars on the roadway,” said David LeBlanc, who “slugs” from Woodbridge to Crystal City and runs the website slug-lines.com. “Slugs” form insta-carpools and ride the HOV lanes along I-95. “If you lose that times savings, you’re going to lose one of the key pieces of slugging.”
But Virginia officials said not to worry.
“We believe this will make commuting times faster and more predictable for commuters,” VDOT Commissioner Gregory Whirley said.
In exchange for the construction of the toll lanes, expected to be finished in 2015, and maintenance of the lanes for 73 years, Fluor-Transurban would get to keep between 60-95 percent of the profit from the tolls, depending on how much revenue is raked in.
The project has been planned for years but got hung up in 2009 when the state pulled back from the plan and Arlington officials filed a lawsuit against it. The project was then scaled back earlier this year.
Critics have said the state rushed into a public-private partnership without studying other options.
“We need to have all the facts on the table before the state commits to this particular approach,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.
State officials said they expect to sign a final contract and begin construction in summer 201
