A widely hailed project to connect the missing leg of the Fairfax County Parkway through Fort Belvoir lacks funding to finish key interchanges at each end of the two-mile stretch, prompting alarm that traffic will be funneled into neighborhoods or onto already congested roads.
Virginia transportation officials in February signed an agreement to complete the parkway through Belvoir’s Engineer Proving Ground, following more than a year of wrangling with the Army over the project’s details. Construction is slated to begin late this year.
The parkway is considered one of the most critical transportation links needed to prepare for 19,000 new workers comingto the base by 2011 as part of Base Realignment and Closure process. Fairfax County supervisors worry, however, that the piecemeal pace of construction will route traffic into unwanted places.
The initial two phases would build the four- and six-lane road as well as ramps in the middle of the proving ground. Left incomplete are the subsequent two phases that would improve interchanges at Rolling Road and the Franconia-Springfield Parkway at the western end, and building ramps at Boudinot Drive at the eastern end.
Three members of the Board of Supervisors raised their concerns at Monday’s board meeting.
“The impending traffic will be exceptionally and frustratingly exacerbated by the tangle of access points and ramps created by the construction of only phase 1 and 2 of the parkway,” Supervisors Pat Herrity and Jeff McKay said in a joint statement that advocated measures to cut traffic in adjacent communities.
McKay, Herrity and Mount Vernon District Supervisor Gerald Hyland also decried the lack of the $17 million worth of interchange improvements at Boudinot Drive, without which vehicles leaving the Fullerton Industrial Park are deprived of direct access to the Fairfax County Parkway and Interstate 95 north, and instead pushed onto nearby congested roads. The supervisors urged state and federal highway officials to find a way to immediately fund a $5 million ramp.
“This is not a perfect solution, but the current situation is completely unacceptable,” they said.
