Fairfax residents and officials are worried that a planning flaw related to the Fairfax County Parkway extension will cause traffic bottlenecks and nightmarish delays for local drivers.
The Virginia Department of Transportation is building a $117 million project to fill in a two-mile gap in the parkway, which breaks off between Interstate 95 and the Franconia-Springfield Parkway.
As the project now stands, drivers headed north on the new two-lane parkway section will merge with a third lane at Rolling Road, only to be jammed into a single-lane ramp onto the parkway’s older westbound route.
“It’s clearly going to create some problems,” said Supervisor Pat Herrity, R-Springfield.
“All those people coming from Fort Belvoir trying to get to points in western and northern Fairfax County are going to use a single-lane ramp? No way,” he said.
Fairfax will absorb roughly 20,000 new commuters next year when the army’s Base Realignment and Closure program relocates thousands to Fort Belvoir.
Charles and Frances Metcalf, longtime Fairfax residents and founders of the local Rolling Road Committee, have voiced concerns about the ramp to Herrity and other local officials.
“It’s a nightmare ready to happen,” said Charles Metcalf, 65.
Frances, 61, agreed and said she worried the congestion would hurt local homeowners.
“It will lower home values, because if you can’t get out of here who would want to live here?” she said.
Officials from VDOT have identified the ramp as one of the parkway extension project’s potential problem areas and have proposed interchange improvements. But those improvements carry a hefty price tag and are languishing on VDOT’s back burner.
That’s about to change. The Fairfax Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a motion proposed by Herrity and fellow supervisors Jeff McKay, D-Lee, and Gerald Hyland, D-Mount Vernon, that would refocus county and state transportation officials’ attention on widening the ramp. Herrity said the third phase of the parkway extension is coming in roughly $8 million under budget, and the county should use that cash to fix the ramp problem before it’s too late.
“I’m asking our transportation staff to assess how big a problem this is and to propose some solutions,” Herrity said.
