Northern Virginia roads are consistently ranked among the most congested in the country, killing drive times and drawing the ire of local leaders and commuters alike. But a new study hopes to find solutions before the end of 2012 that will alleviate the problems of today and tomorrow. The Virginia Department of Rail and Transportation will spend the next 12 months analyzing traffic patterns throughout Northern Virginia to develop a comprehensive plan for relieving congestion around key employment centers in the Washington suburbs, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Monday.
The study, dubbed “Super NoVa,” will use U.S. Census data to track population shifts and trends, including the impact of commuters entering the Beltway from as far west as the Shenandoah Valley, south to Culpeper and Carolina counties and east to the Northern neck, as well as other states.
In announcing the study, McDonnell emphasized the importance of evaluating Northern Virginia as a region and notes that the review will ignore jurisdictional boundaries. That’s the kind of “big picture perspective that the region needs in terms of addressing long-term needs,” said Bob Chase, president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, a business-citizen coalition.
While he thinks the study has merit, Fairfax County Supervisor Jeff McKay said he is leery of embracing another traffic study after so many others failed to produce results.
“That doesn’t help the people that are stuck in failed infrastructure gridlock,” McKay said. “We’ve done a lot of studying and they haven’t really materialized in a world class network. There’s a good amount of study fatigue.”
McKay also questions if the study will only rediscover what many Virginia officials have claimed for years: transportation is grossly underfunded.
McDonnell spokesman Jeff Caldwell said the department will go beyond searching for funding sources and suggest options for “telework, public transit, working with companies to figure out how to keep employees close by, working with federal government as they shift their workforce around, the HOT lanes that are going in now — all of those things play a roll here and that’s part of the equation.
“It’s not an issue we can build our way out of,” Caldwell said.
The failure would be if the study goes largely ignored, Chase said. But, he added, “if the McDonnell administration is sponsoring this study, one would hope it would prepare to financially support it.”
