A new study by Albemarle County’s Places29 has demonstrated what should have been clear to anybody paying attention: installing a 29 bypass won’t reduce traffic. Why? Because it’s us causing the traffic jams, not hordes of people commuting from Culpeper to Danville or long-haul truckers slaloming through Nelson. 67% of all the traffic on 29 N both begins and ends between the 250 bypass and WalMart. Presumably if that stretch were expanded from UVa to Ruckersville, we’d find that something closer to 90% of traffic is local, and thus wouldn’t take the bypass. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Jessica Kitchin has the story in today’s Daily Progress.
we need toll booths :D
that will stop them people from using OUR roads
HaHaHa. Another study. Another week in Charlottesville. Same result. Why do people still think the car culture has a solution in roads? Has it worked anywhere else in America?
Why oh why can’t we just start having some traffic engineering sanity on 29N? Why are we beholden to the political interests that demand a traffic light for every business driveway on that road? Really, the car culture is largely to blame, but it is also grossly exaggerated around here by brain-dead planning – not conducted by professionals but by political hacks. The city can hardly keep a traffic engineer, and is it any wonder with the idiocy demanded by our political leaders? Look at the ‘traffic calming’ debacle in the city, now thankfully moribund, to see what happens when citizen/residents try to play at traffic engineering.
Specifically with regard to 29N – can’t we all recognize that the new Hollymead Town Center has made the purported bypass obsolete before the construction even started? Really, let’s kill this thing once and for all!
We need an expressway – we need to just use the existing corridor and clean out all of the traffic congesting signals up and down the length of the corridor! We need grade-separated interchanges at Proffit/Airport & 29, Polo Grounds Rd. & 29, Rio & 29, Greenbrier & 29 and Hydraulic & 29, terminating in something mixing-bowl-like where 29N meets the 250 bypass. All driveways on either side of the road between those exchanges should be serviced with slow-moving access roads. Four center lanes could be carved out which flowed un-signalized to north of the N. Fork of the Rivanna. We need driveway ACCESS ROADS for the local traffic!!! Any future developments – commercial or subdivisions – would have to PAY FOR THEIR OWN GRADE SEPARATED EXCHANGE. They would not automatically have the ‘right’ to impose the traffic costs on the rest of us. They can build the cost into the cost of the damn houses or stores.