Supervisor Rodney Thomas has informally agreed to limit access to 29N in exchange for VDOT funding the Western Bypass, Jim Bacon writes on Bacon’s Rebellion. A major problem with the bypass bypass is that it doesn’t really bypass very much at all—there’s plenty of sprawl to the north of it, and the county has shown no willingness to reduce the rate of expansion of that sprawl. Every new road that connects to 29N, every new business entrance, every new stoplight makes the bypass that much more useless. (Recall that the 29 Bypass actually bypassed 29, once upon a time. But the urban ring sprawled out past it.) Now Thomas has committed the Board of Supervisors and Albemarle County to not just limiting new access, but also potentially to eliminating private roads that connect to 29N and getting rid of some median-strip crossovers that currently allow traffic entering 29N to turn either right or left.
Of course, that’s just Albemarle County. Greene County isn’t about to make any such agreement, and at the rate they’ve been growing in the past decade, our wise willingness to limit access to 29N may be made irrelevant as Greene and points north keep clogging up 29 with new gas stations, shopping centers, and connecting roads.
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