Articles

Fighting Corridor Torpor

Not every transportation solution requires building new roads. The Kaine administration thinks "corridor management" can reinvigorate traffic flow through major traffic arteries.

by Peter Galuszka

There's more to streets and roads than meets the eye. Pavement and potholes, curbs and gutters, stop lights and stop signs... they barely scratch the tarmac of what it takes to design road networks that move automobiles efficiently. Just as important as the engineering of roads, though less obvious to motorists, is how well they interconnect.

Thanks to legislation passed by the 2007 General Assembly and signed into law by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia's roads will be wired together more efficiently in the future. The changes may take years, maybe even decades, to have a discernible effect on traffic congestion, but they are an indispensable part of the far-reaching transportation package passed this year after prolonged legislative gridlock.

One bill addresses "corridor management": the planning that goes into major thoroughfares to ensure that traffic flow is not hampered by excessive intersections and stop lights. Another bill requires new subdivisions to connect with one another through back-door routes rather than forcing motorists onto increasingly overloaded arterial roads.

Additional measures affecting the affordability of secondary roads will allow some neighborhoods to builder narrower roads than now permitted, and will will make neighborhood roads meet more stringent public-benefit requirements before being taken over by the Virginia Department of Transportation to maintain.

Wherever you travel around Virginia, some of the most congested roads are major thoroughfares lined with malls, shopping centers and big box stores. Every region has one or more: Arlington Boulevard in Northern Virginia, Broad Street in Richmond, Military Highway in Norfolk, U.S. 29 North in Charlottesville, Williamson Road in Roanoke. Thousands of drivers use them every day. Though typically six lanes wide, these arterials are afflicted by stop-and-go traffic caused by frequent intersections with ill-timed stop lights and cars that continually slow down to turn into some merchant's parking lot.

Traffic engineers and county planners who would like to limit the number of side roads and driveways accessing these thoroughfares have proven no match for developers who lobby to get direct access to their property. But the balance of power will shift with the new legislation. Jimmy Carr, the assistant transportation secretary who is shepherding the bills through their regulation-writing phase, says the laws represent “dramatic changes to the status quo.” Some examples:

• In the past, property owners whose land abuts state roads were automatically granted tie-ins to those roads if they met sight-distance and other safety criteria. The new regulations will make access-management principles a major factor in determining whether and where an access break is allowed.

• Property owners enjoyed a right to their own access to main roads, regardless of traffic patterns. The new law allows sharing of an access break to be imposed as a condition for granting a permit. For instance, if a big box store linked to a state road, another big box owner who built next door might be required to share his neighbor’s access road.

• If a major thoroughfare was widened in the past, VDOT had to rebuild the entrances for property owners. Now, for property owners who abut more than one road, VDOT can grant access to the side road in order to eliminate the break to the main road. 

Environmentalists praise the legislations. “Overall, these are two bills we supported and worked on,” says Trip Pollard, a lawyer with the Charlottesville- based Southern Environmental Law Center. “These will help us get to better planning, which is where we really need to get to.” Among the important benefits, the two newly enacted bills clarify issues of who has decision-making authority over what, says Pollard.

While the new laws define important principles, the state needs to write detailed regulations to define and enforce the law. Robert Hofrichter, VDOT state land development manager, says that the process is just beginning. Between now and Dec. 31, the public will have opportunities to provide input to the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which has final say on the regulations. Final rules take effect on July 1 of next year.

One key corridor that will be impacted by the new regulations is a nightmarish stretch of U.S 29 north of Charlottesville. The city and Albemarle County have written a draft Places29 master plan to guide the redevelopment of the road and the development around it. The new state laws will provide them tools they didn't have before. (See "Reinventing the Motor Mile".)

The new laws, says Pollard, will “strengthen existing tools and expand them.” For the concepts in the bills to work, however, he says the state needs money for study. As it stands now, he says, VDOT does not have a good grasp of where the worst corridors are. “They’ve done a couple of studies, such as one on U.S. 13 on the Eastern Shore,” but that's about all.

Gov. Kaine proposed earmarking $50 million to help with corridor studies, but the General Assembly killed that part of his budget.

While important, the corridor management issues aren’t the most critical changes in recent legislation, says Carr, the assistant transportation secretary. Depending on the corridor in question and the development patterns along it, he says, “It might take years to realize the benefits of the new access management standards." Instead, he says, the quickest impact on roads and land use may come from provisions affecting the acceptance of new subdivision roads into the state system.

In the past, developers typically built new roads in their subdivisions to state standards and handed them to the state for ownership and maintenance. VDOT accepted any subdivision roads that met minimum specifications. In the 2007 General Assembly session, some legislators moved to halt the state from accepting subdivision streets. Others wanted to preserve the status quo. Eventually, lawmakers gravitated to the governor’s solution, which factors in connectivity between neighborhoods and other public benefits into the decision whether to provide public maintenance. Connectivity between subdivisions helps traffic flows by offering motorists alternate routes.

A related issue for state acceptance allows narrower subdivision roads. For decades, developers built streets that were wider than needed for normal traffic on the grounds that they had to accommodate emergency vehicles such as fire trucks. Narrower streets are cheaper to build and maintain, and they create less of the impermeable surface that generates rainwater run-off implicated in pollution and erosion. As long as subdivision roads provide more connectivity, they also work better from the standpoint of emergency access, says Carr. "They provide redundant routes and access points."

Carr complains that Kaine’s legislative initiatives covering subdivision road acceptance and corridor management have received little coverage by the state’s mainstream news media. Regardless, VDOT is busy writing the corridor management regulations, and hopes to present an early draft to the Commonwealth Transportation Board by July. The regulations will go through several rounds of public input -- the commercial real estate industry is following the progress closely -- and rewritings before a final version is ready by the New Year.    

-- May 21, 2007