Articles

Reinventing the Motor Mile

U.S. 29 North of Charlottesville is one of the ugliest, most congested thoroughfares in Virginia. But local officials have an imaginative plan to transform the corridor over the next 20 years.

by Robert L. Burke

In a way, U.S. 29 in Albemarle County is a victim of its own success. The proof is scattered along the miles of highway that stretch to the northeast from the Charlottesville city limits across nearly 11 miles of Albemarle County. There are strip malls, gas stations, and a slew of shopping centers anchored by big-box retailers -- Target, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Sam’s Club -- and these are not the kinds of retailers trying to draw a local clientele. Appealing to shoppers from several counties around, they line the highway with massive parking lots.

Data shows that U.S. 29 carries mostly local traffic. A county study showed 64 percent of trips begin and end within the 10.75-mile study area, while just 12 percent is pass-through. Another 24 percent of trips begin outside the corridor but end there. Nobody is happy. Local residents complain about the hassle of getting from one place, while through travelers dread the congestion.

Near the city limits, the highway has been widened to eight lanes in places, but even that hasn’t helped. “It’s a textbook example of how not to do planning,” says Trip Pollard, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit environmental group based in Charlottesville. “It’s a corridor that has been junked up – it’s got so many exits and entrances and stoplights. Not surprisingly, it ends up with a lot of congestion.”

As bad as it is, U.S. 29 is hardly unique in Virginia. The same pattern has replicated itself endlessly across the state: retail and residential development encrusting old highways and gumming up traffic with an endless series of stoplights and cars turning into retail centers along the road. The problem is so pervasive that the General Assembly passed a series of bills this year to help transportation planners do a better job managing these congested corridors. (See "Fighting Corridor Torpor.")

One problem with U.S. 29 North is the lack of parallel roads to provide motorists with alternate routes between local destinations. Much of the commercial and residential development along the highway relies upon the highway for connectivity to anywhere else in the region.

Now local planners are working on a breakthrough approach to redevelop the 10.75-mile corridor over a 20-year period. The Places29 master plan would replace the disconnected strip malls and retail centers with pedestrian-friendly mixed-use focal points interconnected with a network of parallel street. Many of the congested intersections of today would be replaced with underpasses that would let local traffic exit and enter while letting through traffic flow unimpeded.

There are two key hurdles for critics and supporters alike. One is that the Places29 proposal is still a work in progress. County planners have produced huge maps to help residents grasp the concepts but many of the details yet to be settled – such as the cost and the impact on property owners in the corridor.

In late April, the North Charlottesville Business Council fired off a letter to the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, saying the process to date didn’t sufficiently include local business people, and urged the board to retool the plan. “Parts of the Places29 Plan do not reflect current land use, economic and transportation realities,” wrote NCBC Chairman Michael McGowan. “There seems to be no serious consideration of timing, phasing, priorities, construction, costs, and disruptions of existing activity.”

Judith Wiegand, senior planner for Albemarle, says the text that will settle many unanswered questions about the design and implementation of the plan is still being written. “We feel that when we finish the plan most people are going to actually find that their situations are improved,” she says. “People are going to see a big difference in how easy it is to get around once they start having some of these choices.”

McGowan is unconvinced. “This community is one that’s great at planning but poor at implementing,” he says. “I guess we’re a little bit selfish in that it ought to be focused on what the local community needs. We think the plan ought to be a realistic one that can be built.”

A second hurdle is that in many places the retrofitting of U.S. 29 will disrupt existing businesses. McGowan says the parallel network of roads is unworkable. “We don’t see how you build them as they’re drawn,” he says. “They go right through the front of people’s buildings. They go up and down terrain that’s too steep to build on. They take the assumption in the plan that the landowners will donate the land to build these roads. There’s a disconnect in what we see in talking to the property owners, and in what the planners say.”

But Wiegand says the vast majority of parallel roads will be developed in conjunction with property owners who want to make it easier for customers to reach them. She also says there’s still plenty of opportunity for local businesses to get involved. Some key elements of the plan are still being worked out – such as the number of underpasses. Instead of one or two, five or six such projects might be needed, which would mean designing urban-style interchanges to mitigate the impact on local businesses.

The unexpectedly high number of underpasses raises the question of how these improvements will be funded. It’s too early to say, since the final decisions haven’t been made, and any transportation improvements have to be reviewed by the area’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Virginia Department of transportation, and the Commonwealth Transportation Board. New project funding has largely dried up statewide so the challenge of getting state dollars is significant.

The cost is certain to be high but the potential benefits are as well, says Harrison Rue, executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. About 90 percent of the roads built in Virginia are done by the private sector anyway, he says. If a new network of interconnected streets is built with private-sector support, “there’s tremendous opportunity for building parts of the system in ways that benefit both businesses and neighborhoods.” 

And, the demand for public dollars could drop because, if implemented, the plan would dump less traffic onto the main public corridor.

Rue predicts state support will emerge when the plan is ready. “What we’ve heard over and over again from Richmond and the General Assembly is, ‘As soon as you guys get your act together and everybody agrees, then we’ll start funding.’”

The next step, though, is to have county planners spend more time working out specifics of the proposal and then explain them and get feedback from affected residents and businesses. That’s a tough process because the plan is so complex and covers such a large area and a long time span.

There’s good reason to look 20 years into the future – the city and county’s combined population reached about 130,000 in 2005, and is expected to climb to 157,000 by 2030, according to the Virginia Employment Commission. If the current development pattern continues, U.S. 29’s congestion woes will extend even farther into the countryside. A longstanding proposal to build a bypass around the congested corridor still has some supporters but appears politically dead and financial unfeasible. So, whatever solutions there are to U.S. 29 will have to happen there.

“Changing what’s there can be done over time,” Pollard says. “Because a lot of the area is going to change over time anyway. Clearly what’s there isn’t working.”

-- May 21, 2007