The Curmudgeon received a nice little newsletter from the Virginia Dept. of Transportation last week detailing VDOT's plans for improving I-66 between the Roosevelt Bridge and the Dulles Access Road. Called "Idea 66," the newsletter urges its readers to "imagine the possibilities."
For more info, go to VDOT's I-66 website at www.idea66.com. (For Arlingtonians, there is also a "public workshop" scheduled for Tuesday, January 23, from 7-8:30 in the cafeteria at Washington-Lee High School.)
The newsletter would be a lot better if it wasn't written in government bureaucratese, such as "[t]he VISSIM model is a software program that can be calibrated to existing conditions including origin-destination data from a digital license plate survey, field observations on I-66 Westbound, turning movement counts, and ramp counts."
After plowing through Idea-66, however, and checking out the website, we've gleaned that VDOT plans to make three "spot improvements" to I-66 while it continues to study longer term options.
Those spot improvements will do a lot to fix the highway's most glaring problems with Westbound traffic in Arlington/Falls Church, but, unfortunately, do nothing to address the most glaring and easily corrected problem with Eastbound flow.
For Westbound traffic--coming from Washington, D.C. toward Falls Church, VDOT will widen the roadway to three lanes in several critical spots. First, it will extend the on-ramp from Spout Run all the way to the next exit ramp, at Glebe Road. This will help things a bit, but this really isn't where the traffic problems start.
Second, VDOT will extend the on-ramp from Fairfax Drive all the way to the exit ramp at Sycamore Street. This will be a huge improvement. Anyone who regularly drives on I-66 knows that the back-ups begin with the heavy traffic merging in from Fairfax Drive, where a two-lane on-ramp meets a two-lane highway--an engineering mis-match from day-one!
However, we fear that VDOT's improvement will only shift the beginning of the back-up to Sycamore Street, where, after the improvement, I-66 will go from three lanes back to two lanes for about a quarter mile. In the long run, VDOT needs to squeeze that third lane in all the way to the next improvement, at the Washington Blvd. on-ramp.
Currently, when the Washington Blvd. ramp meets I-66, it runs all the way to the exit for the Dulles Access Road, making for pretty smooth traffic flow. VDOT would add another lane running all the way to the Dulles Access Road (about a mile), thus making the highway four lanes wide for this short stretch. That's a good idea, since the Dulles Access exit has two lanes and I-66 has two lanes. Thus, two of the four lanes will exit right to the Dulles Access Road while the other two continue on I-66 towards its rendezvous with the Beltway, where I-66 again widens to four lanes westbound.
Still, we're concerned about that short strip of two-lane highway that will be left between the Sycamore exit-ramp and the Washington Blvd. on-ramp. This is a tough spot because there is an overpass and the East Falls Church Metro Station sits in the median. Our guess is that it would be quite expensive to add a third lane in this stretch, but without it we don't think the spot improvements will, in the end, clear out the long daily back-up on this stretch of I-66.
Now, what does VDOT propose to do with Eastbound I-66 in the same area? Apparently nothing.
That's tragic, because even in non-rush hour periods, traffic backs up badly from Glebe Road all the way to the Beltway and the Dulles Access Road in this area. And during the afternoon rush hour, traffic from Tyson's Corner toward Washington is at a standstill due to the bottleneck on Eastbound I-66.
There is a simple spot improvement that would vastly improve this situation eastbound (it won't completely fix the problem since there is also a problem of narrowing four lanes down to two at the Lee Highway/Washington Blvd. exit). If VDOT would extend the on-ramp from Sycamore Street all the way to the exit ramp at Fairfax Drive/Glebe Road (about a mile) it would work wonders. This two-lane stretch of highway is always congested and slow, and gets more congested and slower with each car that enters from Sycamore Street. All that congestion ends at Fairfax Drive, where a significant percentage of cars exit the highway, and it's then generally smooth sailing all the way to the Roosevelt Bridge.
We can't imagine this fix is any more difficult than the spot improvements on Westbound I-66, although it might require re-routing part of the W&OD bicycle path in that section since it runs right next to the highway there.
Perhaps we'll get an explanation from VDOT for why it's ignoring I-66's Eastbound problems at the public workshop in a week or so.
And here's a Curmudgeon prediction: despite the fact that the improvements proposed by VDOT are quite modest and fit within I-66's existing right of way, there will be the usual contingent of Arlingtonians loudly voicing knee-jerk opposition to any change in I-66, on the rather silly grounds that they didn't want the highway in the first place and they simply refuse to think about anything to improve it. (Sadly, that includes some of our elected representatives.)
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