Peter Bacque with the Times-Dispatch provides a solid update on the new highway access regulations that the Virginia Department of Transportation is putting into effect.
A year and a half ago, Bacon’s Rebellion highlighted the challenge of “Corroding Corridors,” the problem created when local governments allow commercial establishments to create too many entrances to state-maintained highways. An excessive number of access points increases the risk of traffic accidents, and it diminishes the volume of traffic the highways can carry. Studies show, Bacque says, that a four-lane highway with good access management can carry as much traffic as a six-lane highway with poor entrance control.
In one of its more important, though little noticed, transportation initiatives, the Kaine administration is re-writing the rules for highway access. A key goal is to increase the carrying capacity of major transportation corridors such as Midlothian Turnpike and Broad Street in the Richmond region, U.S. 29 North in Charlottesville, the Leesburg Pike in Northern Virginia, the Military Highway in Norfolk and countless others. It’s a great example of how it is possible to address traffic congestion by making the existing road network work more efficiently, as opposed to spending billions of dollars on new capacity, with attendant ongoing obligations to maintain that capacity.
According to Bacque, management techniques include:
- Increasing spacing between signals and interchanges
- Controls on driveway location, spacing and design
- Using reserved turning lanes
- Two-way left-turn lanes from a center lane
- Raising medians to prevent movements across a roadway
- Employing service and frontage roads
- Sharing entrances
- Providing access across adjoining properties
- Land use policies limiting access to highways
While these policies seem vastly preferable to the anything-goes practice that reigns now, they may be less than ideal. “Much of the language and the standards are geared to suburban rather than compact, urban forms of development,” says Trip Pollard with the Southern Environmental law Center. “The standards for spacing entrances seem too larger for urban settings where compact development is desired.”
Even so, I regard the new approach to corridor management to be one of the signature achievements of the Kaine administration.