If one gets off the interstates and four-lane highways, there are interesting things to see along the roads of Virginia. This fellow watches over traffic on Rt. 45 between Farmville and Cumberland Courthouse.
There Were Giants in the Earth
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51 responses to “There Were Giants in the Earth”
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It is a hilly but fun road as I remember.
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Loads of fun on a motorcycle.
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When NBA players mate…
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Uh yep. Them Hollywooders made a flicker show ‘bout gittin’ off’n da main roads. Called it “Deeliverence”.
There are wonderful roads with no lines where the method of paving is spraying hot tar and throwing rocks on it. All of them are a Rte. 600-something. All of them fun to drive.
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Roads with less than 3000 vehicles per day don’t get center lines, per VDOT policy.
I’m also amazed at how, decades ago, they knew that Virginia would NEVER need more than 599 primary routes.
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It’s not that they foresaw that Virginia wouldn’t need more than 599 primary roads. It’s that they never foresaw computer mapping. They’d have had no problem at all with having Rte. 140 in Brunswick Cty, and a Rte. 140 in Fairfax except now deconfliction is an issue.
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Who cares? The arrow is faded, and the numbers aren’t even centered in the sign.
Someone could knock this sign down and nobody would miss it.
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I’m also wondering how they determine what is a primary route.
For example, Manassas Drive is primary route 213. It’s a 25MPH, 2-lane road that’s about 3 miles long.
Yet Braddock Rd is secondary route 620 and is much longer and gets more traffic than Manassas Drive. It runs from VA 28 to I495 and beyond. It’s at least 4 lanes, 6 lanes in some places, with a 45MPH speed limit.
I guess consistency has never been the Virginia Way.
EDIT: I also wonder why they (VDOT) post guide signs for SOME secondary roads and not others. Waste of money, nobody cares what the route number is, the county posted a sign with a name and we all use that.
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It’s fun in Texas too. They have two letters with the number that used to mean something, e.g., FM (farm market), RR (ranch road).
My favorite was a small road between Coppell and Grapevine that had two names. It was, say, Maple St. in Coppell and Maple St. in most of Grapevine, except for 1/2 mile in the middle where it was BassPro Lane.
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I saw a BassPro Lane in Katy, Texas, last weekend.
My first trip to Texas. We found some excellent bar-b-q and a fantastic Mexican restaurant, but overall, apart from having a road system you can sail boats on during the slightest rain storm, I did not find the Houston metropolitan area particularly impressive…
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I also found Houston less than impressive when I visited for a conference years ago. It was a Mass Transit Conference, the only problem being Houston’s only mass transit besides buses is a trolley that runs east west for 2 blocks.
If you want good TexMex and other sites to see, I suggest San Antonio.
The spousal unit was at Ft. Sam and I visited her, the road system confuses GPS, because they are so big and right on top of one another.
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Ya gotta get west of Ft. Worth sometime, in the Hill Country, to see the amazing part of Texas. East of the I35 and south of I20, Texas is flat, open fields, mostly boring with spotty places of interest.
Early May is the month to go to the Texas hills. Before then, it’s brown. Yechy brown. After May, it’s hot. Bloody damned hot.
Here’s an idea. Ship the bike by rail to Ft. Worth, fly into DFW, and ride one-way west to the Davis Mtns.
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That sounds like an excellent idea.
Houston would not have been my first choice, but this was a family illness situation so I had to go to where the sick relative was.
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Hope things went for the best.
And now for the NN usual sort of reponse.
“Okay, so start by shipping the relative to the Davis Mtns….”
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That also sounds like an excellent idea…
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By the way, things did go pretty well. Thank you.
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Well, you know what to do next year. Check with any good Texas wildflower site when planning. Take the unspecified relative with you.
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And WB for “washboard”?
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Oh god. The concrete roads are as smooth as butter.
Unfortunately, the asphalt roads are butter. You would not believe how deep the wheel ruts get. We had a Honda Accord while in Texas and if I wasn’t careful, the cross carriage would strike the road.
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Oh god. The concrete roads are as smooth as butter.
Unfortunately, the asphalt roads are butter. You would not believe how deep the wheel ruts get. We had a Honda Accord while in Texas and if I wasn’t careful, the cross carriage would strike the road.
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I can remember when Braddock Road was a gravel road from Centreville all the way to Rt. 15. A poor region of Virginia now lined with million dollar homes.
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In the mid to late 90s I once took a drive out that way on Braddock Road. I didn’t go very far after the road turned to gravel.
They really chopped Braddock Road up east of I66. About the only way you used to be able to see the original route of the road was the overhead phone cables that crossed 28, but those are now gone with the new interchange, or at least I think they’ve been removed..
The Federal spending in Northern VA has certainly contributed to that transformation of that area.
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Phone cables showing old route of Braddock Rd:
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I have a funny (to me) story about an incident on Braddock Road in the late 1980s.
On second thought, although the statute of limitations has almost certainly run out, I’d probably better not share it here…
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In the mid 1990s, on Braddock Road during rush hour, my car told me in no uncertain terms that it wanted a new fuel filter. (Was a car I bought used several months prior).
Who cares? The arrow is faded, and the numbers aren’t even centered in the sign.
Someone could knock this sign down and nobody would miss it.
They can be a bit treacherous on a motorcycle for a couple of weeks after a new batch of tar-and-chip has been laid down, but overall you are correct – the 600-series roads in Virginia are a lot of fun to drive/ride.
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So long as they have recently (1-2 years) been repaved, sure.
There was a question on what makes a VDOT road a primary route:
Interstate: connects states and major cities
Primary: connects cities and towns and interstates
Secondary: local connector roads
Frontage: mainly alongside interstates
(others are listed here: http://www.vahighways.com/route-log/fseries.htm )
Urban streets are maintained by cities and towns with $$ from VDOT
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Also, the state will maintain a primary road that runs through a city or town. Secondary roads are maintained by VDOT. There used to be a formula that allocated funds to counties. Now, I think that formula allocates funds by district and the districts set the priorities.
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The state did not and does not maintain that portion of 28 that runs through the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
Nor does it maintain that portion of Manassas Drive in Manassas Park that is a primary route 213.
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My memory failed me. Instead of VDOT maintaining the primary roads, the state provides funding for the city or town to maintain them.
Generally, 3-numeral routes are secondary roads.
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VDOT also provides funding to the city or town to maintain secondary roads. They may provide more funding for primary roads, perhaps that is why Manassas Drive is a primary route. Toss the poor broke city of Manassas Park a bone by making their 2-lane residential drag a primary route so they get more money.
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Except for Arlington and Henrico, VDOT is responsible for all state road maintenance–but they don’t do a good job in many areas.
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Just as long as they *think* they do a good job, that’s all that matters, right?
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Anything above 599 is a secondary road.
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Dick, you’re a little off on the facts.
VDOT is responsible for the 57,867-mile state-maintained system which is divided into these categories:
Interstate – 1,118 miles of four-to-ten lane highways that connect states and major cities
Primary – 8,111 miles of two-to-six-lane roads that connect cities and towns with each other and with interstates
Secondary – 48,305 miles of local connector or county roads. These generally are numbered 600 and above.
Frontage – 333 miles of frontage roads
A separate system includes 10,561 miles of urban streets, maintained by cities and towns with the help of state funds.
Virginia’s cities are independent of its counties.
Henrico County (1,279 miles) and Arlington County (359 miles) maintain their own roads with VDOT funds.
There is an additional 39 miles of toll roads maintained by others.
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Some cities do the maintenance and get state funds towards it. VDOT lists the Prince William maintenance office for Manassas. 703-259-0244 https://www.virginiadot.org/VDOT/Travel/Manassas_Map.html
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Manassas does their own maintenance; so does Manassas Park. The Prince William maintenance office for Manassas is for everything on the other side of the “city limits” sign.
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Makes for some strange speed limits too.
In York Cty, there’s a neighborhood where VDOT maintains about 1/8 of mile of road connecting Rte. 17 to the rest of the neighborhood where the speed limit is 25 MPH. There are houses along all roads, but the speed limit on that section was 45 MPH. It was finally dropped to 35, mercifully.
That’s what the policy is, but the examples I listed do not match. Manassas Drive is NOT a primary route by any stretch of the imagination, yet is considered one and is VA 213 (it’s not even posted anymore, hasn’t been in over 20 years).
Also, Prince William and Fairfax County Parkways. It took VDOT nearly 20 years to give these a primary route number.
The process of determining what is a primary route seems to be very political.
It doesn’t appear to be based on any sort of objective criteria like number of lanes or traffic volumes.
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There are objective (mostly) criteria for the eligibility of city and town streets for maintenance funding from the state. The formula is based on the width of streets and amount of unrestricted right-of-way. The criteria are rather convoluted because the General Assembly was involved and, naturally, politics was a factor. Also, a lot of streets were grandfathered. See Code Sec. 33.2-319. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title33.2/chapter3/section33.2-319/
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There are objective (mostly) criteria for the eligibility of city and town streets for maintenance funding from the state. The formula is based on the width of streets and amount of unrestricted right-of-way. The criteria are rather convoluted because the General Assembly was involved and, naturally, politics was a factor. Also, a lot of streets were grandfathered. See Code Sec. 33.2-319. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title33.2/chapter3/section33.2-319/
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That’s some fine legalese, right there…
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There are objective (mostly) criteria for the eligibility of city and town streets for maintenance funding from the state. The formula is based on the width of streets and amount of unrestricted right-of-way. The criteria are rather convoluted because the General Assembly was involved and, naturally, politics was a factor. Also, a lot of streets were grandfathered. See Code Sec. 33.2-319. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title33.2/chapter3/section33.2-319/
As a young man I visited Pittsburgh to meet some of the ex-in-laws.
Leaving the Pa Turnpike on a dark night, I struck the first of many car-swallowing potholes. Things were HUGE! More hole than road.
All along the road were signs that read “This Is A State Maintained Road”.
The next morning, I mentioned to the ex-spousal unit’s uncle something snarky about Pennsylvania being proud of a crappy road.
“The State didn’t put those signs up. The City put them up.”
City probably spent more on signs than it would have cost to patch the road. Hell, they could have put the signs over the holes.
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Same thing in Virginia, with the “END STATE MAINTENANCE” signs. I think there used to be one of those on Euclid Ave right at the Manassas Park city line–and the implied meaning, don’t call VDOT about Manassas Park’s lack of maintenance.
I expect that a lot of secondary roads have become primary roads as urban growth has spilled out into once rural areas over several decades. They just haven’t been renumbered to reflect their new status and confuse everybody.
There’s a huge lumberjack outside a building supply store in Coeburn, although it’s along a 4-lane (US 58). https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fd5d7556a213f979cfcb33ae2a557317870a9ca3261c81c54250825531bf585a.jpg
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That particular “muffler man” was originally in Indiana.
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Thanks for the link.
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