Celebrating Mixing Bowl's Big Makeover

Another challenge was to keep traffic flowing along with the concrete. Mixing Bowl commuters have suffered through eight years of jams, detours, bumpy pavement, temporary striping and unexpected merges.

To help, officials added 5,000 park-and-ride spaces, created a vanpool program and increased safety patrols to clear breakdowns. Commuters praised VDOT for keeping them informed at a storefront office in the Springfield Mall and on the project's Web site.

The project has been more than a blur of orange safety cones and dump trucks to some drivers. To them, it was a ballet of cranes and steel girders that crossed into the realm of beauty.

"I will miss it," said Beth Rado, a federal worker and amateur photographer who moved to Springfield in 1999, when work was just beginning. Co-workers said her timing was awful.

"In fact, it was the perfect time," she said. "It has been a great opportunity."

During the past eight years, Rado has taken hundreds of photographs during her daily commute. Her portfolio includes dramatic shots of unfinished bridges, snow-covered ramps and sun-dappled support structures. For some shots, she pulled over to the side of the road or climbed on top of construction trailers. A collection of her photographs is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/betts/.

"I like the strength and beauty of the piers and the graceful swoops of ramps through the sky," she said. "Giant highway constructions embody our culture's fascination with speed, enormity and rapacious change. They are monuments to the things we value."

She even embraced the delays, truly setting her apart from other commuters. "Stopped-dead traffic jams are terrific for photos," she said.

The Springfield interchange began innocently enough. It was built in the 1960s as a simple interchange between I-95 and the Beltway. But then the route for I-95, originally planned to go through the District, shifted to the part of the Beltway between Springfield and College Park. Because of the route change, all traffic on I-95, one of the country's busiest highways, was exiting at Springfield through roads ill-equipped for the task.

The interchange was obsolete by the early 1970s, when it carried 150,000 vehicles a day -- about a third of the 430,000 vehicles a day that use it now. A series of improvements did little to ease congestion or the dangerous merges. In fact, the merges are what gave the Mixing Bowl its name. The interchange is where the three major highways "mix" together.

The daily interplay between commuters and vacationers, local residents and long-distance truckers, the confused and the confident made driving through Springfield a white-knuckle experience. Drivers were forced to make split-second decisions and cross several lanes to make their exits. Chronic backups made rear-end collisions a near-daily occurrence.

A study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the Mixing Bowl was the site of 179 crashes in 1993 to 1994, more than any other spot on I-95 and more than double any other Beltway interchange.