Five-Year Forecast: Get Ready, Set . . . Sit

Drivers Face Crush Of Major Projects

Commuters will soon endure the Washington region's most extensive transportation construction boom since Metro was built a generation ago, as state and local governments rush to make more than $10 billion in road and rail improvements.

A half-dozen mega-projects and innumerable smaller ones promise to create traffic jams on nearly all of the region's major commuter routes as well as on neighborhood streets. After the delays and detours disappear, however, leaders say commuters will be rewarded with several congestion busters, including an east-west route across the Maryland suburbs, more lanes on the Capital Beltway in Virginia and a new Metrorail line through Tysons Corner.

The boom, which will be felt most intensely in the next five years, will begin by early fall as Maryland starts building the first leg of the intercounty connector, an 18-mile, tolled highway across Montgomery and Prince George's counties. State leaders are also revamping several interchanges on the Beltway.

District leaders plan to renovate the heavily used 11th Street bridge, in addition to completing pavement projects that have stalled traffic across the city.

In Northern Virginia, state leaders are planning an extension of Metro's Orange Line from Falls Church to Tysons Corner and on to Dulles International Airport, four new toll lanes on the Beltway from Springfield to Georgetown Pike, new toll lanes on interstates 95 and 395, and a wider Interstate 66.

Virginia leaders expect construction-related congestion to be so severe that they have named their first congestion czar to coordinate the work. The state has budgeted $58 million to pay for incident management crews, electronic message signs, Web sites, updates that can be sent to cellphones and other portable devices, shuttle buses around Tysons Corner, and information centers at shopping malls.

"I don't sugarcoat it," said Ronaldo T. "Nick" Nicholson, the state's congestion czar. "There's going to be pain before we get to the gain."

The construction landscape in the past several years has been dominated by two major projects: the revamping of the Springfield interchange and the building of a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Both required extensive delays and detours, but most were at night or during non-peak times and confined to the areas near the projects.

But even commuters whose routes won't be under construction probably will be affected by the breadth of projects to come. There is so much traffic congestion and so few route options in the Washington area that the effects of slowdowns ripple across the region. The current closure of the District's Frederick Douglass Bridge, for instance, has tied up traffic on Interstate 295 south to the Beltway and across the Wilson Bridge to Virginia.

"It's going to take every tool in the highway construction toolbox to have this not result in massive gridlock," said Lon Anderson, a spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic. "We're talking I-95 between Fredericksburg and Washington, the Capital Beltway, Tysons Corner. These are the highest of high-profile routes. Motorists are not going to miss these."

The projects have converged as mounting frustration with the daily commute and a desire to keep the region's economy growing have focused area leaders' attention on improving mobility after years of not backing projects.

"We've had a long dry period and delays in a lot of work that should have been done long ago," said Ronald F. Kirby, transportation director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. "This is a five-year catch-up period."