Five-Year Forecast: Get Ready, Set . . . Sit
Drivers Face Crush Of Major Projects

By Eric M. Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 29, 2007; A01

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."

In Maryland, then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) revived the $2.4 billion intercounty connector linking interstates 270 and 95, a project that had been debated on and off for 50 years and looked to be dead several years ago.

In the District, a strong economy and a string of budget surpluses have allowed the city to invest in its long-neglected infrastructure. The result are fixes to ailing bridges, such as the Douglass and 11th Street spans, as well as the revitalization of such key commuter routes as Georgia Avenue and Benning Road.

The plan to extend the Orange Line to Dulles International Airport had been discussed for years but was given a final push by a coalition of businesses and local and state leaders concerned that increasing highway congestion was choking off Tysons Corner and making it too difficult to get from the District to the airport.

This year, Virginia lawmakers approved the first major increase in transportation funding since the 1980s. The increase means that the state's transportation department is projected to break ground on 548 projects in the next six years, compared with last year's six-year plan, which projected only 54.

The plan also allowed an authority, composed of top elected officials in Northern Virginia to raise taxes and fees to generate an additional $300 million a year for transportation projects across the region. A referendum on a similar plan to raise local taxes to pay for road and transit projects failed in 2002.

The money is funding a new Fairfax County Parkway interchange, the widening of the Prince William Parkway and a rapid bus line through Arlington County and Alexandria, among other projects. Many have been designed but lacked the money to proceed. Groundbreaking could happen in a matter of months, officials said.

Nicholson, whose previous job was overseeing Virginia's portion of the Wilson Bridge project, said his main priority will be to coordinate the timing of the work to minimize disruptions. That means scheduling a lot of night work and making sure two parallel routes are not closed simultaneously. He will have the power to veto proposed lane closures if the timing is not right or if they will compound delays caused by closures from another project.

Another goal will be to respond to accidents or breakdowns that can quickly turn a delay into a disaster.

"We need to be ready to pounce down and clear the roadway ASAP," Nicholson said. "The system is so sensitive that it just takes a fender bender to disrupt everything."

Nicholson acknowledged that the projects, no matter how well coordinated, are going to be tough to deal with -- for him and for commuters.

"But we can't put them off," he said. "We're already in a gridlock situation."