More Study Needed On I-66 Problems
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Dear Dr. Gridlock:
I object to Fairfax County board Chairman Sharon S. Bulova's heavy-handed tactics in ordering Fairfax County Supervisors Catherine M. Hudgins and Linda Q. Smyth to change their recent vote on the Transportation Planning Board to stop the Interstate 66 "spot improvement" project until the Virginia Department of Transportation does a comprehensive study of alternatives in the corridor.
If, as Bulova asserts, Fairfax County residents have always supported widening I-66, it's because VDOT refuses to present them with any alternatives.
It is precisely for this reason that Hudgins and Smyth demanded a corridor study that might recommend another way to eliminate congestion on I-66 at a fraction of the cost in dollars and pollution.
-- Audrey Clement co-chair, Green Party of Virginia
The plan to widen westbound Interstate 66 at three spots inside the Capital Beltway has a tortured history and tortured future. It's no one's vision of an ideal transportation plan for the heavily used corridor.
Opponents of the spot improvements shocked supporters in February by getting the Transportation Planning Board, the regional panel that must endorse projects for federal financing, to block it until Virginia studied transportation alternatives in the corridor.
The blow back from Fairfax County that Clement describes was bound to come. Fairfax is home to many commuters who battle I-66 traffic each day.
Falls Church City Council member David F. Snyder, another planning board member who voted against the spot improvements, pointed out that the highway program's failure to widen all of the westbound side threatens to create new chokepoints.
But others noted after the spur-of-the-moment vote on the planning board that this is no way to run a transportation system. "What kind of policymaking is that?" asked Bob Chase, executive director of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance.
