Our Own Inaction During Growth Led to HOT Lanes
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Dear Dr. Gridlock:
How did this horrible HOT lanes project get approved? Was a powerful lobby behind this? I get sick seeing all the trees and displaced wildlife every time I am on the Capital Beltway.
I live off Braddock Road in King's Park, and I don't expect the traffic will even get better with the new traffic lights and exits.
I hope I am wrong, but I will be shocked if the confusing new traffic patterns and HOT lane rules actually work. The current Beltway and Interstate 66 exits already seem too much for a lot of drivers.
Rob Stein
Springfield
The drive along the western arc of the Capital Beltway in Virginia is startlingly different this year. Large areas of vegetation are now vacant slopes as construction ramps up for the HOT lanes.
The bridges that take Braddock Road and other major routes over the Beltway need to be widened to accommodate the new lanes below. That construction will be very disruptive for a few years, but the site was an eight-lane interstate, not a parkway. The HOT lanes program is one of the least disruptive of the major projects aimed at easing congestion.
People who came of age in the past two decades haven't experienced the furious pace of road and transit building that reshaped Washington and other metropolises, particularly after interstate construction became the nation's greatest public-works project in the mid-1950s and after Metrorail helped revive rail transit in the mid-1970s.
As that great wave of transportation spending dissipated, we didn't replace it with anything else -- not with a new idea, an old idea, a transit program, a roads program, a land-use program -- and nobody speaks well of the result. This congestion on the roads and crowding on the trains didn't just happen. We let it happen through inaction. The HOT lanes project won't solve our traffic problems any more than the Intercounty Connector project or Dulles rail or the Purple Line, but it's part of the solution.
