I had a 1pm meeting in Richmond on Saturday. I left Norfolk a little late – not until 11:50 – so when I plugged the address into my GPS unit, it said I was going to arrive at 1:29pm. I called ahead and said I’d be late. I had no idea how late I’d be.
The first slowdown came from that bottleneck we call the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. Traffic was already backed up to Granby Street when I got on I-64. I watched the arrival time on my GPS inch up. By the time I got thru the tunnel, it said that I would get there at about 1:55pm. The traffic moving freely was a temporary thing, though, because as I got on the other side of Mercury Blvd., it backed up again.
It wasn’t until I got near Williamsburg that the traffic started moving again. By that time, my arrival time had increased to 2:18pm. I finally got to my destination at 2:20pm.
Why there was so much traffic on a Saturday afternoon, I have no idea. But can you imagine how bad it must be during rush hour? And it wasn’t just the westbound I-64 traffic. East bound was backed up, too.
So if the traffic doesn’t move, there is really no opportunity to speed. There goes a chunk of the $65 million to be raised by the abuser fees. Without the money, the problems created by that traffic (the HRBT, the compressing of 4 lanes of traffic into 2 lanes) will not go away.
It’s a vicious circle.
Now think about this: what if, instead of the abuser fees, there had been an increase in the gas tax? Even with the congestion, the amount would have been paid. And because of the congestion, it would probably raise even more money. After all, I used more gas due to the increased length of my trip.
The abuser fees just make no sense.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
VJP, you’ve been tagged.
http://skepticalobservor.blogspot.com/2007/07/since-you-asked.html
It would be something else entirely if all the congestion was the direct result of accidents that blocked lanes of traffic as a consequence of reckless driving. But most often, it’s just simple volume, which actually frustrates me more. I feel like if I have to wait an hour to get through Norfolk and across the HRBT into Hampton, there better be sixteen fire engines responding to a plane crash on the other side of the tunnel simply by way of explanation, but most of the time I get through and traffic speeds up again to something approaching the speed limit like we were all driving slower for no apparent reason.
anon – I agree. The weirdest thing happened to me on the way back from Richmond, though. The tunnel traffic was backed up so I jumped off at Woodland Rd, drove thru Phoebus and jumped back on at Strawberry Banks. Once I got into the tunnel, I noticed that there were no cars in the right lane and only three cars behind me in the left lane, with one of those trucks with flashing yellow lights behind them. As best as I could tell, they had stopped traffic from going into the tunnel! But why? I have no idea. I saw nothing that would create the situation.
Two points:
One — I believe that many weekly beach rentals are from Saturday evening to Saturday morning. This creates the Saturday afternoon traffic both ways.
Two — Volume backups are frustrating, but natural. The basic case can be seen by picturing two cars in the rightmost lane (with unnumbered cars ahead and behind). Because of the cars in the next lane, they cannot change lanes. The three cars are keeping a minimum safe distance from each other — which is the minimum distance required to not crash if the car in front hits his brakes. Another car gets on at, let us say, Mercury Blvd. That car must merge. He gets between cars 1 and 2. Car 1 is not affected at all, nor are those ahead of him. The merging car, to keep a safe distance, slows down until he is the same distance from 1 as 2 was previously. To avoid an accident, car 2 must slow down, and so must all the cars behind him.
Increasing speed limits can only help so much. One might think that increasing the speed limits would increase the limit of the traffic volume, and the above case would not happen. However, the volume increases as the speed, but only if the cars stay the same distance from each other. However, the minimum safe distance increases (roughly) with the SQUARE of the speed, and so people like to keep larger distances at higher speeds.
The problem with just building more roads is that, because it makes travel easier, people will decide to move further out. They will do so until the traffic becomes too bad again.
The only way out of this dilemma (that I can see, anyway) is public transportation. However, it must be convenient enough, cheap enough, and fast enough to compete with driving.
Public transit rocks if it’s done right; when it’s not, it just ends up being another part of the problem. I feel like there ought to be a larger push for public transit in Hampton Roads because, like you point out, it has to be convenient, cheap and fast enough to compete with driving, but driving is getting too expensive, too inconvenient and so god-awful slow that if I could get on a train and read a newspaper while going from point A to point B, I would in a heartbeat. A well-planned regional system for moving people quickly between HR cities, combined with local systems for moving people from regional public transit hubs to commerical, residential and industrial centers would be a fantastic way to reduce congestion by taking local drivers off the roads.
The major stumbling block unfortunately seems to be that our cities weren’t planned for efficient public transit, if “sprawl” can be defined as a plan. In Virginia Beach it seems like everyone’s trying to get to the same six places (somewhere on VB Blvd, Town Center, Lynnhaven Mall, the Oceanfront, somewhere at Laskin and First Colonial, or to I264 so they can get the heck out of town) which makes you think that we could probably do something with public transit to take cars of the roads locally–but residentially we’re all so sprawled out and the hard part is getting to a bus stop. I have to say, though, recent developments like Town Center show a lot more thought to how we can develop mixed-use property to bring residential and commercial zones together, making the city more convenient.
Although some people seem to hate it.
You are correct — there was little planning involved, especially in Norfolk. The “plan” was to make roads avoid water, because bridges are expensive.
Exactly true! It’s true in Virginia Beach, too. I grew up on the Lynnhaven, and it’s beautiful, but the roads and neighborhoods twist and wind and dead-end because we’ve got all this land that juts out into the river and we have to do *something* with it, so we just build houses along six-mile-long cul du sacs because we couldn’t come up with anything better. False Cape is going to end up doing the same thing. 😦
just for giggles, where are you going to get the votes for a gas tax. It’s most ardant opponents aren’t even opposed in November.
Once upon a time, Jerry Brown was in a debate about flat taxes, which he favors. Someone on the opposing side asked, “How do you expect this to get through Congress?” Gov. Brown looked at the man in stunned amazement, as though he were surprised that anyone that could ask so stupid a question could even be allowed to enter the room, much less to participate in the debate. He replied, simply, “I don’t. That’s why we are discussing it here, instead of in Congress.”
As the Republican incumbents have demonstrated so effectively over the past two years, Brian, we don’t need to work with everyone to create a transportation plan. We only need 51 votes in the House, so we can afford a handful of ardent gas tax opponents. The difference in this case is we’re still going to work with the Senate, and with the Governor.
Anon, you need more than 51 votes. You need a majority in a House Finance subcommittee. You need a majority in the House Finance full committee. Since it will have a budget impact, you’ll then need to have the support of a House Appropriations sub-committee and then a vote of support from the full committee.
Then you need 51 votes on the the floor, and Delegates across the Commonwealth aren’t excited about raising gas taxes in their districts for roads out here and up north.