WASHINGTON DC:Study of Second Crossing

Frank Wolf, northern VA congressman and head of the transp appropriations subcommittee got $2m put into the latest transport funding bill (HR4475) for FHWA-supervised studies of the proposed Second Crossing. Virginia governor Gilmore has weighed in with $0.4m. Maryland governor Parris Glendening is more wary of the proposal but says his admin has “an open mind” and will cooperate. The project has strong local support with a AAA poll showing 75% metro area support and 86% support in immediately adjacent areas.

The project will be a major battle however. Environmentalist anti-roads groups and the USEPA fiercely oppose it. And finding an acceptable right of way will be difficult. Two more Potomac River crossings were in transport plans for the region in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were ‘demapped’ in the wave of anti-roads activism in the early 1970s.

Among the items to be studied according to the Wolf legislation is toll financing. Wolf laid out his hopes for the study in a 3-page letter to the US Sec of Transp Rodney Slater. The funds are for study of a crossing “north of the American Legion Bridge linking Maryland and Virginia.” The study should look at “the traffic and safety benefits of a new Potomac River crossing” and provide data on how it could reduce travel times between the two areas.

Wolf says the study should consider the feasibility of (1) incorporating bus or light rail transit into the highway project (2) an environmentally-protected parkway-type facility with wide conservation easements and no development allowed the length of the road (3) limited access without interchanges (4) prohibitions on Heavy trucks (5) tolls for financing.

The study must also identify various sites along the river for the crossing.

Wolf notes that the Washington DC metro area has the “second worst traffic congestion in the nation, just behind Los Angeles.” Travelers between the Rockville-Gaithersburg MD and Dulles-Reston area “must make a nearly 30-mile horseshoe shaped trip... which can take sometimes up to two hours each way.”

Wolf comments: “That’s such a waste of productive time. We need to find ways to give commuters a break and provide more time for families, for recreation, for community service, or a host of other activities, all preferable to sitting in traffic. Not only do clogged highways lead to frustrated commuters, they also breed safety problems... half of all traffic accidents are directly related to congestion.”

US-15, a 2-lane road is presently the only alternative to the Beltway and has a high accident rate. There is 45km (28mi) between the US-15 crossing of the Potomac at Point of Rocks and the American Legion Bridge at the Beltway, and yet much of this bridgeless distance there is major development on both sides of the river. Unbridged, the Potomac is a great divide, isolating two important parts of the metro area.

‘Techway’

I-270 is best known for its bio-tech businesses spawned in part by the many hospitals and health research establishments in Montgomery county immediately north of DC – notably the National Institutes of Health. Genome and DNA work has been heavily concentrated in Montgomery co. The Dulles corridor (VA-267) has been a leader in various kinds of information technology (IT) work, in part a spinoff of work for the nearby Pentagon and CIA. This contributed to the development of Tysons Corner, one of America’s largest ‘edge cities’ just outside the Beltway. The Dulles Corridor which starts at Tysons Corner and extends beyond Washington Dulles International Airport – the region’s largest – into Loudoun county. America Online, Network Solutions, UUNet are here, in what is often said to be the world’s largest concentration of internet companies.

Traffic

The American Legion Bridge currently 10-lanes carries some 225k veh/day. I-270 has about the same traffic in its southern 12-lane section and the Dulles tollroad/airport access road complex of 12-lanes is not much short of 200k veh/day. Expansion of capacity on these routes is difficult and expensive. Potentially much more cost-effective is eliminating the need for a decent portion of these trips through a direct connection between the two arms of the U.

A typical trip from I-270/I-370 in the Shady Grove/Gaithersburg MD area to the VA-267/VA-28 interchange near the entry to Dulles airport is 42km (26mi). As the proverbial crow files it is 26km (16mi) for a savings of 10mi (16km). A road cannot probably be built that straight but if 10% is added to the distance in right of way compromises the Second Crossing route becomes 28km (18mi) still a 14km (8mi) distance saving.

At an average 40mph the present 3-legged journal takes 39mins, whereas at 65mph the Second Crossing route could be done in under 17mins for a 22min time saving. There is talk of not-uncommon two hour trips on the present route suggesting average speeds can be as low as 13mph. Users of the Second Crossing might well pay something for greater certainty of trips as well as for quicker average trips.

Joseph Passonneau

There’s already one report favoring the project. Called “The Case for a new Potomac River Crossing between Montgomery County and Northern Virginia” (Jan 00) it was approved by the Washington Airports Task Force (WATF). Its leading authors were Leo Schefer WATF president and Joseph Passonneau, a veteran roads architect/engineer and dispute conciliator. (He is perhaps most famous for putting together the process that resolved the long dispute about building I-70 through the Glenwood Canyon in Colorado.)

The report uses modeling data from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to project 2010 trips that might form the basis for Second Crossing traffic. The numbers are 126k trips each day Montgomery county to northern Virginia and returning and 44k trips in the reverse direction for a total of 170k/day. The report does not get into what proportion of this traffic might pay a toll for the shorter route. But it estimates the excess travel costs at between $38m and $96m/year. That is based on excess vehicle-miles traveled of between 124m and 309m/year (the range being with 2mi and 5mi excess distance per average trip.)

The WATF group does not discuss any specific alignment. But Passonneau influenced the group to take a quite radical position in order to meet the normal orojections to a highway like this. Passonneau thinks that there has been widespread opposition to urban motorways because of their huge scale and the dominance of harsh paving. The report proposes just six traffic lanes in a minimum 122m (400') right of way so that vegetation can dominate and the roadway be parkway-like. He wants 2x3.65m (12') light vehicles lanes each direction and a single bus/heavy truck lane each direction. The bus/truck lane would be separated form the car lanes by planting. There would be a hike/bike trail. Berms would be used to shield traffic. A lack of intermediate interchanges, plus covenants, zoning and legislation would be used to prevent unwanted development alongside.

Maryland

Most of the completely new road needed for the Second Crossing would be in Maryland – a minimum of 15km (9mi) from I-270 to the Potomac – whereas in Virginia the connections could be as short as 5km (3mi). Virginia already has two arterials which can be readily upgraded to provide connections beyond this – VA-28 which runs along the eastern boundary of Dulles Airport, and the Fairfax County Parkway (VA-7100), another north-south route a couple of miles east.

Trafficwise the I-270 connection would be neatest as a westward extension of I-370, the small spur off I-270 that currently leads to the Shady Grove metro parking lot and has been planned as the beginning of the Inter County Connector (ICC). The I-370/I-270 interchange already has ramps all directions including west. But quite a lot of the I-370 route west is built on, and would require extensive property acquisitions or tunneling.

There are two or three potential corridors north of I-370 that largely avoid developed areas. But they will be opposed because they go through farm land, which has been described in some hyperbole as a ‘crown jewels.’ It isn’t clear that a parkway-style road is incompatible with an agricultural preserve but opponents of the crossing say any major road there is unacceptable.

The position and nature of the river crossing itself will be another issue. The river here runs over rocky rapids so except in flood it isn’t wide. The engineering challenge is minor. But it is pretty and has a lot of history to it. On the northern bank is the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal heavily linked to George Washington.

Passonneau thinks that a distinguished bridge designer could design an acceptable bridge over the river and its edges. Otherwise a tunnel could be considered.

Politics

One factor in the emergence of the Second Crossing proposal has been the formation of Marylanders for a Second Crossing, a group formed only this spring. It has a number of hardworking articulate leaders who have been very energetic at attending meetings, lobbying officials, and gaining publicity. Founder and co-chair of the group is Kenneth Reid, a small publisher who was motivated by difficulties getting employees from northern Virginia to work for him because of the commute. Others in the group are frustrated at the difficulty of getting to Dulles airport and other destinations in northern Virginia.

High-tech businesses are another major force for the project and indeed it has sometimes been referred to as Techway, because of its links to internet tech industry in VA and biotech in MD. (Contacts Rep Frank Wolf 202 225 5136, Marylanders for a Second Crossing 301 515-4926, Joseph Passonneau 202 296 8017, Leo Schefer WATF 703 572 8714)