For a recent trip from Ocean View to Williamsburg that ought to be a half hour drive, Pavithra
Parthasarathi, Deputy Director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization, gave herself a full hour. You know why. It’s the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT), the most overworked 3.5 miles of highway in Virginia, hosting up to a hundred thousand vehicles a day during the summer and enough the other seasons to force all of us to schedule trips across our famed harbor at odd hours or not at all.
Thankfully, help is on the way. By 2027, mostly thanks to Mary, an enormous 430 foot long, 46 foot wide “boring” machine, and a host of dedicated engineers, trades people and others in hard hats, we will have nearly ten miles of widened interstate highway including bridges and tunnels. Some of the lanes will be free, others tolled to give drivers options to move west to east or east to west even more quickly.
Because water is both our blessing (creating and sustaining jobs in defense, shipping and tourism) and curse, (the cost of crossing it and keeping it off the land), we must tend to our bridges and tunnels. With the HRBT, we have waited a long time to keep up with the traffic that uses it. The first tunnel opened in 1957. It wasn’t until 1976, during Governor Mills Godwin’s second term, that a second came on line.
Now nearly a half century later, we are able to invest nearly $4 billion on the largest infrastructure project in state history, 92% of which was raised in our region, thanks to the 2013 establishment of the Hampton Roads Transportation Fund (HRTF) and the 2014 creation of the Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability Commission (HRTAC), which administers the HRTF. Boy, do we need it.
The fact that we add more time to trips to avoid backups, or experience them even if we don’t, is a productivity killer. When we sit and wait, we are not at our computers, in class or at a job site. If they’re not sleeping, kids are complaining, the car is belching out pollution, and our Hondas and Chevys, not to mention buses and semis, are wasting gas or electricity. Family gatherings, beach vacations and office meetings start late, nerves are frazzled, and in an emergency, like an approaching hurricane, we risk our very lives because let’s face it, there aren’t many ways out of our beloved region when we absolutely must evacuate.
To say that more capacity at the HRBT will be a huge psychic lift for our citizens and visitors is an understatement. “I am proud that VDOT, HRTAC, and the HRTPO have collaborated to bring this massive project to life. This is a model example of regional collaboration in Hampton Roads,” says Bob Crum, Executive Director of the HRTPO/ Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. His and our satisfaction will be watching rush hour and vacation weekend traffic moving smoothly from Willoughby to Phoebus, knowing that the fruits of our labors (and the money from our taxes) will have done as intended, made motoring more pleasant because drivers were able to reach their destinations when the GPS said they would.
Yes, that day may be a few years hence but given how long we’ve waited, for civil engineers and everyday citizens, it will be worth every minute.
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