Could have, should have

Charlottesville Daily Progress
Published: April 27, 2008

Hindsight is perfect, so it should be clear by now that the U.S. 29 Main Street concept is not working as well as it should and that a bypass ought to have been constructed around Charlottesville.
True, a bypass route once was chosen, and the Virginia Department of Transportation even went so far as to start buying up rights-of-way.
But it was the wrong route.
The so-called close-in bypass was ultimately doomed by politics. But had it been built, it would not have solved the community’s traffic problems.
Nor would it have solved traffic problems for long-distance haulers or for businesses in Lynchburg and Danville, which were among the topics of discussion at a recent traffic forum with the North Charlottesville Business Council.
Even when it was conceived, that bypass plan would have dumped vehicles right back into a rapidly developing area where traffic congestion and traffic lights were on the increase.
Time is money, and sitting at stoplights or creeping through traffic amounts to time inefficiently used. Gasoline burned sitting at stoplights or creeping through traffic is costly as well.
Long-distance drivers still need an unimpeded route around the bottleneck that is Charlottesville and the urbanized section of northern Albemarle County.
Meanwhile, the Main Street idea that was advocated as reason to widen U.S. 29 north has proved its flaws.
In one sense, however, the idea has succeeded. For local drivers needing only to tootle from one shopping center to another, it works fairly well. Keeping traffic on U.S. 29 business, rather than diverting it to a bypass, was one of the reasons that local commercial interests lobbied to have the road widened, referring to their plan as a version of Main Street.
A “Main Street” that’s eight to 10 lanes wide hardly has the traditional benefits of Main Street, however. As predicted, the widened road has become an obstacle to pedestrians — even as rapid development and increased density have made walking or biking more important to those living and working along much of the U.S. 29 north corridor.
Some say the solution to the traffic problem is the addition of grade-separated interchanges at key points along U.S. 29 north.
Large interchanges also have plenty of disadvantages, including the fact that they will wipe out some existing businesses. They also will fail to provide unimpeded passage around Charlottesville, and they will create even bigger hurdles for pedestrians.
Interchanges, bypasses; close-in, far-out — it’s all moot at the moment. There’s no money to build such projects.
There’s only hindsight, gazing with chagrin at a missed opportunity to build a useful, efficient road around the city and the urbanizing county.