This week we received a document from the always informative JJ Madden (you can thank her for that great pedestrian bridge that connects North Vienna with the Wolf Trap neighborhood) that shows regional transportation leaders believe widening of Route 123 is necessary within Tysons. The document from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) notes that VDOT has plans to widen Route 123 between the beltway and Route 7 interchange from 6 lanes wide to a massive 8 lane wide stroad (a road that makes all pedestrian and cyclist access impossible). I know many commuters think that this “improvement” will help them.
It won’t.
The problem isn’t, and has never been, that Route 123 within Tysons doesn’t have enough lanes. A supposed expert touting this stretch of quasi highway as being a congestion point is exercising the highest form of non-local negligence. In other words, I don’t think who ever proposed this project has ever even been to Tysons.
Why do I think that? The only back ups that ever occur within town happen due to back ups (caused by accidents) on the 495 on-ramps and the bottlenecks that happen on exit from the town at McLean and Vienna.
In the case of McLean, the bottle neck is now permanent due to column locations of the Silver Line. In the case of Vienna, the town has no plans on allowing any widening of Maple Avenue as this is a corridor of significant retail and community importance, and they certainly don’t want the stroad design standards that VDOT has in store for them.
This plan to widen from 6 lanes to 8 lanes is throwing away crucial funds, $22 million to be exact, so that people will think VDOT has made an improvement, but there will be zero congestion relief.
By mimicking the design of Route 123 between 495 and the Dulles Toll Road (DTR) VDOT intends to create more situations where people routinely speed at 55 mph only to slam on their brakes. I routinely watch vehicles come off of the beltway on ramps and speed at 55 mph, and here is the secret, it’s not their fault. The language of the road that VDOT has created by making Route 123 a quasi highway is that it is similar to Route 28, which does have a 55 mph speed limit. So people believe they are correct, or atleast zone out from paying attention.
This has lethal implications to anyone who is cycling or simply crossing the street at any of the Route 123 intersections, and no amount of speed limit signs will change that situation.
The plan is exactly what has turned Tysons into the wasteland of office parks that many consider it, and assures more of the same if not objected to by officials who intend to turn the area into a more walkable neighborhood. In fact, it is a double whammy because the funds being wasted on this project won’t even go to fix any traffic problems, it is widening for the sake of widening.
Officials will point to the need to incorporate bike lanes and bus lanes as a guise as to why the project is necessary, but the empirical evidence that has been seen from the widening of Route 123 on the east end of town shows that widening does not need to occur in order for that to be feasible. Instead the widening to 8 lanes has all but removed any ability to safely travel Route 123 in anything but a car.
Tysons terminates at both ends with a 4-lane road that is, for all intents and purposes, a permanent condition. Any road width wider than that section is fruitless and actually creates more traffic by creating bottleneck merging, which is already the case with the 6 lane road (8 lanes on the east end of town).
Instead of this wasteful spending, the county and VDOT could spend thousands (not millions) of dollars to repaint the far right lanes of the already 6 lane road as shared bus/bike lanes. Because the real issue is the bottleneck, and this would effectively retain a consistent lane section through Old Courthouse Road, it would not cause any additional traffic friction. What it would provide is bus rapid transit and non-vehicle access from the heavily populated neighborhoods of Vienna (and the W&OD trail) to Tysons.
The businesses and stores along Route 123, and those that the county desperately wants to occur, would see an added benefit of not having to be stuck next to a quasi highway, which makes the land around it look more like industrial use than commercial, and therefore less marketable.
People are starting to see that VDOT has a road fat crisis, proposing waste project after waste project instead of reviewing what the root causes of the congestion is. This comes both from a fundamental lack of understanding in how to design urban regions, but also from lazy design which doesn’t even travel to the location to see what’s causing the problem in the first place.
If this project goes through, just call it another move towards the old terrible status quo, a far cry from the ambitions to turn Tysons into a community. How many crosswalks, street lights, stop lights, and bike lanes could be created instead with this money?