Several road projects cut or delayed in VDOT plan

Virginia’s highway funding crunch is on display in a list of nine Lynchburg-area projects that have been delayed or cut from the 2008 version of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s six-year plan for roads.

Delays affect two road projects in the city.

The widening of U.S. 29/460 between Campbell Avenue and Wards Road is pushed back one year and won’t happen until 2015 or later.

Improvements to the Lakeside Avenue intersection with the Lynchburg Expressway “will likely be delayed” because of new funding requirements beyond its previous $39 million cost estimate, said VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter.

The Lynchburg-area cuts were among several hundred projects that were delayed or cut by the Commonwealth Transportation Board on Thursday. They had been in action mode on VDOT’s six-year plan in 2007.

Elsewhere in the Lynchburg district, from Pittsylvania County to Nelson County, nearly 30 secondary road improvement projects were delayed, and a dozen were cut from the plan.

At the top of the cuts list was the $200 million-plus idea for a U.S. 29 bypass in Campbell County that would have connected with the recently completed Madison Heights bypass.

Another cut eliminates, for now anyway, VDOT plans to improve traffic flow on Wards Road.

Still other cuts mean five sets of bridges on U.S. 29 and U.S. 501, mostly in Campbell County, will not be rebuilt and widened.

Instead, the existing bridge structures will receive maintenance upgrades, Hatter said.

The talked-about U.S. 29 bypass in Campbell County “was a $200 million to $300 million project, potentially,” said Hatter, who is based in VDOT’s Culpeper office.

“With the limited funding available, the decision was that we were better off pursuing projects that cost less and have a realistic chance to be completed in a reasonable period of time,” Hatter said.

Payne said the cuts in state road money have been occurring for a long time.

“It’s not something that happened just in the last two years.

“It just means it’s going to be longer and longer before these projects are addressed,” he said.

“If we really, truly need to build these roads, we’re not going to be able to do it with the money we have.”

Less money is a trend and not a surprise, Lynchburg City Manager Kimball Payne said.

“The possible silver lining, in my mind, is we might start exploring the relationship between traffic patterns and land use,” in part because of new state requirements for including traffic management in plans for new development projects.

“We’re going to have to rethink our relationship with our cars.”