Cracking the Charlottesville Bottleneck

Once again, the folks up the road in Charlottesville and Albemarle County are doing all they possibly can to forestall any solution to the U.S. 29 corridor nightmare.

The highway, which runs from Pensacola, Fla., to just outside Baltimore, is one of the main routes of commerce from north-central North Carolina and Southside and Central Virginia to Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia.

Virginia, over the course of the last two decades, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to relieve traffic bottlenecks and chokepoints along the corridor.

But all the planning has ground to a halt in Charlottesville and Albemarle, where monied residents and their elected officials fancy themselves as the center of the universe. No bypass of our fair city is needed, they’ve said for years, because there is no traffic bottleneck — it’s mainly just local traffic, they say.

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The horse-country crowd in Western Albemarle and the anti-development environmental folks dug in for the long fight, successfully delaying any work at all on a bypass. All the while, they were funnelling any and all growth they could further north on U.S. 29 in hopes of rendering a western bypass all but obsolete. Twenty-five years ago, commercial growth pretty much stopped after Fashion Square mall on U.S. 29; now it extends almost to Albermarle’s northern border with Greene County.

Now, county planners have unveiled “Places29,” a proposed master plan for the U.S. 29 corridor north from Charlottesville to Greene County. It’s a plan that would further concentrate commercial, mixed-residential and residential growth along U.S. 29.

In the jargon of the professional-planning crowd set, it’s all about “new urbanism.” According to Media General News Service, the proposal envisions construction of additional lanes for U.S. 29, side-access roads, enhanced at-grade crossovers and more amenities for pedestrians and cyclists. (Read the Charlottesville Daily Progress story about Places29 at http://tinyurl.com/lzccqe.) All straight through and blowing past any possible connection point along U.S. 29 for a western bypass.

Well, isn’t that convenient.

And extremely self-centered, even for the leaders of Charlottesville and Albemarle. For them, the world revolves around their little hamlet, much like popes of the Middle Ages believed Earth to be the center of the universe. (News flash: It’s not!)

The nightmare that is U.S. 29 through Charlottesville and Albemarle is a problem for all of Virginia, especially Southside and Central Virginia. And it must be looked at as a regional problem that needs a regional solution, not a parochial, “new urbanism” plan that serves only the interests of Charlottesville and Albemarle.

But not everyone in Charlottesville and Albemarle is as self-centered as the anti-bypass crowd and their politicians.

The Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce has labeled the plan as fundamentally flawed because it ignores the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the U.S. 29 western bypass. The business community knows their part of the state is not an island unto itself, totally separated from the rest of the state.

Joining the Charlottesville chamber in raising severe doubts about Places29 and its projected $500 million cost are the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce and Rex Hammond, its president.

“There’s no substitute for a bypass,” Hammond told Media General News Service. “In order to solve a bottleneck, you have to break outside the constriction. Places29 doesn’t do that.”

He’s right.

Places29 is an expensive academic exercise that serves only the perceived needs of a privileged few in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, not the needs of the many up and down U.S. 29.