Campbell Is Planning For the Future

The best way to manage future economic growth is to plan for it and plan well.

That’s the lesson the Campbell County Board of Supervisors can teach quite a few other local government bodies.

The supervisors received a briefing from Virginia Department of Transportation officials earlier this week on the future transportation needs anticipated in the county, specifically any major improvements along the U.S. 29 and 460 corridors. The word from the state transportation experts is that two bypasses are on VDOT’s planning books.

Mid-term plans, in the next 10 to 20 years, call for widening U.S. 460 to six lanes between the intersection with U.S. 501 to Waterlick Road with a four-lane highway through the Evington area that would merge with the current U.S. 29 in the Yellow Branch area. Long-term (think 20 to 50 years), VDOT sees the need for a second highway running parallel to the U.S. 501 corridor around Rustburg to Yellow Branch.

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Laurrell was quick to point out to supervisors that VDOT’s plans are based on current transportation trends and could change over time. Still, the county would be remiss not to include the future highway projects in its planning documents.

According to county officials, the supervisors likely would need to designate corridors at least 500 feet wide along the proposed routes. Putting that into writing in the comprehensive plan would give future boards of supervisors the legal basis to deter any major development projects in the highways’ paths.

If only local governments had such foresight three or four decades ago before the U.S. 29 corridor became as congested as it is today.

The highway, for this part of the Mid-Atlantic region, is one of the major north/south corridors, especially so for Southside and Central Virginia as it’s the major link to Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Years ago, unfortunately, local governments thought of the highway as only a local street, not a major regional corridor. That gave rise to unfettered growth creating one traffic chokepoint after another. Think Madison Heights, Wards Road, Warrenton in Fauquier County and, of course, the entirety of Charlottesville and Albermarle County.

And those chokepoints are obscenely expensive to fix, as essentially the only remedy is to start over from scratch at the worst spots but with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. Hence, bypasses that are true bypasses with limited access and tight land-use controls that prevent unfettered growth.

The desire of the Campbell supervisors to be cognizant of VDOT’s long-range plans is in stark contrast to local government leaders further up the U.S. 29 corridor, and here we’re talking about the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

Albemarle County staff has been busy for years devising Places29, a planning document that lays out the county’s vision of what U.S. 29 would look like in the coming years. VDOT’s proposed western U.S. 29 bypass isn’t even mentioned, as if it doesn’t even exist.

After Albemarle, Campbell County is the second-worst chokepoint along the corridor. Campbell leaders, unlike their brethren up the road in Albemarle, want to be part of the problem’s solution.

And for that, they deserve recognition and more than a little praise.