Several dozen people, most of them Campbell County residents, got their first close look Thursday at proposed changes in the U.S. 29 corridor from North Carolina to the Washington suburbs.
Many of the residents didn’t like what they saw, especially a proposed new road to carry U.S. 29 traffic west, behind Lynchburg’s airport, to U.S. 460.
“They always told me the shortest distance from A to B was a straight line,” said Thomas Campbell, a retired truck driver. The western route wouldn’t provide a straight line for traffic headed north past Lynchburg, he said.
Campbell and several other people said the highway should be routed east through farmland near Rustburg and follow the U.S. 501 corridor to a connection with the Madison Heights bypass at U.S. 29/460.
Both the east and west corridors appeared as green lines on a map at the public meeting held by the Virginia Department of Transportation in Lynchburg. The lines showed the highway forking like a wishbone, with prongs toward Lynchburg’s east and west boundaries.
The eastern concept involving 501 has appeared on governments’ long-range planning documents for years.
All the concepts are still long-range, because there’s no source of money to build them or even do an environmental study that would be required, said Rob Cary, VDOT administrator for Lynchburg.
The maps are intended to serve as planning guides for the counties along U.S. 29, so they can direct shopping centers and other development projects to sites that wouldn’t block the proposed corridors.
The easterly U.S. 501 course would create an adequate bypass of the traffic lights and congestion that are developing on Wards Road south of the airport, several people said.
People crowded around the maps and asked questions of VDOT officials and representatives of Parsons Transportation Group, the consultants who prepared the study.
In the Charlottesville area, the consultants recommended upgrading U.S. 29 on its course through the city instead of using the western bypass that was proposed 20 years ago.
The consultants’ ultimate goal, said project manager Joe Springer, is to get rid of all the traffic lights on U.S. 29.
That would mean replacing most of the lights with interchanges, and would include a long new bridge between Hydraulic Road and U.S. 250 in Charlottesville.
The proposal also offered the possibility of routing U.S. 29 along a north-south railroad corridor east of Charlottesville.
The maps were in preliminary form for display at five regional public meetings that are being held in cities along the corridor this fall.
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