When Fairfax County adopted a four-year plan to relieve traffic last month, supervisors and transportation officials stressed that the focus was on choke points that could be fixed with relatively little money. The intersection of Gallows Road and Route 29 in Merrifield seemed an ideal candidate for some of those funds. For years, traffic has backed up at that intersection, located near the Dunn Loring Metro station and the planned Merrifield urban center and not far from Tysons Corner.
Board chairman Gerry Connolly (D), the transportation plan's chief architect, listed the intersection project as one of his "hot spots — spot improvement projects that focus on lower-cost, quick fixes to clear bottlenecks and increase safety around the county" before proposing to funnel $3.9 million toward traffic improvements at the intersection. According to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), it will cost $26 million to fix the intersection.
THE PROBLEM is that not everyone in the surrounding communities is enthusiastic about the proposed solution to the bottleneck. An early plan to fix the intersection, put forward by VDOT after a series of public meetings, would widen the roads feeding into the intersection from two lanes to six, two of which would be left-turn-only lanes and one a right-turn lane. Neighbors say the proposal would not be pedestrian-friendly and would pave over several area businesses.
"You basically have to sprint across the intersection as it is," said Emory Tate, of the Providence Park Homeowners Association. "Talk about adding a whole bunch of lanes becomes a serious problem."
In 2001, the county adopted a new plan for the Merrifield area that called for a walkable community with residential and retail buildings sharing space within walking distance from the Dunn Loring Metro station.
Bud Siegel, VDOT's project manager for the intersection, said the agency had taken the plan into consideration and had tried to make it as easy as possible for people to cross the street by putting a median in between each lane to give pedestrians a refuge from the traffic. Also, in response to concerns from cyclists, he said the far right lanes would be 15 feet wide, rather than the usual 12, to give cyclists room, even though the street wouldn't be striped for bicycles, because, Siegel said, "it's not wide enough."
"Generally speaking, we tried to incorporate a number of different interests of a number of different groups," he said.
TATE ALSO said VDOT's plan for the intersection would require the agency to buy up a number of existing businesses, driving up the price of the project and delaying its completion.
"From a taxpayer's standpoint, there's an appallingly poor level of communication and incomplete information being passed between the county and VDOT about the county's plans," he said. "Taking the broader Merrifield community perspective, a lot of businesses in Merrifield rely on the existing ability for traffic to turn left into their parking lots, including the post office. The VDOT design with its median separation would eliminate that for a lot of businesses. There's a potential for some fairly significant adverse economic impact."
But Siegel said the proposed solution was "the lowest cost and the least invasive from the standpoint of property impacts."
Other alternatives for the intersection included an interchange, which would require VDOT to purchase considerably more property.
"That would have had a huge impact on the property right around there," said Supervisor Linda Smyth (D-Providence). "Something needs to be done to make that intersection more functional."
Kevin Warhurst, one of the managers at Merrifield Garden Center, which is located at the intersection, said he preferred the widened intersection proposal because it would eat up less of the Garden Center's property. He added that he didn't find the current traffic situation all that bad.
"It would be fine with us if things remained the way they are for the foreseeable future," he said. "But we realize that improvements need to take place across the county.
"Since we operate a business here, we're certainly not looking forward to the disruption that will surely come with a road-widening."