Beltway Blunder

Guest contributor James Clark on how a now-paused Beltway expansion project could have a profound effect on Alexandria

About Alexandria welcomes Alexandrian James Clark as a guest contributor. James is a former EPA official with an interest in urban planning. He lives in Old Town.

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The Virginia Department of Transportation is planning for another expansion of the southern Beltway to ease projected future traffic. VDOT prefers to add two express toll lanes on either direction crossing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, among other projects, along the eleven mile corridor between Alexandria and Springfield.

Following months of public outcry, however, VDOT tabled discussion until next year. Alexandrians should use this time wisely and consider alternatives that actually benefit our neighborhoods.

Source: VDOT

Residents already know how to provide economically sound alternatives. This goes back to fundamentals of community building: do top-down mandates promote prosperity or are bottom-up processes better? Of course the answer is a bit of both, not either-or. But what about the job of the engineer? Is the purpose of the highway engineer to improve the highway, or to improve the communities serviced by the highway? What happens when the former overrides the latter?

Oxon Hill, National Harbor, Huntington, Hybla Valley, West Alexandria and Springfield: all have been blighted by this self-reinforcing gentrification. In Old Town, Beltway traffic is eroding yet another cherished community. In the afternoons, Beltway-bound traffic from Route 1 reaches up to Slaters Lane well into the evening. It’s even causing King Street to buckle, which now requires a separate traffic signal switch from Henry and Patrick Streets to ensure a compensatory time lag—do we really think two express toll lanes will relieve that?

VDOT considers this outside its purview because it is a highway bureau, not holistic planner. A highway engineering bureau can only conjure up traffic solutions that involve highway engineering. We don’t need engineers to expand an already congested highway. As a result, VDOT plans are routinely out of step with local planning decisions. We need them to engineer the solutions that bolster alternatives to the Beltway.

This study began in 2022 and the result was predictable: just add more lanes. True, VDOT does provide access for bus and bike lanes, but these are tangential not the crux. The crux is highway expansion. Three years could have been spent canvassing every nook and cranny of every southern Beltway community to arrive at the only logical solution to traffic congestion: reduce our reliance on the highway itself.

This is not hypothetical. VDOT commissioned public opinion surveys earlier this year as part of a comment period/branding tour. Over 300 people responded. The surveys can be seen

Only 18 percent of the respondents participants liked the proposed project. Answers were split for the entire point of the project: “extending … the express lane system.” How could VDOT miss the mark so badly on a $1.5 billion project?

Source: VDOT

VDOT had its assumptions backward. They don’t view reliance as a problem. Just listen to what VDOT’s spokesperson about the need for the project

Projected traffic growth is not a reason to expand the Beltway for it to function better —it’s a reason to make it less important for it to function better. In fact, VDOT has no plan to decrease the number of people using the Beltway, which is the only way to reduce traffic.

Vehicle attrition, as urban scholar Jane Jacobs called it, occurs by improving the self-sufficiency of walkable, vibrant places. Self-sufficient neighborhoods have less need for highways. These communities are the product of bottom-up processes being cultivated by the right kind of top-down mandates, ones that are responsive and supportive of communities.

VDOT is unable to grasp this concept because they are tasked with highway performance the same way a child is tasked with feeding an ant farm—detached from outcomes and functional processes. This was on full display in their 2022 surveys during project formulation, which asked residents how to improve their highway experience, not their attitudes on their Beltway reliance. The surveys can be seen

We need options to the Beltway, but VDOT is not providing them.

Our jobs, our groceries, our social life and our entertainment all increasingly rely on access to the highway because VDOT has routinely chosen to make it more important for the region. The Beltway encourages land use planning that prioritizes cars, big box retail and atomized luxury apartment complexes. It’s a downward spiral.

VDOT’s proposal is estimated to cost $1.5 billion. What could we the residents of the southern Beltway do with $1.5 billion that would tangibly reduce traffic and improve our communities? Transportation funds should instead be entrusted to the above communities to alleviate the source of traffic, which is dependency on the Beltway itself. Human scale architecture, walkable infrastructure, family owned enterprises, multi-generational housing and bustling sidewalks all go hand-in-hand in a virtuous circle.

We already know that communities become more self-sufficient the more they follow these time-honored traditions. Old Town or 14th Street in DC, or Shirlington are among the positive examples, should VDOT choose to look. It is VDOT’s job to help us in our own destinies, not to force us onto a highway.

It’s counterintuitive for VDOT to think of spending transportation funds for non-transportation aspects of community development because VDOT is, in this instance, narrowly tasked with highway construction and maintenance. There is more than one way to skin a cat, so they say, and this would be obvious to VDOT if it incorporated community development and actual resident opinions about the highway in the project scope.

You can heat a house with proper air circulation principles in the design phase, or install a central HVAC system; the former feeds off natural bottom-up processes and the latter imposes top-down infrastructure that requires maintenance, fuel, specialty labor, and forces other inefficient design decisions. VDOT assumed we needed the costly HVAC system and forgot the design principles based on natural processes of economic development.

Given the chance, our neighborhoods would likely prefer to control their own destinies. It is the basis of a free society. But, VDOT saps this foundation in the well intended dependency they have created.

When we depend on our cars and the Beltway and big box retail stores and soulless apartments, how free are we? Do you expect your children to flourish in such conditions? What else can you imagine besides this for your neighborhood? What else around you do you need that isn’t being fulfilled? I’m eager to hear your comments.