Is Consensus Possible on U.S. 29 Bypass?

If the latest study of the U.S. 29 corridor — including a bypass around Charlottesville — was intended to build consensus, someone dropped the ball.

Parsons Transportation Group was hired by the state to review the 219-mile corridor from North Carolina to Interstate 66 at Gainesville. The idea was to pull together at least five other studies that have been done along parts of U.S. 29, the only major north-south corridor serving Central Virginia.

It comes as no surprise that the most contentious part of the latest review involves a bypass around Charlottesville. The city and Albemarle County have resisted any such bypass, including proposals taking either a western or eastern route around the nightmare that currently exists for traffic through Charlottesville.

A bypass around Charlottesville remains the only stumbling block on the corridor that has seen bypasses constructed in the past 20 years around Danville, Lynchburg and Madison Heights, Culpeper and Warrenton.

The bypass is needed, as even John J. “Butch” Davies, who represents the Charlottesville and Culpeper area on the Commonwealth Transportation Board, said last week. That board sets transportation policy around the state.

The most recent study, however, proposed an eastern route around Charlottesville that would take the highway up through Orange County and into Culpeper before tying back into the existing roadway.

One of the first problems — and perhaps the most significant — was the consultants never bothered to meet with the folks in Orange County whose communities could be affected by the new road around Charlottesville. The proposed route, said Davies, caught too many people by surprise.

“The consultant never met with people in Gordonsville, never met with government officials in the town of Orange,” said Davies. And when the Parsons team met with Orange County officials, they learned the county “didn’t like the idea of creating a new route” for U.S. 29, he said.

As a result, Davies and Pierce Homer, state secretary of transportation, used their authority to erase the eastern route that the consultants had proposed. They said the route was premature.

Erasing the proposal has concerned Rex Hammond, president of the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce, who has worked with others in the region to encourage the bypass around Charlottesville. He and others in localities on U.S. 29 envision a highway that “is stoplight free from North Carolina to Maryland.”

Proposed routes that go both east and west around Charlottesville should stay on the table, Hammond said.

Joseph Springer, project manager for Parsons Transportation Group, said the study was never intended to be detailed. He said the details would be worked out later, along with environmental impacts. “Those lines were not intended for people to interpret them as going specifically through some parcel or particular features,” he said.

Instead, they were intended to provoke discussion, “to see what people would react to,” he said.

He got reaction all right, but not the kind of reaction that those who have supported a bypass around Charlottesville have been working toward for more than two decades.

Davies, nonetheless, expressed some optimism about a future bypass. “I think there is a growing acceptance of the need for a bypass of Charlottesville and Albemarle,” he said.

That acceptance must be accompanied by a realization on the part of Charlottesville officials that the current thoroughfare jammed with traffic lights and shopping centers is not acceptable to those who have to use U.S. 29 on a regular basis.