Dual proposals for Route 29 spark concerns in Campbell County

Lots of government decision-makers have been regarding the latest consultant’s study of ways to improve traffic flow on U.S. 29 as a curiosity rather than a concern.

“There’s no money for it,” said Kimball Payne, Lynchburg city manager, echoing several other local government officials’ reaction to lines on a map that show not one, but two, bypasses proposed south of Lynchburg.

Campbell County residents who live near those lines didn’t take them lightly, even if construction is decades away. The map’s mere existence affects their property and what they can do with it.

“I wouldn’t build anything major there,” advised Joe Springer, spokesman for consultant Parsons Transportation Group, in answer to a landowner’s question during a public meeting Sept. 24 at the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Lynchburg headquarters.

A Campbell resident told VDOT officials: “What you are doing will have a tremendous effect on what we own.”

The study’s immediate purpose is to guide county land-use planners who are likely to be approached by developers wanting to build shopping centers or similar projects on land that might be needed later for U.S. 29 improvements.

If adopted, the study also would make it harder to add traffic lights to the existing highway. “The bottom line is, we are looking for solutions that take all of these traffic signals out” of the corridor, especially in Charlottesville, Springer said.

“VDOT must take a position on this corridor,” Campbell County Administrator David Laurrell wrote in an August letter to Ken White, the region’s representative on the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which sets statewide road policy.

Laurrell said a designated route would help the county “avoid development within the corridor.”

Apparently the Campbell County officials weren’t expecting Parsons to choose two corridors.

Charles Falwell, chairman of Campbell’s Board of Supervisors, said the board favors an eastern route for a U.S. 29 bypass, starting at Yellow Branch, which would run close to Rustburg and connect to the Madison Heights bypass at U.S. 460.

“We have always favored that route, and still do,” Falwell said at the September meeting.

People in the audience voiced a suspicion that Campbell County’s Seneca Commerce Park influenced Parsons to also recommend a second bypass route that runs west of U.S. 29 and Lynchburg’s airport to the Timberlake area.

Both Falwell and Springer said the industrial park had nothing to do with Parsons’ proposing the western route. “That didn’t factor into where we put the line,” Springer said.

Although the western bypass is not the straightest route for traffic headed north past Lynchburg, the western road would take much more traffic off today’s U.S. 29/Wards Road, Springer said.

Using figures from a 1997 traffic count, the Parsons study said traffic was 2 ½ times heavier near Lynchburg than it was at the county line between Campbell and Pittsylvania counties. There were 28,000 vehicles per day on U.S. 29 near the Lynchburg airport, compared to about 11,000 at the county line.

Those numbers mean the destination of most drivers is Lynchburg, and a bypass running near Rustburg wouldn’t take much traffic off the already-congested Wards Road, Springer said.

Parsons’ study assigned the western route a higher priority than the Rustburg-area corridor because of its potential to provide congestion relief, Springer said.

Trucks accounted for about 10 percent of traffic at both the county line and in the airport vicinity.

Lynchburg-area business leaders have focused much of their interest on the Parsons study’s recommendations for the Charlottesville area, a major bottleneck on the 219-mile corridor between North Carolina and Interstate 66 at Gainesville.

Springer said Parsons wanted to “generally implement” the Charlottesville region’s own traffic study, called “Places 29,” which used a concept of protecting neighborhoods along the route.

Parsons developed its additional concept of “managed access” to the 29 corridor that seeks to put Charlottesville’s local traffic on a network of roads parallel to U.S. 29.

To handle through-traffic in the busy sector between Hydraulic Road and U.S. 250, Parsons proposes a bridge that would pass over existing streets. VDOT already owns much of the right of way, Springer said.

As an alternative, Parsons suggested the possibility of rerouting U.S. 29 east of Charlottesville along a corridor with north-south railroad tracks.

An existing proposal for a Charlottesville bypass west of the existing highway “made sense 20 years, ago,” Springer said, but is now out of date because of commercial development on U.S. 29 north of that route.

Rex Hammond, president of the Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce, offered comments for the Parsons study that he said reflected concerns about “obstacles that are marginalizing U.S. 29 as a safe and effective transportation corridor.”

“Growth north of Charlottesville is resulting in more stoplights and congestion on U.S. 29,” Hammond wrote, and Albemarle County has half of all traffic accidents on that highway in Virginia, he wrote.

A single locality should not be able to jeopardize mobility on the U.S. 29 corridor, Hammond said.

“This study has the potential to shed light on and, ultimately, to address the aforementioned challenges and obstacles,” Hammond wrote.