ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140160
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
WHEN VALLEY VIEW MALL comes up in conversation, the first thing out of most people's mouths is about the traffic.
How bad it is.
How crazy the interchange off Hershberger Road is.
How stupid having only one exit is.
With a new interchange off Interstate 581 in the works, some of those complaints could be resolved, the city says. There will be another way out of the mall area, and traffic on Hershberger should decrease.
As for the crazy interchange, how crazy it is depends on whom you talk to. The man who designed it is proud of his work. Some who use it find it confusing.
Others think the city could have come up with something better.
``The big question I have regarding [Valley View and Tanglewood] is why the traffic flow is so abysmally engineered,'' David Foster of Salem said. ``In fact, looking at these cases, `traffic engineering' becomes a real oxymoron!
``At Tanglewood, there is some excuse because the roads were already there, but what is the problem at Valley View?'' he asked.
"That was a greenfield project, and someone actually designed that mess that way!"
That "mess" is separated from Alfred and Geraldine Stinnette's Huff Lane neighborhood home by a landscaped berm. When the mall was first proposed, Alfred Stinnette said, residents were told only about the mall, not about the adjacent development that would follow.
The traffic noise has increased to 24 hours a day since Wal-Mart opened, Geraldine Stinnette said.
"He's not only put a mall in," Stinnette said of Valley View developer Henry Faison. "He's put a town in."
Stinnette, who has lived on Dorchester Drive for 35 years, holds the city responsible for the perceived traffic problems at the mall.
"I blame that on the city people, because all they were looking at was the dollars they were going to get out of it," Stinnette said. "As long as they get 'em in there, they don't care how they get out."
|--| When Richard Burrow drives to Valley View Mall, he sees things a little differently.
The oft-criticized interchange was, after all, his brainchild.
Burrow, the city traffic engineer at the time, designed the Hershberger-Valley View Boulevard interchange, a modified cloverleaf that looks, to the average driver, more like scrambled eggs than a road system.
It's the interchange everyone loves to pick on, but Burrow defends it as a sound design. Even nearly 20 years and several jobs later, he can be called on to retell the story of what probably is the most complex traffic pattern in the region.
When then-City Manager Bern Ewert walked into Burrow's office and told him a rezoning request might come in to build a mall on the Huff Farm property, Burrow's first reaction was appropriate for a man in his position: Would there be a traffic study?
Assured there would be, Burrow waited for the numbers on a project that stunned the community and his colleagues in city government.
"I remember when this plan first came out, it was pretty much of a jolt to everybody that this farm wasn't going to be a farm," he said.
Previously, city planners had not counted on much growth on the Huff Farm property because of its proximity to the airport and because it was a working farm.
After Roanoke annexed the Hershberger Road corridor in 1976, the city worked with Virginia Department of Transportation officials to forecast traffic for the area, based on a four-lane divided road.
The highway plan, and its computerized forecasting technique, took the airport into account, but it still didn't plan much for the Huff property or the Andrews Farm, now the site of Towne Square shopping center.
And back then, the airport was much different from what it is today. The new terminal hadn't been built yet, and the runway was 900 feet shorter. There also was little development on the other side of I-581, where the Marriott and Clarion hotels are today.
But by the time of the Huff Farm rezoning request, Burrow said, planners knew one thing for certain: "A million-square-foot mall generates a lot of traffic."
Siting entrances to the mall would prove to be one of the planners' biggest puzzles.
They had to decide first whether to allow direct access into the mall from the surrounding neighborhoods.
This would have made visiting the mall convenient for residents, but they were afraid traffic would bleed through from Williamson Road and "destroy" the neighborhoods, Burrow said. So they decided to make the mall accessible from Hershberger Road only.
The planners also had to maintain a clear zone around the airport. This limited where they could place not only entrances, but the mall itself.
The original rezoning application called for "two, at-grade, signalized intersections" - engineering jargon for two entrances with stoplights on Hershberger Road. Faison had requested the two entrances, Burrow said, because he knew that major department stores wouldn't want to come to a mall with severely limited access.
That plan would have been fine for the existing 1970s traffic, but when planners factored in the 20-year projections, it became clear that the stoplights would snarl traffic on Hershberger Road into a "parking lot," Burrow said.
Even without that data, Burrow was against entrances with stoplights.
"I personally thought one of the problems with Tanglewood was that it was served by traffic signals, and that ultimately Tanglewood would have traffic problems," he said. The objective at Valley View was to allow traffic to move "unrestrained" by traffic lights.
They also had to consider airport access. A goal of city planners then - and now - was to allow cars to drive from downtown Roanoke to the airport via I-581 without encountering a stoplight.
Hence the you-can-come-in-but-you-can't-get-out road - Valley View Boulevard North - leading past Best Western, Pier 1 Imports and Toys 'R' Us.
"Everybody thinks it's really stupid, but it's not," Burrow said. Providing access from the mall back onto Hershberger would have required installing a traffic light, which would have brought through traffic to an absolute halt. "You talk about creating a huge bottleneck," he said. "That would've been it."
From the city's standpoint, he said, if there was a holdup, better that it be on mall property rather than on Hershberger Road.
But some folks at the mall aren't so sure.
"It's frustrating because a lot of customers won't turn in [the parking lot] because they don't want to get caught in traffic leaving," said Trisha Cox, manager of the Pier 1 Imports store.
She also can't count the number of times frazzled mall customers have stopped in the store because they had gotten lost trying to get back to Hershberger. Her staff figures the store must have a big "DIRECTIONS" sign painted on it.
"We joke sometimes that we're going to have maps preprinted with directions on how to get back out of here," she said.
Norma Carlisle, who manages the Sears store at the mall, said she doesn't think traffic is as bad as some people make it out to be. "When I first came here, I was told people had to wait hours to get in and out," she said. After three years at the mall, she's never seen traffic get that bad.
But she knows it takes getting caught in just one traffic jam to sour shoppers, and she knows some of them blame the mall for the mess.
One of the top customer complaints is the traffic, said Scott Ashcraft, Valley View Mall's marketing director.
"They can't believe there's a mall this size that has two entrances and just one exit," Ashcraft said. "It's probably our No.1 stigma. ... It's just something we've lived with."
|--| Until now.
These days, traffic engineers and mall merchants speak in almost reverent tones of a magic elixir that, they promise, is sure to cure the mall's traffic ills.
They're awaiting a new partial interchange off I-581 that will connect with Valley View Boulevard Extension near Round Hill Primary School, then wind its way toward Tire America.
The interchange project hasn't been started, except on paper. City officials say it won't be completed until late fall 1998, at the earliest.
Is it worth waiting for? It's the interchange, after all, that is encouraging further development, which is sure to attract more traffic. Faison recently requested rezoning of 40 acres of the old Watts Farm - the land, adjacent to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter, through which the new road will run - for more retail businesses. The developer won't say just who would be moving into the area, but says a discount retailer and several specialty shops, plus banks and restaurants, are on the way.
Additionally, the new interchange will serve only traffic coming from the south or leaving southbound on I-581. Cars coming from the north still will have to navigate Hershberger Road.
But that should be enough for now, said Jim Douthat, Faison's Roanoke attorney. More than 60 percent of Valley View traffic comes from or leaves in that direction. And eventually - in 15 years, perhaps - the interchange may be expanded to serve traffic coming from and going to the north. Space has been set aside for additional exit and entrance ramps, if they're ever needed.
Even without a full interchange, the project will help traffic coming from both directions, traffic engineers promise. Right now, 100 percent of the mall traffic must travel Hershberger Road. Once the new interchange is complete, more than half those cars may take the new route instead.
Burrow, who went on to supervise construction of Explore Park as project engineer and is now executive director of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation in Bedford, agrees that the new interchange is an idea whose time has come. But the existing system of roads has served its purpose, he said. Not only did the interchange provide access to the new mall, he said, but it ultimately allowed improvement of the airport and brought higher value to the Andrews property.
"This interchange was the right thing to do," Burrow said. If there was one thing he'd do differently, it would be to keep northbound Valley View Boulevard three lanes from the stoplight at Shakers all the way to the Hershberger interchange.
It now narrows to two lanes 200 feet after the stoplight and widens to three lanes again shortly before the interchange. At the time, engineers thought two lanes could handle the traffic, but the merging at times causes backups.
"Other than that, I'm 100 percent satisfied with the interchange and how it works," Burrow said.
He often drives out there himself and said he's never felt that the design was a failure - even though his own secretary has complained about getting lost there.
You simply can't build a road to support the day-after-Thanksgiving traffic, he said.
"I'm out there all the time. I know it's more crowded, but traffic is moving."
LENGTH: Long : 204 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. ERIC BRADY/THE ROANOKE TIMES. Traffic, shown in aby CNBtimed-exposure photograph, enters and leaves Valley View Mall at
dusk. color. 2. FILE 1978/THE ROANOKE TIMES. In 1978, when a mall
was first proposed for the Huff Farm off Hershberger Road at
Interstate 581, the prospect took the Roanoke community by surprise.
City planners had not counted on much growth on the property because
of its proximity to the airport and because it was a working farm.
Planning the mall's entrances and traffic patterns became a puzzle,
taking into account the needs of its neighbors - the airport, I-581
and the adjacent neighborhoods. B&W. 3. ERIC BRADY. Now, with plans
in place for a new I-581 interchange and new retail development,
traffic patterns soon will change yet again - for the better,
traffic engineers and mall merchants hope. color. MEGAN SCHNABEL
AND BETTY HAYDEN SNIDER/THE ROANOKE TIMES