THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409160485
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: IN THE CITIES
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
Once upon a time if you wanted to go to a store, you walked down a street, came to its door and walked in.
Then came the automobile. You drove down the street, turned into the store driveway, walked across the parking lot and entered the store.
Then came more cars and more stores. Two-lane roads became eight-lane boulevards with separate turn lanes, median strips and stoplights.
As life grew more complicated, a small device that regulates how traffic enters and exits a highway became important - and valuable.
It's called a curb cut.
It's a notch in the concrete that allows cars to enter a business from a highway. Without it, businesses have trouble drawing customers or making money. Property can fluctuate by thousands, even millions, of dollars depending on the number and location of its curb cuts.
But curb cuts are also bad, local traffic engineers say. The more curb cuts, the more traffic slows and the more potential there is for accidents.
``Businesses would prefer to have entrances everywhere,'' says Phil Marley, a civil engineer in the Virginia Beach Department of Public Works.``In a perfect world, we would prefer not to have any.''
As you drive around the suburban areas of Hampton Roads, you'll notice that the ease with which you drive is often determined by curb cuts. The fewer cuts, the swifter you travel. But with fewer cuts, it can also be more confusing to get where you're going.
Despite the monetary value of curb cuts, midlevel administrators like Marley and Virginia Beach traffic engineer Bob Gey decide how many cuts businesses get and where they are located. City councils usually get involved only when property is rezoned.
Like old seamen recalling war stories, Marley and Gey sat in Gey's office recently and recalled the head-bumping they do with businesses.
The hardest businesses to deal with, say Gey and Marley, are national chains. They have set ideas, whether they're selling burgers, gasoline or videos.
The worst, Marley says, are gas station chains. They want corner lots and usually four curb cuts, two on each side.
What Marley and Gey do, to howls of protest, is take away the two cuts closest to the intersection. That's so drivers making turns or going through the light won't be confused by someone entering or exiting a station at an intersection.
After curb cuts come other battles, including breaks in the median strip and barriers to restrict cars from changing lanes as they exit high-speed freeways.
A problem, Gey and Marley say, is that as these traffic regulating devices proliferate, highways can become overloaded with signs, lanes and signals and drivers can't handle all the choices.
A good example of how all these decisions add up is Battlefield Boulevard in Chesapeake.
In the sections closer to Great Bridge, where businesses located many decades ago, restaurants and small stores each have their own curb cut directly onto the highway.
But move north into the mile-long section marked off by U-shaped Oak Grove Road, where development took longer to reach, and you have a highway that makes a traffic engineer's eyes twinkle. City planners designed this section in 1974 and have pretty much stuck to it, says Joan M. Fowler, a Chesapeake planning supervisor.
The plan breaks the highway here into six sections. Each section has one median cut and one curb cut. To get to a fast-food restaurant or bank, you will usually have to turn into a shopping center or sidestreet first.
Gey says only once can he remember a developer offering a bribe to get a curb cut.
``I had a guy from New York say to me,`What does it take to get a driveway put in here?' '' Gey remembers. ``But we told him, `We don't do business like that down here.' '' by CNB