THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 23, 1995 TAG: 9503230552
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By MAC DANIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Bulldozers are turning a tree-shaded section of Interstate 64 into a memory as the state triples the width of the highway near Greenbrier.
The $25 million project will provide badly needed relief from rush-hour gridlock as well as make the road safer.
All this comes, the state acknowledged, at an aesthetic price.
There won't be space for the 3.4-mile wooded median that has provided a touch of natural relief from concrete vistas.
Residents whose homes abut the interstate will have their back yards bordered by sound walls to combat the drone of traffic from those additional lanes.
A strip of mature pines and oaks is being razed quicker than a Brazilian rain forest. In one section of the road near the Greenbrier exit, all of the trees are gone.
``Believe me, it bothers me that we had to do that,'' said Frank Dunn, a state transportation planner. ``But when we considered all factors, we really didn't have any other option.''
In the end, this section of road will resemble the adjacent Indian River Road interchange, where neighborhoods are blocked by 60-foot sound walls.
Officials of the state Transportation Department say the widening of Interstate 64 is necessary for safety's sake.
Daily traffic volume between the Indian River and Greenbrier exits has skyrocketed. In 1975, 31,820 vehicles traveled the road daily. In 1993, 84,000 vehicles were using the same stretch. Transportation officials predict that by 2015, 156,000 vehicles will travel the section every day.
The road will increase from the current four lanes to as many as 12. Two new conventional lanes and one high-occupancy vehicle lane will be added in each direction, and the left-hand shoulders will be widened.
Wider acceleration and deceleration lanes are also being added to allow traffic to merge more smoothly. And collector-distributor lanes - traffic separated from the main interstate by concrete barriers - will be installed to permit easier and safer exits. Similar lanes are now located at the Newtown Road exit on Route 44.
Because housing developments were built hard against the road and because of a requirement to add storm-water drainage in the center, there is little room for aesthetics.
There are plans to save some of the green around the road, but not much.
Dunn said the only other alternative was to buy up personal property for the expansion, a move that could have displaced families and destroyed more trees.
Velma McNair's shaded backyard abuts Interstate 64 near a section of road that will soon nearly double in width. During the day, even in the heat of summer, the windows of her Ipswich home are closed to keep out the highway noise that ricochets from one room to the next. But all in all, she said, it's not too bad.
``Some people feel more sorry for us than we feel for ourselves,'' she said, ``but it would affect the quality of life if it gets much worse than this.''
The project, which began Feb. 13, is expected to be complete by October 1996. During construction, some exits to the Greenbrier Parkway will be closed for three to four months, said Bob Owen, the Transportation Department's local district project engineer. The closures will likely occur in late 1996.
Once this road-widening is finished, more will follow.
With the widening of the Indian River Road interchange, a bottleneck was created between Indian River Road and Greenbrier. From Battlefield Boulevard west to Bowers Hill, the traffic drops by roughly 30 percent, so there should not be a similar problem, transportation officials said.
State plans, though, call for Interstate 64 to eventually be widened to four lanes in each direction to Bowers Hill.
Frank Vespe, director of communications for Scenic America, a Washington-based conservation group that works on protecting the ``visual environment,'' said some states are beginning to encourage highway design that emphasizes people instead of traffic flow.
``We need roads - there's no way around it,'' he said. ``But the question is, how can we have roads that contribute to our quality of life rather than detracting from it.'' ILLUSTRATION: Map
JOHN EARLE/Staff
KEYWORDS: HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION by CNB