As seen in Leesburg Today, and discussed around my kitchen table (and many others, judging from my inbox traffic): The six-lane roads scheduled for Ashburn are coming off the schedule. They’re too expensive and they’re not needed.
What we do need is to have our state legislators make the Greenway operators institute a graduated fee for the Greenway.
And you all know that my personal feeling is that we need more buses and bike routes.
I could do most of my job at home, hooked into my company’s network.
It’s a good one!
How about a mandate for telework at least 1 day out of 5 for all companies that don’t have labs, factories or other fixed capital machinery?
Yes, I know, that kind of mandate is distasteful, but something like that is also part of the solution. Getting cars off our roads is more than buses and bikes, it’s also rethinking what it means to “go to work.” I manage a team of 5 engineers, all of whom work from their homes, in 5 different states, none of which is Virginia.
And we do pretty well. 🙂
I did also add “Ticket Dispensers”
where everyone used SmartTag, it would be much easier to implement, but unfortunately it’s not the case.
On the NJ Turnpike now, if you have SmartTag, you can breeze by the tollbooths at both the entrance & your exit. Cuts a lot of time off your trip, and eases congestion.
I literally praise Mark Warner every time I go past a line of cars waiting to pay by cash at toll booths, since he was the one (when he was governor) who got SmartTag to sync up with EZPass and the other transponder-based systems along I-95.
That if they instituted graduated tolls, the ridership would go up enough to pay for the added toll booths.
Actually, they wouldn’t need to add booths, they would just need to move the booths they have at the entrances to the exits and add transponder readers and ticket dispensers to the entrances.
As someone who grew up around and learned to drive on the “graduated-tolled” New Jersey Turnpike (exit 3, if you’re gonna ask), that’s what is sorely needed to increase usage of the Dulles Greenway and to reduce traffic on the “free” roads”.
The only hang-up would be the necessity of changing the location of the toll booths from where you enter the Greenway at the terminus of the Dulles Toll Road to each individual exit. That’s going to cost money, and I can see the Greenway operator recouping those costs through higher tolls.
So it’s a Catch-22.