Country Roads, Taking Forever

SPOTSYLVANIA COURTHOUSE, Va.

This crossroads where Union and Confederate forces fought to a bloody draw 136 years ago is still just a wide spot in the road surrounded by corn and hay fields--a bucolic scene that motorists have plenty of time to contemplate.

That's because every rush hour, as horses graze on the battlefield, cars back up for half a mile along Brock Road, a winding two-lane road with no shoulder. Nearly 30,000 cars and trucks pass through the intersection every day--twice the number of a decade ago.

At 7 p.m. on a recent Thursday, it took six minutes for a car to clear the lone traffic signal here. And it's only going to get worse with 400 houses planned nearby.

Forget Route 7 or Rockville Pike. Welcome to Brock Road, Gum Springs Road and Bumpy Oak Road, country byways on a collision course with modern-day traffic. Winding routes designed a century ago for horses andbuggies suddenlyare carrying thousands of cars a day.

"People used to wave at you down here," said Ralph Bishop, an FBI retiree who left Annandale 20 years ago to live on a farm two miles down the road from the courthouse. "Now they try to run you off the road."

As development marches well beyond the fringes of the Washingtonsuburbs, a new phenomenon has emerged--rural traffic.

It may sound like an oxymoron. But it's a phenomenon of increasing frustration to residents who remember quieter times, and it's of growing concern to planners trying to turn cow paths into cut-throughs, dirt roads into dual-lane highways. The fixes are anything but cheap, and as subdivisions emerge from cow pastures, the problems will only proliferate.

Here in the countryside, you can come to dead stops in bottlenecks that rival Braddock Road at rush hour--like the junction of Routes 17 and 1 in Stafford County, legendary for its absence of turning lanes. It takes eight minutes to get through the traffic light. And there's winding Stoakley Road in Calvert, Maryland's fastest-growing county, transformed by Washington commuters into a rural shortcut between main arteries where traffic grinds into gridlock most rush hours.

As far out as King George County, Va., a farming community of 17,000, 80 miles southeast of Washington, commuters contend with a constant stream of trucks lumbering along Route 3 headed to a new gravel mining operation and a three-year-old landfill. Working silos stand next to mountains of red soil tilled for new subdivisions.

At the end of the day, many of the Dulles Corridor's high-tech denizens speed from their gleaming offices on Route 28 down Gum Springs Road in Loudoun County, clocking 60 mph on a twisting lane where one farmer has posted a roadside sign advertising "Buffalo Meat Sold Here." Gum Springs carries 7,500 vehicles a day, more than double the traffic five years ago.

Developers want to build 3,500 houses along the route, generating a projected 35,000 more car trips a day. The county's long-term plan callsfor widening Gum Springs to six lanes--but not for years.

"You're talking about roads that were aligned for horses and buggies, but it doesn't take too many 100-unit subdivisions before you realize the roads are not there to accommodate them," said Gene Wilson, a rural traffic expert at the University of Wyoming. "These local governments have very little money and a whole lot of problems."

Even as they watch narrow roads turn into parking lots, some county and state officials refuse to widen them. Our rural character is just fine, thank you, they say.

These are no Tysons Corners in the countryside--yet. Just 75,000 people live in Calvert County; to the north in Charles, it's 124,000. Spotsylvania County's population is 83,000. But to people who remember when there was no stop sign at their corner--let alone a traffic light--the change has been dramatic.

"Anything is more than it was," said Pete Fields, a Stafford County supervisor whose own home was purchased by the state in 1998 and torn down to make room for the Route 218 bypass.

While commuters do their part to clog country roadways, other drivers also contribute, running errands at new malls, ferrying their children to soccer games, picking them up from school.

Kathy LeFebre moved to Spotsylvania County in search of a cheaper, simpler life. But now she deals with the same traffic aggravations as her suburban friends.

A part-time caterer, LeFebre lives on 13 acres at the end of a gravel lane. The 46-year-old mother of four can easily spend four hours a day at the wheel of her Ford Explorer.

There are school drop-offs at 7:30 a.m., pickups at 3 p.m. Horseback riding after school. Tuesday night soccer games; haircuts and marketing; church on Sunday.

"I used to think it was perfect here," she said. "It's like Northern Virginia now."

She's developed survival strategies, like avoiding Route 3, the strip of fast food and big box stores through Spotsylvania and Stafford counties that is permanently jammed. On a Saturday, she won't go near the road.

Like a big-city driver, LeFebre takes shortcuts to avoid backups on other two-lane roads--Block House Road instead of Brock, Hickory Ridge instead of Salem Church.

She recently met her first case of road rage after accidentally cutting off another car on Route 3. When she and her 10-year-old returned to their car from Denny's, the other driver was waiting in the parking lot. The woman said menacingly, "You've got a big problem," LeFebre recalled. "I said, 'I'm sorry, I had to get over to the right and I signaled.' My daughter was scared. It's something that didn't use to happen around here."

Burgeoning rural counties surround Washington and its suburbs. Howard and Calvert were the two fastest-growing Maryland counties in the last decade, ballooning at double-digit rates, recently released Census Bureau figures show. In Virginia, Stafford, Spotsylvania and King George counties grew at a similar pace in the 1990s. Loudoun's population has skyrocketed by 81percent. Fredericksburg, a quiet, historic city of 24,000, has become a de facto mini-metropolis of 200,000, thanks to new development stretching along eight routes out of the city.

As main countryside arteries emerge as makeshift beltways, planners see new dilemmas. Commercial growth along Route 17 at the edge of Stafford County--including a new regional headquarters for Geico Insurance with 3,500 workers--has increased traffic on the road by 6 percent a year in the past five years, pushing its daily volume to 37,000 vehicles.

Improving country roads to handle such volume is expensive, and rural counties must compete for precious road money with closer-in suburbs that, because of their larger populations, are first in line.

For roads and public transportation, Northern Virginia received $291 million this year from the state. Fredericksburg and the 14 counties around it, which include some of Virginia's fastest-growing areas, got $56 million.

"We're way behind the curve," said Steve Black, the Virginia Department of Transportation's traffic safety chief for the Fredericksburg area.

The customary load for a rural road is 2,000 cars a day, transportation engineers say. Now many are seeing 10,000 a day, with rising numbers of crashes as well.

Fatalities on rural roads occur at twice the rate as on busier urban and suburban routes. Maryland drivers were killed on rural roads in 1998 at a rate of 2.26 per 100 million miles driven, more than double the fatality rate for urban routes, according to federal data. In Virginia, the fatality rate on rural roads was 2.0, compared with 1.21 for urban roads.

People aren't the only casualties. After a speeder killed a swan on two-lane Airlie Road in Fauquier County two weeks ago, the Airlie Foundation decided to erect the county's first "Swan Crossing" sign.

It costs $500,000 to straighten a mile of road to improve a driver's line of sight, and $3 million a mile to widen it by one lane in each direction, say officials with the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Even when planners have the money to improve a road, it's not always possible. Building turning lanes to untangle the bottleneck at the junction of Routes 17 and 1 in Falmouth would mean altering a legally protected historic bridge over the Rappahannock River. Virginia transportation engineers are studying the intersection to find other options, but few are hopeful they can ease the gridlock.

Sometimes when the money is there and road improvements are relatively simple, residents and even officials refuse to widen a country road just to relieve traffic.

In Loudoun, where 7,000 homes under construction in neighboring Prince William County are sure to generate congestion along Route 15, county officials refuse to consider widening the scenic highway. Prince William wants to widen the road to four lanes.

The counties have agreed to disagree.

"There will be a time when these roads have to be widened," said Loudoun's transportation chief, Sanjeev Mulhotra. "But that's not right now."

An eight-mile stretch of Route 32 in western Howard County now carries double the number of cars it did a decade ago. On the same stretch of pavement, there were 80 crashes last year and 70 in 1998.

Maryland officials acknowledge the road is treacherous and are considering spending $160 million to add two lanes. But such an investment would be rare for the state, whose "smart growth" policy discourages road building in rural areas.

"Our highest priority is addressing safety issues," said Neil Pedersen, Maryland's highway planning director. "But there's a lot of concern about whether widening Route 32 will encourage sprawl in Howard County."