They’ve been talking about what to do about Interstate 81 for years now.

I use the word they there because, well, the list of people who have involved in the talking is rather lengthy.

It dates back four governors now - I remember covering my first Interstate 81 summit as a cub reporter back in 1997 during the last year of George Allen’s single four-year term in Richmond.

Add to that list the Virginia General Assembly, the Virginia Department of Transportation, the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

And a number of citizens’ and lobbying groups representing various constituencies.

And, of course, the big, bad STAR Solutions - which came to the Old Dominion five years ago with promises that it could land billions of dollars in federal earmarks for its grandiose scheme for building separate truck lanes to segregate cars and big rigs up and down the I-81 corridor.

For most of the past five years, the STAR Solutions proposal dominated the discussion of what was going to be done to alleviate traffic congestion along the 325-mile stretch of interstate highway that bisects Western Virginia.

Which is why it was such a surprise when the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which is responsible for setting state transportation policies, decided in October to distance itself from the STAR plan.

The board voted to authorize VDOT to begin on a course of safety improvements that could be completed within the next 12 to 18 months and to complete the environmental-impact study that has been ongoing for the past three years, in addition to requesting that the Virginia Department of Rail and Transportation work with Norfolk Southern to conduct a freight-rail study that could itself initiate short-term improvements to the rail system in Western Virginia that could divert truck traffic from I-81.

The vote came seemingly out of nowhere - in the days leading up to the board meeting where the issue was considered, citizens’ groups that had been leading the charge to block the STAR plan from coming to fruition had been lobbying board members to delay any decisions relative to I-81 in the hopes of staving off what they were seeing as the inevitable.

Board member Dana Martin said the move eventually taken by the board had been in the works for several weeks leading up to the vote.

“I guess it would not be generally known that the corridor members - James Davis, Jim Bowie and I, along with James Keen - had for a while been trying to get an initiative through to begin making changes instead of waiting for the STAR Solutions proposal to run its course,” said Martin, a Roanoke businessman who represents the Salem Transportation District on the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

“The reason for that was, one, if it did work out, we felt it was going to be an awfully long time, and two, if it didn’t work out, then we didn’t want to be in a situation where we’d have to start from scratch. So we wanted to find whatever monies could be made available and do the things that could be done appropriately within the system while waiting for that,” Martin said.

It was the availability of $141 million in federal earmarks that were approved by Congress last year that made the change in course possible, Martin said.

“The $141 million is roughly a tenth of what is actually needed to do everything. It certainly gets us started on something - the safety features and the truck-climbing lanes, in particular, that we were interested in,” Martin said.

“We felt that we needed to get on with some safety improvements as soon as possible - and we also wanted to put an end to the idea of building two separate truck lanes the whole length of this route,” said Davis, the president of Shenandoah University in Winchester, who represents the Staunton Transportation District on the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

“Also, I was very much in favor and continue to support a separate effort to do some detailed work with Norfolk Southern and eventually even CSX to take as much of this freight off of I-81 as we possibly can by using rail. It’s not a part of the road solution directly, but it’s a part of the solution with dealing with the future transportation needs of Virginia.”

***

The reaction from the citizens’ groups that had been gearing up for another fight with the state over the expectation that things were going to proceed in the direction that STAR Solutions had been trying to get things moving in was generally very welcoming.

“There was definitely some progress made,” said Trip Pollard, a senior attorney and policy advocate at the Charlottesville-based Southern Environmental Law Center.

“It has come a long way from a time when this large STAR project was looking like it had tremendous momentum to when the recommendations clearly would not move forward with a project like that, of that kind of a massive scale,” Pollard said. “It’s a positive step - the CTB endorsing shorter-term enhancements, recognizing the value of getting some of the freight off of trucks on 81 and onto rail. And then also blessing the agreement that the state and Norfolk Southern have worked out - finally - to look further at interstate rail, which is something that the draft environmental study ignored completely.”

“This is one of the first times in the last few years that there has been this very intensive oversight of VDOT on a major project by the Commonwealth Transportation Board,” said Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Washington, D.C.,-based Coalition for Smarter Growth.

“The Commonwealth Transportation Board intervened like I have not seen it do before in terms of redrafting the terms of the resolution that they would be voting on - after extensive negotiation. And it seemed that they were not entirely happy with the resolution that was drafted by the secretary of transportation for them to review,” Schwartz said.

“What they achieved was more Commonwealth Transportation Board oversight, inclusion of the rail report and analysis, which is significantly important - and they also had some softening of the language regarding how much of the highway should be expanded,” Schwartz said.

“Things are moving in the right direction - for a change,” said Rees Shearer, the chairman of the Emory-based Rail Solution, which has been leading the push for inclusion of rail in whatever I-81 corridor plan ends up being adopted. “Up until that vote, it still seemed like the express will of the secretary to proceed with widening along the entire interstate - two-thirds eight lanes and one-third six lanes.

“We’re very pleased about the CTB’s decision to go after the safety problems along I-81 as quickly as possible - and especially to incorporate the results of the freight study that’s under way with Norfolk Southern and the VDRPT,” Shearer said.

“The direction that they have chosen to take is the right one,” said Dale Bennett, the executive vice president of the Richmond-based Virginia Trucking Association, which has been keeping a close eye on the developments regarding I-81 relative to the STAR plan for separated truck lanes and the plan for funding any I-81 improvements in part through the assessment of tolls on drivers, including freight drivers.

“The direction that they chose we think is one that makes sense right now. There’s federal money there that Virginia needs to take steps to go ahead and utilize while we can and while it’s there. It’s a if-you-don’t-use-it, you-lose-it-type situation,” Bennett said.

“They’re going to take it and use it and do some short-term improvements that can be done quickly - and we hope as quickly as possible - that will provide some quick relief,” Bennett said.

“We’re pleased that VDOT has rejected the idea of a one-size-fits-all, multilane expansion along the entire length of I-81 financed by heavy tolls on trucks - which would have had a devastating economic impact on the Valley’s poultry industry,” said Hobey Bauhan, the president of the Harrisonburg-based Virginia Poultry Federation.

“Interstate 81 is critical to our industry - and an efficient transportation system is important. So we’re very concerned about the future of Interstate 81 - and want to see improvements there. But we certainly need to balance the economic impacts of implementing those,” Bauhan said.

“As long as the progress toward improvements continues in terms of the schedule, I would say that things are probably, from our perspective, going in a fairly good direction - because I think that particularly the inclusion of rail and the increased emphasis on rail will have a positive impact on economic-development activities,” said Robin Sullenberger, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Partnership, which provides marketing and business assistance to localities in the Central Shenandoah Valley region in relation to their development activities.

“Our emphasis all along has been that the improvements continue on some sort of defined schedule - and not get bogged down in the administrative process or review process or debates over how the funding is going to occur or what the appropriate fix is,” Sullenberger said.

“Certainly, the renewed emphasis on some of these choke points and so forth is not something that the economic-development community is going to be opposed to. As long as we’re convinced that progress is being made and that the situation is being addressed, we can live with that,” Sullenberger said.

***

The reaction from state-government officials was more enthusiastic.

“Those proposals that were out there the last couple of years were just not feasible proposals,” said Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a Republican who was educated to the realities of the I-81 issue during his 2005 campaign for the second spot in the executive branch of Virginia government.

“They weren’t economically feasible - but more than that, I think that when people understood the impacts that those proposals would have had on the Valley, there would have been no public support for those proposals,” Bolling said. “Those were massive, Northeastern-style traffic projects through the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. And I think when people started understanding that, those proposals would not have moved forward.

“You start talking about eight lanes of concrete with Jersey walls and truck lanes - that is a major Northeastern-style traffic project in a very historic and scenic part of our state,” Bolling said. “I think they did the right thing getting those proposals off the blocks and moving in the direction of ideas that are more feasible.

“There are some short-term steps that we can take - improving key interchanges, creating truck-stacking lanes in areas where traffic tends to back up. That’s not going to be the ultimate solution, but those are things that we can do,” Bolling said.

“I was somewhat frustrated over a period of time there - particularly when we developed a consensus out here in Western Virginia that the STAR Solutions proposal was not what we wanted to see happen nor what we could afford,” said Emmett Hanger, a Mount Solon Republican who has served in the Virginia Senate since 1996.

“I’m very pleased that now, I think, the transportation board is solidly behind a regional approach that many of us had lobbied for and worked for legislatively for a number of years wanted to see,” Hanger said.

“I’m very optimistic about the direction that 81 is going in,” said Matt Lohr, a Broadway Republican who was elected in 2005 to serve the 26th House District that represents Harrisonburg and Northern Rockingham County.

“VDOT has gone in the direction now that we’ve been talking about now for a couple of years,” Lohr said. “We really wanted to see improvements made, fixing congested areas by adding those additional truck-climbing lanes - and not just coming in and blanketing the whole interstate top to bottom.

“I’m a supporter of just looking more in-depth at rail - and I was glad that was included in the CTB plan, as well as just continuing to look at the avenue of rail being a possibility, which I hope can still figure into the equation,” Lohr said.

“I’m really positive about the direction that the CTB has taken right now,” Lohr said.

***

Legislators, state leaders, public-interest groups and private citizens all have been weighing in on the issue of what to do about I-81 for years and years.

Could it be, then, that the public input was what made the difference in setting things in a new direction?

“The price tag is so steep, and the damage it would cause is so extensive - I was cautiously optimistic that over time we would be able to highlight those shortcomings and get reasonable decisionmakers to realize that it was a bad deal for taxpayers, for communities, for the environment. And over time, that’s very much what happened,” the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Trip Pollard said.

“You started to see business opposition, farmers, localities, historic preservationists - an enormous amount of people who, the more they looked at this proposal, the more people were alarmed about it. So over time, the process of getting this information out has worked in that regard. It’s taken a while - this thing had a lot of momentum. But its flaws have surfaced and been discussed over time - and enough people began to see these problems,” Pollard said.

Commonwealth Transportation Board member James Davis cited the feedback that he received as being a key influence for him.

“I sat through more than 10 hours of hearings in Harrisonburg, Winchester and Staunton, listening to the people - probably several hundred people spoke at those hearings. It was an interesting mixture of concerned citizens, of people affected immediately by where their homes were located, and also business and corporate types who were saying that we need to make a wise decision here in order to make this road work better and more safely - but at the same time, we don’t want to pave over the Valley, and we want to protect our air and our water,” Davis said.

Fellow CTB member Dana Martin thought the volume of correspondence that he received regarding I-81 in the days and weeks leading up to the board vote might have been a bit of overkill.

“Personally, I was one of the people who at the CTB meeting in September, when we got the original resolution, I think I was the first one to mention that we needed to get our suggestions before the next meeting so that we didn’t have to go through a whole lot of administrative stuff to make changes at the meeting. That was before anybody had heard anything from anyone. And it concerned exactly the same things - the fact that we wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a carte blanche to just add lanes indiscriminately in the future,” Martin said.

“So while indeed it is true that the activist groups got what they had asked for, it’s also true that the activist groups got what the board thought and where the board was heading anyway,” Martin said.

“I can’t speak for everybody else on the board, but for a majority, that campaign was more of a distraction. If it was going to have an impact, it could have been just as easily a negative one as a positive one,” Martin said.

“We on the board cannot or should not try to do our job by popularity polls. We should and have to listen to everybody who speaks - but one person saying the right thing is the one we’re going to have to listen to, regardless of another hundred people saying the wrong thing,” Martin said.

What’s interesting about Norfolk Southern’s involvement in the I-81 corridor-improvements story is that as recently as 2003, the rail company didn’t seem to want at all to have anything to do with whatever was to happen.

“It would take a tremendous investment on our part to get involved. We’re interested in the continuing discussions on this issue, but we’re working right now on what we consider to be more pressing needs,” Norfolk Southern spokesperson Susan Bland told me back in September 2003.

So what has changed since 2003 to turn things around for the company?

“It really is not a change,” another spokesman, Robin Chapman, told me this past October. “We have been studying the issue for a number of years. Two years ago, the Woodside consulting firm completed a study for us of the I-81 corridor. What this study is is basically an update of that. And this time around, we’re working with the state to bring that study up to date. So this is an issue that has been on our plate for a long time.”

More to the point, Rees Shearer of Rail Solution thinks Norfolk Southern sees that the political winds have shifted in their direction.

“I think they thought the political winds were driving toward a highway solution - so they just laid low,” Shearer said.

“And then things shifted. The Highway Bill that Halliburton and STAR Solutions had been touting as their vehicle for bringing in federal dollars to build a huge truck-lane solution just kind of petered out,” Shearer said. “They were able to get $100 million for exclusive truck lanes - but that was a far cry from the $800 million that they said they could get in that particular session with that bill, with another $800 million coming after that. And of course, Don Young is no longer going to be the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, because he’s term-limited out for the next Highway Bill six years down the road.

“I think Norfolk Southern saw those developments, and that’s when their new interest in the I-81 corridor seemed to gel,” Shearer said.

***

Norfolk Southern, significantly, isn’t interested in trying to improve its existing rail lines in Western Virginia. Doing so would be too expensive, Chapman said - based on the age of the lines and the challenges that the hills and mountains of the region would present.

The focus in the current Norfolk Southern-Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation study, Chapman said, is on improvements that can link Harrisburg, Pa., to Front Royal in Northwestern Virginia, then heading east to Manassas, south to Lynchburg, then over to Roanoke and down to the Bristol area, and then south into Tennessee.

It doesn’t matter to Virginia Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer what route Norfolk Southern eventually decides to take - the issue to Homer is “how best to maximize the amount of freight that’s carried by rail in that corridor.”

“That could be accomplished in a number of ways - and those various alternatives are going to be studied and in an open and transparent way,” Homer said.

“There are a lot of things that have been said about the right way to proceed with rail investments in that corridor - and this study will provide, I think, some definitive analysis and direction for where is the best bang for the buck in terms of rail improvement,” Homer said.

Kevin Page, the director of rail transportation at the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation, feels the key to the study’s eventual success is that it is not just limited to what can be done inside Virginia’s own transportation borders.

“What we have here is an opportunity to go back and look at the I-81 corridor up to 500 miles outside of Virginia and have a real true comparison as to what really can be achieved in the corridor for identifying diversion of truck traffic and helping to set up a framework for both an analysis of what is considered as the private benefit versus the public benefits of those aspects that we can identify as divertible traffic in the corridor - and then how we go about setting a framework and a strategy to have some cost-sharing there as the improvements that are brought out in the study are visualized and then worked out toward a strategic approach to funding those improvements and actually seeing a true win-win public-private partnership,” Page said.

One thing is clear at this early stage in the analysis - the potential for rail to take a significant number of trucks off of I-81 is there.

“We’re seeing that containerization is probably the most commonly used device to move freight globally. And Norfolk Southern has done a very good job as a transportation competitor in the global marketplace of being able to come in and be flexible and provide for a transportation solution in an innovative way - to offer intermodal double-stack corridor service to offset truck and highway congestion and also to help bring containers into the United States and get them to ports of call inside like the Virginia Inland Port and other movements within the United States,” Page said.

“Nationwide last year, the U.S. railroads handled 12 million intermodal shipments - trailers and containers. We think we could divert 3 million right here on the I-81 corridor on this little move from Harrisburg to Knoxville. So there’s an opportunity right away to come up with a business volume that is 25 percent of what the railroads did nationally last year. So it’s a huge opportunity,” Rail Solution’s Foster said.

That’s not to say that there aren’t questions about just how much truck traffic can be taken off the roads and put onto rail lines.

“When you talk about rail and trucks and intermodal, the fact remains that trucks are going to be involved in that transportation link one way or the other,” the Virginia Trucking Association’s Dale Bennett said.

“What that says is, as far as the plan for taking truck traffic off of 81 and putting it onto rail, there are still a lot of questions,” Bennett said. “As far as we’re concerned, the jury is still out on that. That’s why we think it’s appropriate that VDOT do a due-diligence analysis on that proposal - to make sure that there is going to be a return on any investment that the state is asked to make.”

***

Money will surely be a focal point for Norfolk Southern and the Department of Rail and Public Transportation in their study.

“Obviously, it takes money to move anything. And this is probably what I consider to be one of the biggest steps - to get out there and do the study and set up the framework,” Page said.

“From that point forward, with everything that we see in today’s marketplace, we have to have not only a funding strategy but a dedicated source of funds to go about making those improvements. And it will all fall into play as to how far the federal government and the local partners in Norfolk Southern and the neighboring states come together to make this a successful effort,” Page said.

Just how much money will be available for rail improvements within the larger I-81 corridor project - and where it is going to come from - is still very much at question right now.

“Unfortunately, the infrastructure is so outdated - the tracks and the routes and whatever - that a major capital investment is needed in order to put in new modern tracks and to take them where they need to go and as fast as possible and as safely as possible. And so it’s going to require a partnership between a private company like Norfolk Southern and the state that has taxing authority to come up with the kind of money that we’re talking about that would make possible building a railroad from somewhere in Tennessee all the way up into New England,” Commonwealth Transportation Board member James Davis said.

“There are a lot of questions about who puts up how much, and how do we assure that these are projects that are in the public’s interests - not just Norfolk Southern’s business interests, which to the degree that the two coincide is fantastic,” the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Trip Pollard said.

“There is clearly important potential for this kind of public-private partnership to make these rail improvements - where you get the state, the federal government and the private sector, Norfolk Southern, in this case, basically pulling together, recognizing the overlap of public and private interests,” Pollard said.

Commonwealth Transportation Board member Dana Martin wants to make sure that the state doesn’t lose sight of the public-interest portion of that overlap.

“Sometimes I feel like there are people who believe we should do something akin to nationalizing the rail system - or just giving Norfolk Southern lots of money. And neither one of those is something I could support,” Martin said.

“I know I was speaking in extremes there - but for whatever happens at Norfolk Southern that allows them to determine this to be profitable or reasonable for them to make their contribution, then that’s the key to what has changed in terms of us being able to seriously look at the rail component,” Martin said.

“I would never have been in favor of saying to shareholders of any railroad, Here is this taxpayer money, and we’re going to give it to you, and you’re going to have the benefit of it,” Martin said. “I’m not at all opposed to saying, Well, we’re going to share some risk, we’re going to share some investment, and you’ll have brought yourself into certain benefits in the future. That’s OK. I have no problem with government and private cooperation - but I’m not in favor of government taking over private industry, or the government ensuring, in my view, the private sector’s ability to benefit from taxpayer money.”

All the talk about rail studies and safety improvements and the rest is great - but it’s not exactly as if the Commonwealth Transportation Board is awash in the greenbacks needed to get things done.

Jeff Southard, the executive vice president of the Richmond-based Virginia Transportation Construction Alliance, estimates that the I-81 improvements will exceed $5 billion when all is said and done. To put that in perspective, “That is about seven years worth of all of VDOT’s construction money,” said Southard, who served as chief of policy, planning and the environment at VDOT before joining the VTCA in 2005.

“So the question becomes, how do you fix 81? How do you pay for those things?” Southard said. “Certainly, there are some federal earmarks that are available - but that’s the proverbial drop-in-the-bucket. In the long term, for 81 to be improved, it will have to include tolls, and it will have to include more funding from the state level.”

State leaders have been grappling with the wider issue of transportation funding for projects across the Commonwealth for several years now. Disagreement over how to best approach the issue pushed the Virginia General Assembly to the end of June before it could come up with a state budget for the 2006-2008 biennium and spilled over into a brief special legislative session in September that saw nothing in the way of progress toward a final transportation-funding solution.

In the meantime, Virginia’s transportation-improvement needs continue to stack up - forcing projects like I-81 to “compete for funding,” in the words of Virginia Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer.

“In that context, the actions that the CTB took are a reflection of the fiscal reality. Because if you stand back and look at the immediate rail and highway-safety needs in that corridor, those very immediate needs vastly exceed the existing resources,” Homer said.

***

One way to boost those resources is the financing mechanism called tolls - which are still on the table with respect to the I-81 project despite their near-universal unpopularity among citizens, business groups and state legislators alike.

In Southard’s mind, the state really has no choice but to consider tolls among the options for providing money for I-81 improvements.

“Any comprehensive corridor-wide improvement is going to have to include tolls,” Southard said.

“What the research shows at the national level is that people are willing to pay tolls if they get the benefit for it - if they get new capacity, safer corridors, better connectivity, more safety, then they’re willing to pay for that, the users are willing to pay for that,” Southard said. “And of course, tolls are almost the perfect user fee. If you’re going to use this road, then we’re going to charge you to use this road. It also means that it’s going to get people who are traveling out of state, who may not be buying fuel here, who certainly don’t have their cars registered here, who may not have bought their cars here.

“So I think tolls, when we look at these major corridor improvements, whether it be 95, the Capital Beltway, 460, 81, we’re going to have to rely on tolls. That’s going to have to be a big piece of it,” Southard said.

How big? Nobody seems willing to want to hazard a guess on that at this point. But with the General Assembly apparently unwilling to address its part of the transportation-revenue equation, it would appear that tolls could be forced to play a sizable role.

“As we’ve seen with many of the other public-private initiatives, tolls won’t pay for all the improvements,” Southard said. “As the governor said in a speech a few months ago, the key to public-private partnerships is a viable public partner. And right now, we don’t have a viable public partner.

“If a long-term solution for the entire 81 corridor, a long-term multimodal solution, was decided upon, and let’s assume that tolls could pay for 80 percent of it, VDOT wouldn’t have the money to put up the other 20 percent. And that’s probably very optimistic - that tolls could pay for 80 percent of it,” Southard said.

“The Commonwealth Transportation Board said, Let’s keep all funding options on the table. That was the essence of their resolution. It’s certainly not a panacea - but it is one potential way of addressing long-term needs in the corridor,” Homer said.

“We’re undergoing that debate right now in Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia - where interstate facilities are being proposed for tolling. But the other thing that we’re learning in those places, and I suspect the same will be true with I-81, is you can’t do it with tolls alone. There needs to be a blend of public, private and user-fee resources to address long-term infrastructure needs in I-81 and Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia,” Homer said.

The opposition to tolls in Western Virginia is focused on the expectation that their utilization would be bad for business - cutting into the profit margins of the distribution centers that have located along the corridor in recent years in addition to making it tough for the now-thriving poultry and manufacturing sectors to balance their own books due to the increase in shipping costs that would result.

“The scope of the tolls that were proposed as part of the Star Solutions plan was very troublesome - and would have had a significant economic impact on our industry as well as many businesses in the Valley that depend on Interstate 81,” the Virginia Poultry Federation’s Hobey Bauhan said.

“We continue to oppose the idea of turning Interstate 81 into a toll road. And hopefully, the state will look to existing funding sources to make the most critical safety improvements on Interstate 81,” Bauhan said.

“I’m not sure I have the answer to the long-term funding solution - but I do know that we’re opposed to the idea of truck-only tolls,” Bauhan said.

“For the manufacturing community and the trucking industry, it certainly is not something that’s well-accepted - and understandably, there is concern about that,” the Shenandoah Valley Partnership’s Robin Sullenberger said.

“I don’t know that we would make a specific statement about that one way or the other. I think that will be debated and worked out over time - and hopefully there will be some consensus on what is fair and equitable to both just the general traveling public and the business community. But there certainly is some merit to the fact that there would be an impact for businesses - because transportation costs and the added expense of tolls certainly would be borne by some segments of the business community,” Sullenberger said.

Rockingham County state delegate Matt Lohr mentions another group that could suffer should the decision be made to use tolls to finance improvements on I-81.

“I certainly don’t want to penalize the folks like, for example, in my district, people like myself who live in Broadway and have to use 81 to travel to Harrisonburg,” Lohr said.

“I’m against local residents having to pay tolls every time they use the road. If there was a way that a tolling system could be implemented that could basically just capture the traffic that’s passing on through, the out-of-state traffic, if there was a way that those folks could be tolled, and the folks here locally could be given a pretty substantial break, then I think it’s worth considering,” Lohr said.

***

So the state doesn’t appear to be in a position to come up with the money for the improvements - and it looks as well that tolls are at least politically not going to be viewed as a viable solution anytime soon.

What do we do then?

“One thing that I think people have a difficult time understanding is just how expensive the improvements will be,” the Virginia Transportation Construction Alliance’s Jeff Southard said. “When you look at, say, the $100 million of federal money that might be available for some short-term improvements, you’re probably talking about 10 miles of improvements. If you look at doing significant interstate improvements, depending upon whether you have the right-of-way or don’t have the right-of-way, you’re talking numbers in the area of $10 million per mile.

“So the question really becomes, how much can we really do with the little money that we have? I think VDOT has a plan for doing that - I know that (I-81 program manager) Fred Altizer and the district administrators and the planning people and the engineering folks are looking at that. I think the real critical issue is not the short term, but what do we do in the intermediate and long term?” Southard said.

“We can’t make any significant improvements without additional revenues - whether that be tolls or additional state funding. It just can’t be done. And that’s the part that people ought to focus on. Everybody is focusing on the plans and the ideas - without adequately discussing the fact that there’s no money,” Southard said.

The perception is out there that VDOT put all of its work on I-81 on hold pending the final resolution to the debate over what needs to be done for the long term.

The truth, said Fred Altizer, the transportation department’s I-81 program manager, is that “we at VDOT really never stopped working on 81.”

“Where funds were available, we continued with safety-improvement-type projects - and this was throughout the corridor,” Altizer said, citing examples of the addition of a number of new guardrails in medians up and down the corridor, extensions of acceleration lanes in some spots and a bridge extension over Abrams Creek in Winchester that had been a worry for years.

“That is an excellent example to cite for a safety kind of issue - that was one of the highest accident problems that we had,” Altizer said of the Abrams Creek project. “The end of that ramp was right at a bridge - there had been some fatalities there, et cetera, a lot of accidents, because it didn’t allow you any room to merge into the lane. We proceeded with designing a separate bridge and extending that ramp so that traffic could enter into the northbound lane of 81.

“What we hope to do in the future is identify some more of these areas along 81 that will really help improve safety and help the traffic flow a little better in spots where we can. This will really make the conditions a little safer and make traffic flow a little better in spots,” Altizer said.

That is where the $141 million earmarked by Congress will come in handy.

“We’re very pleased that we’ll be moving ahead with the truck-climbing lanes and the development of a rail program to take trucks off the highway - but even the most short-term set of improvements are substantially underfunded,” Transportation Secretary Pierce Homer said.

“In the case of spot-safety improvements, VDOT, through a very extensive planning process, has identified nearly $700 million worth of short-term safety and freight- and automobile-safety and operational improvements that are needed today. We have in hand approximately $140 million to address those short-term needs. That might put where we are right now in perspective,” Homer said.

The funding limitations are playing into Altizer’s planning.

“In the Staunton District, there are a number of entrance ramps and exit ramps that are in the process of being worked on right now - and the Staunton office is doing those, and as they can get the plans ready and get a contractor, you will see some work there. That’s going to be true in other areas along 81,” Altizer said. “These are the kinds of improvements that can be rolled out pretty quickly, being that there’s no right-of-way, the environmental process that we go through is fairly easy, because what you’re doing is you’re extending a ramp another 500 or 1,000 feet, and if you look at it, the impact is on the right-of-way, which has already been impacted - those can be done fairly quickly.

“Those are the kind of improvements that you can see in the next 12 to 18 months. The next level is improvements that will take a little bit longer. Those will be improvements that will require maybe purchasing small pieces of right-of-way or adjacent right-of-way for drainage or something that we have to do that we just don’t have enough room within the existing right-of-way. Those will take longer because the process to go through in terms of the engineering and the environmental review is a little more complex. Those will take up to two years or maybe a little bit longer,” Altizer said.

“And then we have some improvements on the long-range term,” Altizer said. “The board has identified three or four major interchanges along 81 that they have said, OK, VDOT, we want you to look at these. These will be fairly significant impacts and long-range projects - and we’re going to begin work on these. They will be fully engaged interchanges - but that’s where some of the biggest congestion is.

“Some of the truck-climbing lanes could be done fairly quickly - if we can keep them in the right-of-way. That’s critical - because there are some places where some lanes can be extended within the right-of-way. However, there are some places that are going to require some major excavation - going back into the hillsides, laying slopes back. To get there, those are more complex kind of projects - and requires more time,” Altizer said.

***

With so much earth about to move, Kim Sandum of the Harrisonburg-based Community Alliance for Preservation, which has been involved in the I-81 study process to advocate on behalf of citizens of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, knows that she will be thinking I-81 for years to come.

“Both sides won a little and lost a little with the CTB resolution. They’ve taken the truck-only lanes out - but they’ve left tolls in, for instance. And they put in some language that calls for them to use context-sensitive solutions when they do their designs for widening - which is a positive. But they left in the option of up to eight lanes - which is negative. So there was both winning and losing - both good points and bad points,” Sandum said.

“All of the initial concerns are still there - so I guess I’m not quite sure where people feel that relief from. Unless it’s that the dedicated truck lanes are gone - but that was not that much of a realistic possibility from the beginning anyway. That was just something that they had to investigate because it was brought to them by Star Solutions as part of the Public-Private Transportation Act,” Sandum said.

“So it was a scary thought to think that we could have dedicated truck lanes and tolls and flyover ramps and trucks trying to weave across the car lanes to get to the truck lanes and that kind of thing - but I think that it was so costly that it probably never stood much of a chance. But a significant widening project was always there, and I think that’s what people were reacting to as much,” Sandum said.

Pollard, like Sandum and others who have been monitoring the developments relative to I-81 improvements, is not about to declare victory and move on.

“This resolution is a big step in the right direction. It overcomes some of the flaws in the draft environmental study. Unfortunately, a number of those flaws remain,” Pollard said.

“I guess that’s one of the reasons that I’m only cautiously optimistic about what happened. I think the resolution was clearly a step in the right direction, but clearly there are not only unanswered questions, but there are flaws in the draft analysis that remain - and I think that we need to be sure that those don’t lead us down the path of making the wrong decision about the long-term best needs,” Pollard said.

And Pollard is among those who wonders if we’re not all missing the big picture in our focus on how much in the way of new pavement we will be willing to consider acceptable at the end of this process.

“For too long, we have focused on asphalt-only solutions to all of our transportation problems - either build a new road or widen an existing highway. That’s pretty much been our whole focus,” Pollard said. “There has been a lot of momentum, as there often is, for the large, massive engineering approach. But I’m optimistic that there is increasing recognition in Virginia, from the governor to legislators in both parties to increasingly people at VDOT, of the need for a more balanced approach to transportation.”

Sandum isn’t sure that she sees that same recognition.

“What my concern has been with VDOT all along - and this is with any of the projects that they’re involved in - is when they present an idea, it’s usually large and involves a lot of pavement. And the citizens come back to them and say, We’ve got a better idea to meet that transportation need, and here it is. And what VDOT usually does in response is say, Good idea, we’ll do our project and your project - instead of, Yes, that would be a good substitute for our project,” Sandum said.

“What I’m hoping they don’t do is say, We’ll do rail and widen Interstate 81 to 10 lanes or whatever they want to do. Because that’s what they keep doing in other things I’ve seen,” Sandum said.

Sharing in that sentiment is the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s Stewart Schwartz.

“This is not the only big project being teed up by the secretary of transportation,” Schwartz said. “We are very encouraged by the governor’s push for strong reform in the state - and the secretary has also talked about some of the performance standards, traffic-impact studies, those reforms. But we’re feeling like the major projects that he’s teeing up will trump anything else that happens.

“What we’re worried about is the fact that these megaprojects will be on the books as approved by the CTB that will continue to make a claim on revenues and various earmarks - and frustrate any efforts by citizens and elected officials to think, to prioritize and to allocate dollars to the most critical congestion-relief needs around the state,” Schwartz said.
“There’s a real question about the priorities being set by the state and the effect that these megaprojects will have in consuming funds for years to come,” Schwartz said.