Between 2000 and 2020, Crozet’s population more than tripled, growth that’s crowded schools, created water worries, and snarled traffic. A new roundabout now aims to ease commuters’ ride from the rural hamlet, even if not everyone’s convinced, as Christine Kueter reports.
[traffic noise]
It’s a sickening sound Chris Oceguela knows well.
CHRIS OCEGUELA: Normally, a big bang, yeah, normally a big bang, and then you hear kind of like, the tires kind of just burn a little. We've gone out there running to see if they’re all doing okay. We’ve seen them crying, we’ve seen them get on the ambulance, when they’re told they have to get on the stretcher. It’s sad. And we have a window right there.
Oceguela is the operations manager at Fiesta Azteca, a popular restaurant west of Charlottesville located at the junction of three roads where more than 45 car accidents have happened over the last five years.
To him, a new roundabout is good news.
OCEGUELA: You know, we’ve seen many cars come in, you know, fast, like, faster than what they’re supposed to come in to. Unfortunately, many accidents have to happen for us to get something like this going. It’s much safer like this.
Ten years after it was proposed, and nearly a year after work began, a new roundabout at the route 240/250 split opened last Friday, March 13. Meant to keep vehicles moving, slow traffic, and reduce the severity of crashes, the new roundabout is one of roughly a dozen across the county that aims to soothe a critical juncture poised to grow even busier.
About 116,000 people lived in Albemarle County in 2024, and officials estimate that another 31,000 more residents will move in over the next two decades. Crozet, an unincorporated town a dozen miles west of Charlottesville, is one of five designated growth areas in the county.
Crozet had 2,800 residents in 2000. Today, it’s more than three times as big, and more than six times the size it was in 1970.
Crozet grew up around a railroad stop at a local farm. Many of its housing developments today use founding farmers’ names: Wayland’s Grant, Cory Farm, Bargamin Park. But Crozet’s transition from rural hamlet to bustling suburb has occasionally been fraught. Many say development has outpaced infrastructure, incongruencies that show up in its schools, sidewalks, parking spots, water sources—and traffic.
[sound of electric clippers]
Lisa McCauley has trimmed hair and beards in the Modern Barbershop on Crozet Avenue for the last 37 years. She grew up in Crozet, and remembers riding her bike around town, something she wouldn’t dare let her grandchildren do today.
LISA MCCAULEY: Everybody’s in a hurry. Most of the time, you can stand out there five, 10 minutes before it clears for you to cross, or somebody will stop to let us across. I just know if, like, if go to the cleaners to drop towels off, or pick them up, don’t go around eight o’clock.
McCauley worries about clogged roadways impacting emergency responders and too few parking spaces in Crozet’s tiny downtown, especially once the former site of Barnes Lumber gets a facelift, which may include a hotel, outdoor stage, mixed-use commercial buildings, and park.
MCCAULEY: There’s good people that are moving here that way as well, but the world is changing. I see a lot of people I grew up with here, and family, have moved away, because of the growth. And this is always going to be a gauntlet, where the trestle is.
Roundabouts have become a go-to in Albemarle County at least partially because of the uncertainty they provoke, which compels drivers to slow down. Intersections like the one at 240/250, which sees nearly 20,000 cars each day, provide a particular design challenge to engineers like Hal Jones, VDOT project manager.
HAL JONES: You’ve got old roads that were goat paths or wagon roads, and with growth patterns, they’re just over capacity and not of current design standards. The growth in the Crozet area put a lot of pressure on 240 over the years, and what you would see in the mornings particularly is a huge queue back from that road, because 250 was essentially a non-stop, straight-through shot . . . so you had a lot of folks waiting in a difficult place to get out on that road.
Eighty-seven year old Kenneth Grove is a retired farmer who sells homemade cutting boards and benches in downtown Crozet most Saturdays. The key to roundabouts, he says, is to slow down.
KENNETH GROVE: In a circle, everybody is impatient, don’t want to give the right of way. That’s what the problem is, because they do not want to come to a complete stop … they just want to keep on getting up.
McCauley worries that inexperience will slow residents’ ability to adjust to the new roundabout.
Her plan?
MCCAULEY: Avoid it. I have my secret way to get to Charlottesville, I don’t want to say it because then everybody else will use it, too.
Crews will finesse the roundabout through June or July, adding outer curbs and splitter islands to channel traffic and improve the site’s drainage. They’ll continue to leave undisturbed the 60-year-old memorial they unearthed during the project, though. Thirty-four-year-old Charles B. Satterwhite died in 1965 when his vehicle overturned, trapping the father of four inside.
