Planning for the long-term means guessing what that future may hold. Regional transportation planners asked the public for ideas as they worked on the latest version of a transportation plan that looks decades ahead.
“It ran the gamut from just your traditional ‘we need a new road here’ or ‘widen this roadway’ to people thinking about flying cars, hover boats and ferries all the way up to DC,” said Dale Stith, the principal transportation planner at the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization.
HRTPO’s Long-Range Transportation Plan is updated every five years and guides the region’s transportation investments until a new version is released.
“Even though our communities may not feel the long-range transportation plan directly or in one single moment, they would feel the results of this long-term planning because these projects influence how people get to work reliably,” Stith said.
And it’s not just impacting the region’s commutes. The plan affects how many safe travel options people have, how freight moves throughout the region and how the network holds up during storms, she said.
Community ideas, concern from residents and computer models informed the newest version announced last month, which looks out to 2050. The team assumed the region’s population would grow from 1.7 million to almost 2 million over the next 20 years. From there, Stith said they considered what would happen if that growth happened mostly in cities or suburbs and what would happen if flooding pushed more people inland.
“The reality again is not that one of these scenarios will happen, but pieces of each will likely happen,” she said. “Within these scenarios we intentionally made them distinct, so that we could stress test the transportation network.”
One thing they factored in was driverless cars. People who can’t drive themselves may be more mobile and take more trips as driverless technology becomes more common. Autonomous vehicles, which communicate by sharing real-time data, may be able to follow each other more closely and increase roadway capacity, Stith said. And these vehicles could make public transit more flexible by picking people up at their door. But Stith warned solving one transportation challenge could create another.
“You might not need parking if these cars can just circle the network, but then that could make congestion worse,” she said.
The plan identifies a $85 billion worth of transportation projects that would benefit the region — but HRTPO staff say that amount isn’t realistic based on planned state and federal funding.
“I wouldn't characterize (the plan) as a vision plan because it is constrained on financial resources the region expects to get,” said Karen Kitsis, chief planning and development officer at Hampton Roads Transit, which works with the HRTPO on the long-term plan.
The plan narrows its wish list down to more than 150 construction projects totaling $15 billion in added infrastructure and recommends another $19 billion for smaller projects to maintain the existing system, Stith said.
“A lot of these projects aren't new,” Stith said, adding the plan is multi-modal and looks at projects to improve transportation for drivers, bikers and pedestrians. “These are projects that we have been planning for years, and they're all in different stages.”
Some are ongoing, like the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel expansion, Hampton Roads Express Lanes Network and the I-64/I-264 Phase IIIA Interchange, while others are more abstract, she said.
“We know that there might be a need to connect communities, but we don't know exactly how or where that connection should best be made,” she said.
Matthew Scalia, the executive director of the Williamsburg Area Transit Authority, said he’s looking forward to the projects underway to improve and widen roads along their routes.
“We still run in a lot of rural areas, or what used to be country roads, but now get so much more traffic, and there's just not space for us to have safe pull-offs and safe bus stops,” he said. WATA is a member of the planning organization, along with representatives from the region’s cities and counties, ports, state and federal departments and transportation-related groups such as the region’s airports.
The long-term plan also identifies projects that aren’t yet funded, including building a bus rapid transit line along Jefferson Avenue between Hampton and Newport News and extending light rail service from downtown Norfolk to the Greenbrier area of Chesapeake. Kitsis said those projects are likely a long way off, but getting on the plan is the first step to seeing them through.
“If we're not in this plan, then we can't put ourselves in the mix (for funding),” she said.
Stith said the team will take a breather for about six months before working on the next iteration of the plan, this time projecting out until 2055.
