Cut through
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Bill Emory
City neighborhood streets are used as an interchange by regional motorists. Getting from point A to point B in the County? Drive local streets through the neighborhoods (in this case Woolen Mills and Belmont), avoid collector streets and traffic signals.
Commentator Bill Emory puts up a new photo nearly every day at billemory.com/blog.
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4 comments
That's nothing compared to what the parkway will do to 5th street and the rest of downtown.
don't worry. The state legislature has spoken...
HOUSE JOINT RESOLUTION NO. 452
Offered January 24, 1989
Commending the Virginia Department of Transportation for the responsive and innovative manner in which the problem of residential cut-through traffic is being addressed and to encourage the timely adoption of policy by the Commonwealth Transportation Board.
OMG! OMG! Another truck spotted in Woolen Mills! What an outrage! Everyone run out of your houses and record the event on camera, tape recorders, video cameras, and cell phones! Tweet it! FB it! And be pompously outraged by it for months!
While I certainly agree that cut-through traffic is a real drag and ruins the feel of a neighborhood, let's just be honest about the real cause of the problem: too much congestion on the collectors and arterials. Hostile, anti-car, anti-driver "traffic calming" measures on those other roads drives up cut-through. The "speed humps" and other measures taken on residential cut-throughs are merely an attempt to make things even worse on the cut throughs to drive the traffic back on to arterials.
We need to un-clog 29N and the bypass and other existing arterials. Yes, when the the Meadowcreek is completed, the stretch of 5th St. from Main and Cherry/Elliot will be impacted, but that is (and always has been) an arterial - like it or not. The meadowcreek is needed and if anything isn't sufficient - it ought to connect the backside of all the subdivisions - Forest Lakes & Hollymeade - which are the source of so much traffic to downtown. This is actually good for downtown. The problem with the bypass now is that it is too congested with stoplights - instead of futher clogging up 250 between McIntyre and I-64, it should be opened up with access roads. Ditto 29N.
If you want to keep 'water from seeking it's level' - traffic trying to find alternate routes - and get rid of idiotic proposals like the Western Bypass (and for that matter, the eastern bypass alternative to the MCP) then unclog the arterials. Our real problem is we've allowed every single developer to get their own left-turn light for their strip-mall driveway.