Unfinished Projects

Last week, I wrote about the Long Island Expressway. Living with it so close to home, literally, and now that my daily commute takes me on a portion of the Capital Beltway (also Interstate 495), I have sat in my fair share of traffic and developed some ideas on how to help.

Faithful readers have already read my rants about traffic - here are the solutions we need. Sure it will take millions of dollars and people will scream, but the long term benefits outweigh the short. Something must be done!

Double decker the roads. The freeways and bridges in California are often double decker roads and they have earthquakes! The East Coast is a little more stable, so why not put another road on top of the existing one? For both roads, it would be very simple. Development has made the further widening of the roads impossible, so go UP. The beauty of the plan is to make one of the roads an "express" with limited access. For the Long Island Expressway, there has even been talk of this (look for the "Urban Legend on the LIE" section. For the express road, have exits at the "major" interchanges (and this will mean something only to those who have been there): The BQE, the Grand Central Parkway, The Van Wyck Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, the Cross-Island Parkway, the Northern State Parkway, the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway, Route 110, the Sagitkos Parkway, and at Exit 70.

For the Capital Beltway (as previously noted, also 1-495), the problem becomes a little trickier and definitely more costly, as there are bridges involved not to mention that huge thing we like to call the "mixing bowl." But double decker the road, make it limited access, with exits (again, for locals and exasperated commuters from DC) at I-95 in Maryland, I-270, (somehow over the American Legion Bridge), the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Route 66, I-95 in Virginia, (somehow over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge), I-295, and Route 50.

Alternatively, let's think about this. For years on Long Island, people have suggested building a monorail down the middle of the expressway. Surprisingly, the Long Island Rail Road has been against it! But let's dream here folks. Build some large parking lots on either side of the expressway (as opposed to the parking lot the expressway can be) and make a pedestrian bridge to a station over the expressway where a monorail can run. DC residents can see how this might work while travelling I-66 in Virginia where the Metro runs down the middle of that road. So in DC's case, build a new Metro line around the Beltway (color suggestions for the line?) on the model of the Orange Line that runs out Route 66.

I will be the first to say that if you build more roads, they will just fill up. But these are a couple of pipe dreams that I think could work in a world where community opposition is nil and plenty of funds are readily available. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who governed New York State from 1958 to 1973, had a pipe dream of his own. He wanted to build a bridge across Long Island Sound. An outstanding idea, but those pesky community activist people told him they couldn't. I actually would have lived near the terminus of the Long Island side of the bridge (that whole expressway thing again), and loved the idea. People shout about it every now and then, especially when thoughts of how to evacuate Long Island should something happen in New York City. Um, tough noogies, folks, you're all gonna die, for one must go through New York to get off Long Island. Sigh. It wouldn't hurt to think about it some more, huh? Please?

So another bridge in DC? The area is concluding work on a major renovation of the Wilson Bridge, which included the construction of a new span. And, hey, guess what, they envisioned a light rail across the middle. See? Someone has been listening to me. There are often talks about a new crossing across the Potomac also. But I think the problem with all this talk is, the people doing the talking know they will be long dead before any of this would get built. But they will probably die in a traffic jam on the beltway. It would serve them right.

BTW, this gets an archives tag for a couple of reasons. I used to work at the Rockefeller Archive Center, where the biography of Nelson Rockefeller comes from (in fact, I put it on the web when I served as the webmaster) and the plans for the Long Island Sound Bridge come from the archives of the Suffolk County Planning Department.