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01-19-04, 12:01 PM
Route 234, also known as Sudley Road, is a narrow, curving two-lane that thinks it's a highway. It has a double yellow stripe down the middle, gravel shoulders the consistency of waterbeds, and it's full of speeding dump trucks, cement mixers and SUVs. I climb the verge, cut inside a pasture fence and walk on, well away from the road. There are Civil War cannon and haycocks on distant hills. By midafternoon I reach the crossroads of Sudley Springs and the shady yard of Sudley United Methodist Church, its cemetery surrounded by towering trees. The congregation is so old that the property appears in Civil War photographs (the original building was destroyed by fire and has been rebuilt). Some of the pictures show stumps of trees that were hacked down to avoid giving cover to enemy infantry. A plaque on the church grounds commemorates the day that "people, some on their way to worship, some already in the church" were suddenly confronted with thousands of federal soldiers, marching down Sudley Road. In the battle that followed, federal and Confederate forces used the church as a field hospital, and performed surgery on its altar.
Inside, the Rev. Ralph G. Satter, a transplanted Californian, is busy with paperwork and thoughts of his Sunday sermon. An acoustic guitar sits in the corner of his office. Sunlight streams through the window. He wears green corduroy trousers, a green shirt and a small wooden cross on a black cord around his neck.
He's a walker. And the best kind of walking, in his opinion, is the kind that allows one to lose track of time. "In terms of our spirituality, that's the best thing," he says. But that's harder and harder to do. "Our traffic situation out here is already horrendous. We're in the rural crescent already, you've got to have at least 10 acres to build, but a lot of development's already been grandfathered in. They're finding ways to do it."
About 1,200 worshipers show up each week for Sunday services. A sign out front advertises an upcoming oyster and turkey dinner.
Do the congestion and traffic and driv-ing take a toll?
"Oh sure," Satter says. "Everything we do affects our psyche. The way we spend our time, the fact that we mostly drive in cars, isolated. It's very impersonal."
On my way out, Satter tells the story of Amos and Mary Benson, church members who were walking home from services at the time of the Civil War and heard moaning coming from a ditch. It was a Union soldier who lay near death. They brought him food and water and eventually took him home. He survived and became a Union officer. After the war, he returned to Sudley Springs and raised enough money to retire the church's debt.
The graveyard just outside Satter's office is surrounded by a black iron fence. Slanting afternoon light illuminates a worn tombstone marked with two small faded flags -- the Stars and Stripes, and the Confederate Stars and Bars. The worn tombstone lettering is barely legible, but if you squint you can just make out the names of Amos and Mary Benson, early Northern Virginia pedestrians who saved a life instead of losing their own.
Searching the map for an alternate route north that doesn't involve hair-raising encounters with dump trucks, I find Sanders Lane. But getting to it will require a detour through a farmyard and fording Catharpin Run under the roadway. On the way I meet a man wiring a campaign sign -- "Families for Friedman" -- onto a metal post.
"We've got all kinds of battles going on out here," says Greg Gorham. He is president of the newly formed Sudley-Catharpin Citizens Association. It has modeled itself on the much older Sudley Mountain/Stone Ridge Citizens Association, and has just won its first big victory -- preserving 136 acres of land from developers' bulldozers with the help of the Civil War Preservation Trust.
There is all kinds of wrangling going on out here over roads and development, Gorham says. There's the battle against the battlefield bypass, which would take traffic around the battlefield, but eat up sacred ground, and which some locals fear would be the first step on the slippery slope toward construction of the so-called western bypass, Northern Virginia's equivalent of Montgomery County's intercounty connector. Some say it would be the beginning of the much-dreaded, much-debated Outer Beltway.
All of these battles are about a larger question, a chicken-and-egg conundrum about road construction -- namely, does building new roads alleviate congestion, or just attract more of it?
People out here have learned the hard way to be wary of new road projects, says Gorham. "I-66 was supposed to solve the traffic problem, but it just brought a whole lot more people out here. They build a new road, and as soon as they open it, it's packed."
The traffic on 234 is so bad, says Gorham, that he doesn't dare get out of his car and walk on it. No one does. "I'm the guy who signed up to pick up the trash on this road and I can't even do it," he says.
Catharpin Run's creekbed under 234 is a blanket of bottles and cans that must go back to the 1940s or earlier. Back up top, on the northern side of the creek at last, I find a deer carcass on the road shoulder, directly in my path. From a distance I assume it is roadkill. And maybe it was, or started out that way. But someone has hacked a deep wedge across the animal's forehead, just where its rack must have been. The wound is not bloody, oddly enough. Instead, it looks like a medical book drawing, a neat cross section of red muscle tissue, sinew and bone. The deer is too recently dead to be rigid. It's eyes -- clouded black -- are the only sign that it's been dead for a while. Maybe a hunter shot the deer, took his trophy and left the carcass behind, but it seems unlikely. This looks like roadkill closely followed by roadkill repo.
In eastern Loudoun, the bright lights of civilization beckon from a Citgo station. Commuter traffic streams by. This used to be country, and there are still paddocks and horses along here, but westbound traffic is backed up all the way to Gilbert's Corner, now about three miles away. All around, subdivisions are rising. The developers out here are so successful their billboards mention their seats on the New York Stock Exchange.
When I ask to use the Citgo phone to call a cab, the station owner volunteers the mechanic on duty to ferry me back to Sudley Springs. He's just getting off duty, about to head home to Middleburg, seven miles west of here. "She walked all the way from Sudley?" he says, shaking his head. Driving me will take him about 20 miles out of his way, but he is gracious about it, especially
after I offer to pay him cab fare. We pile into the front seat of his van, brushing aside cigarette packs and papers, and drive back down Route 234 through the darkness. As usual, from behind the windshield, the menacing lanes of 234 look benign and even beautiful, smooth, and dark, their double yellow line glowing like a beacon in the van's headlights. We talk about cars. The mechanic has a posse of them. He buys them cheap, restores them with care, and then hates to sell them. He's had Lincolns, Cadillacs. He likes to drive. The cars make him feel good. And anyway, he adds, lighting up a smoke, it sure beats walking.
The last three miles to Gilbert's Corner are a straight shot. The westbound side of 50 is wide and grassy. The road narrows from four lanes to two, but even then, the sightlines are good. I see trucks and wide-loads coming from a long way off, and cross the road back and forth to avoid them.
As I approach, I see that Gilbert's Corner is . . . nothing. Instead of ham sandwiches and glasses of milk, there are three bare corners, a lot of traffic and a boarded-up white building, the ghost of the old filling station, surrounded by No Trespassing and No Parking signs. A billboard announces the imminence of a 100,000- to 800,000-square-foot development to be known as Gilbert's Corner Phases I and II.
It must still be a gleam in the developer's eye, apparently, because the only action at this corner at the moment is traffic streaming north, south, east and west. Route 15, which crosses 50 here, is a major north-south truck route. There are right- and left-turn lanes to move the traffic along, but even so, at rush hour, the backups are epic. This is Mad Max Road Warrior territory. You'd have to be a starry-eyed dreamer, a cockeyed optimist, or really determined, to think about reclaiming it for mere humans on foot.
Which is where Susan Van Wagoner and the Route 50 Corridor Coalition come in. Van Wagoner is a painter who specializes in portraits of the hounds and horses that are to Middleburg what Harleys are to motorcycle gangs. For the past eight years, she and a group of citizen activists, architects, road planners and others have led a fractious but ultimately successful fight to make their 20-mile stretch of Route 50 from just east of Gilbert's Corner through tiny Paris, in neighboring Fauquier County, a model for the principles of the new urbanism.
The idea is to keep Middleburg and the other little towns out here -- Aldie, Upperville -- from collapsing entirely from the pressure of raging through traffic. The beginning came in 1995, when Van Wagoner and others learned of VDOT's plans to build a four-lane by-pass around Middleburg, at a cost estimated variously at $35 million to $50 million. The state's plans also envisioned at least three more such interchanges for other towns along Route 50. Estimated cost for the whole stretch: hundreds of millions of dollars. "You didn't have to be a genius," Van Wagoner says, to realize that eventually those big new interchanges would need to be connected, and two-lane Route 50 would turn into a four-lane freeway. This, the locals said, would be the death knell for the scenic towns, and town life, along the route.
The Route 50 coalition was born and began asking questions, which led its members to the leaders of the new urbanism, and "traffic calming" and a federally funded pilot project that its backers say could be a model for the rest of the region, and the country, too. The project proceeded in stages -- years of "charrettes," or design meetings, where everyone from local storekeepers to fire and rescue workers and state highway officials was invited to come and draw on the blueprints. The central notion was that if you want people to drive at 25 mph, you don't build a road that looks like it's designed for 60 mph. Instead, you design it so it looks like you should drive 25, and then, as it turns out, people do. You build in some curves, some raised crosswalks (which reduce pedestrian accidents by a factor of 10, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments), you use brick and other varied paving materials to let drivers know they've left the highway and there are humans afoot.
With the crucial support of Republican lawmakers Sen. John Warner and Rep. Frank Wolf, the coalition won federal money to fund the project, which is now in its final design stages. Based on a model in use in Denmark, the Route 50 plan is considered one of the most innovative in this country, and is frequently cited at national transportation and urban planning meetings. At VDOT, early skepticism has changed to enthusiasm. While VDOT en-gineers will withhold evaluation of the project's effectiveness until it is complete, the agency's top official in Northern Virginia describes it as "remarkable -- perhaps the foremost traffic calming project in the country; we're breaking new ground here." At the same time, the price tag for "calming" the entire 20-mile Route 50 corridor is estimated at $28 million, roughly half the cost for the now-abandoned Middleburg bypass alone.
Local political support has been "very strong," says Jim Burton, a member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. Two successive generations of the Loudoun County Board have supported the project (though the disposition of the new board, elected in November, is not yet known). Commuters, too, were part of the planning process. Most of them came around, says Burton, though some of the more far-flung motorists are still unhappy.
"There are people who live out in Winchester," says Burton, "who'd rather have an autobahn so they can drive 100 miles per hour to get to work in Arlington and D.C., but those of us who live in this area are opposed to turning Route 50 into a four-lane. They did that to Route 7 west of Leesburg, and it opened up that area to intense development."
Inside Middleburg itself and the other towns, the changes will be slight -- road speeds and widths will stay largely the same, but some of the contours of the road will change. (Timed tests show the changes will increase the average commuter's time on this 20-mile stretch by less than four minutes.) But Gilbert's Corner will revert to a design that looks more like it did back in the milk and ham sandwich days. Instead of a traffic signal and three-mile backups at rush hour, traffic will be regulated by a series of four roundabouts. Three of them will siphon off local traffic before it gets to the intersection. The final roundabout, at Gilbert's Corner itself, will slow traffic to about 15 to 20 mph. That might sound like a fantasy, but engineering studies indicate that even at rush hour, the backup at the roundabout will be no more than three or four cars. National studies of roundabouts already in use in Maryland and other states show the circles reduce traffic accidents at intersections by 60 to 70 percent. The level of service at Gilbert's Corner is expected to go from one of the poorer in the region, to one of the best.
"It's not about making life difficult for cars," Van Wagoner says. "What it's really about is sharing the space."
There will be a pedestrian walkway through Gilbert's Corner, too, should you happen to be walking out that way in spring 2008, when the project will be complete if all goes according to plan. The walkway will cut right through the center, but because traffic will be moving more slowly through the intersection, your chances of surviving the crossing on foot should be quite good.
It will be something very new, or maybe very old. "There's an early-afternoon calm in our town," says the narrator of "Our Town." "A buzzin' and a hummin' from the school buildings; only a few buggies on Main Street -- the horses dozing at the hitching posts; you all remember what it's like."
Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
*
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Inside, the Rev. Ralph G. Satter, a transplanted Californian, is busy with paperwork and thoughts of his Sunday sermon. An acoustic guitar sits in the corner of his office. Sunlight streams through the window. He wears green corduroy trousers, a green shirt and a small wooden cross on a black cord around his neck.
He's a walker. And the best kind of walking, in his opinion, is the kind that allows one to lose track of time. "In terms of our spirituality, that's the best thing," he says. But that's harder and harder to do. "Our traffic situation out here is already horrendous. We're in the rural crescent already, you've got to have at least 10 acres to build, but a lot of development's already been grandfathered in. They're finding ways to do it."
About 1,200 worshipers show up each week for Sunday services. A sign out front advertises an upcoming oyster and turkey dinner.
Do the congestion and traffic and driv-ing take a toll?
"Oh sure," Satter says. "Everything we do affects our psyche. The way we spend our time, the fact that we mostly drive in cars, isolated. It's very impersonal."
On my way out, Satter tells the story of Amos and Mary Benson, church members who were walking home from services at the time of the Civil War and heard moaning coming from a ditch. It was a Union soldier who lay near death. They brought him food and water and eventually took him home. He survived and became a Union officer. After the war, he returned to Sudley Springs and raised enough money to retire the church's debt.
The graveyard just outside Satter's office is surrounded by a black iron fence. Slanting afternoon light illuminates a worn tombstone marked with two small faded flags -- the Stars and Stripes, and the Confederate Stars and Bars. The worn tombstone lettering is barely legible, but if you squint you can just make out the names of Amos and Mary Benson, early Northern Virginia pedestrians who saved a life instead of losing their own.
Searching the map for an alternate route north that doesn't involve hair-raising encounters with dump trucks, I find Sanders Lane. But getting to it will require a detour through a farmyard and fording Catharpin Run under the roadway. On the way I meet a man wiring a campaign sign -- "Families for Friedman" -- onto a metal post.
"We've got all kinds of battles going on out here," says Greg Gorham. He is president of the newly formed Sudley-Catharpin Citizens Association. It has modeled itself on the much older Sudley Mountain/Stone Ridge Citizens Association, and has just won its first big victory -- preserving 136 acres of land from developers' bulldozers with the help of the Civil War Preservation Trust.
There is all kinds of wrangling going on out here over roads and development, Gorham says. There's the battle against the battlefield bypass, which would take traffic around the battlefield, but eat up sacred ground, and which some locals fear would be the first step on the slippery slope toward construction of the so-called western bypass, Northern Virginia's equivalent of Montgomery County's intercounty connector. Some say it would be the beginning of the much-dreaded, much-debated Outer Beltway.
All of these battles are about a larger question, a chicken-and-egg conundrum about road construction -- namely, does building new roads alleviate congestion, or just attract more of it?
People out here have learned the hard way to be wary of new road projects, says Gorham. "I-66 was supposed to solve the traffic problem, but it just brought a whole lot more people out here. They build a new road, and as soon as they open it, it's packed."
The traffic on 234 is so bad, says Gorham, that he doesn't dare get out of his car and walk on it. No one does. "I'm the guy who signed up to pick up the trash on this road and I can't even do it," he says.
Catharpin Run's creekbed under 234 is a blanket of bottles and cans that must go back to the 1940s or earlier. Back up top, on the northern side of the creek at last, I find a deer carcass on the road shoulder, directly in my path. From a distance I assume it is roadkill. And maybe it was, or started out that way. But someone has hacked a deep wedge across the animal's forehead, just where its rack must have been. The wound is not bloody, oddly enough. Instead, it looks like a medical book drawing, a neat cross section of red muscle tissue, sinew and bone. The deer is too recently dead to be rigid. It's eyes -- clouded black -- are the only sign that it's been dead for a while. Maybe a hunter shot the deer, took his trophy and left the carcass behind, but it seems unlikely. This looks like roadkill closely followed by roadkill repo.
In eastern Loudoun, the bright lights of civilization beckon from a Citgo station. Commuter traffic streams by. This used to be country, and there are still paddocks and horses along here, but westbound traffic is backed up all the way to Gilbert's Corner, now about three miles away. All around, subdivisions are rising. The developers out here are so successful their billboards mention their seats on the New York Stock Exchange.
When I ask to use the Citgo phone to call a cab, the station owner volunteers the mechanic on duty to ferry me back to Sudley Springs. He's just getting off duty, about to head home to Middleburg, seven miles west of here. "She walked all the way from Sudley?" he says, shaking his head. Driving me will take him about 20 miles out of his way, but he is gracious about it, especially
after I offer to pay him cab fare. We pile into the front seat of his van, brushing aside cigarette packs and papers, and drive back down Route 234 through the darkness. As usual, from behind the windshield, the menacing lanes of 234 look benign and even beautiful, smooth, and dark, their double yellow line glowing like a beacon in the van's headlights. We talk about cars. The mechanic has a posse of them. He buys them cheap, restores them with care, and then hates to sell them. He's had Lincolns, Cadillacs. He likes to drive. The cars make him feel good. And anyway, he adds, lighting up a smoke, it sure beats walking.
The last three miles to Gilbert's Corner are a straight shot. The westbound side of 50 is wide and grassy. The road narrows from four lanes to two, but even then, the sightlines are good. I see trucks and wide-loads coming from a long way off, and cross the road back and forth to avoid them.
As I approach, I see that Gilbert's Corner is . . . nothing. Instead of ham sandwiches and glasses of milk, there are three bare corners, a lot of traffic and a boarded-up white building, the ghost of the old filling station, surrounded by No Trespassing and No Parking signs. A billboard announces the imminence of a 100,000- to 800,000-square-foot development to be known as Gilbert's Corner Phases I and II.
It must still be a gleam in the developer's eye, apparently, because the only action at this corner at the moment is traffic streaming north, south, east and west. Route 15, which crosses 50 here, is a major north-south truck route. There are right- and left-turn lanes to move the traffic along, but even so, at rush hour, the backups are epic. This is Mad Max Road Warrior territory. You'd have to be a starry-eyed dreamer, a cockeyed optimist, or really determined, to think about reclaiming it for mere humans on foot.
Which is where Susan Van Wagoner and the Route 50 Corridor Coalition come in. Van Wagoner is a painter who specializes in portraits of the hounds and horses that are to Middleburg what Harleys are to motorcycle gangs. For the past eight years, she and a group of citizen activists, architects, road planners and others have led a fractious but ultimately successful fight to make their 20-mile stretch of Route 50 from just east of Gilbert's Corner through tiny Paris, in neighboring Fauquier County, a model for the principles of the new urbanism.
The idea is to keep Middleburg and the other little towns out here -- Aldie, Upperville -- from collapsing entirely from the pressure of raging through traffic. The beginning came in 1995, when Van Wagoner and others learned of VDOT's plans to build a four-lane by-pass around Middleburg, at a cost estimated variously at $35 million to $50 million. The state's plans also envisioned at least three more such interchanges for other towns along Route 50. Estimated cost for the whole stretch: hundreds of millions of dollars. "You didn't have to be a genius," Van Wagoner says, to realize that eventually those big new interchanges would need to be connected, and two-lane Route 50 would turn into a four-lane freeway. This, the locals said, would be the death knell for the scenic towns, and town life, along the route.
The Route 50 coalition was born and began asking questions, which led its members to the leaders of the new urbanism, and "traffic calming" and a federally funded pilot project that its backers say could be a model for the rest of the region, and the country, too. The project proceeded in stages -- years of "charrettes," or design meetings, where everyone from local storekeepers to fire and rescue workers and state highway officials was invited to come and draw on the blueprints. The central notion was that if you want people to drive at 25 mph, you don't build a road that looks like it's designed for 60 mph. Instead, you design it so it looks like you should drive 25, and then, as it turns out, people do. You build in some curves, some raised crosswalks (which reduce pedestrian accidents by a factor of 10, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments), you use brick and other varied paving materials to let drivers know they've left the highway and there are humans afoot.
With the crucial support of Republican lawmakers Sen. John Warner and Rep. Frank Wolf, the coalition won federal money to fund the project, which is now in its final design stages. Based on a model in use in Denmark, the Route 50 plan is considered one of the most innovative in this country, and is frequently cited at national transportation and urban planning meetings. At VDOT, early skepticism has changed to enthusiasm. While VDOT en-gineers will withhold evaluation of the project's effectiveness until it is complete, the agency's top official in Northern Virginia describes it as "remarkable -- perhaps the foremost traffic calming project in the country; we're breaking new ground here." At the same time, the price tag for "calming" the entire 20-mile Route 50 corridor is estimated at $28 million, roughly half the cost for the now-abandoned Middleburg bypass alone.
Local political support has been "very strong," says Jim Burton, a member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. Two successive generations of the Loudoun County Board have supported the project (though the disposition of the new board, elected in November, is not yet known). Commuters, too, were part of the planning process. Most of them came around, says Burton, though some of the more far-flung motorists are still unhappy.
"There are people who live out in Winchester," says Burton, "who'd rather have an autobahn so they can drive 100 miles per hour to get to work in Arlington and D.C., but those of us who live in this area are opposed to turning Route 50 into a four-lane. They did that to Route 7 west of Leesburg, and it opened up that area to intense development."
Inside Middleburg itself and the other towns, the changes will be slight -- road speeds and widths will stay largely the same, but some of the contours of the road will change. (Timed tests show the changes will increase the average commuter's time on this 20-mile stretch by less than four minutes.) But Gilbert's Corner will revert to a design that looks more like it did back in the milk and ham sandwich days. Instead of a traffic signal and three-mile backups at rush hour, traffic will be regulated by a series of four roundabouts. Three of them will siphon off local traffic before it gets to the intersection. The final roundabout, at Gilbert's Corner itself, will slow traffic to about 15 to 20 mph. That might sound like a fantasy, but engineering studies indicate that even at rush hour, the backup at the roundabout will be no more than three or four cars. National studies of roundabouts already in use in Maryland and other states show the circles reduce traffic accidents at intersections by 60 to 70 percent. The level of service at Gilbert's Corner is expected to go from one of the poorer in the region, to one of the best.
"It's not about making life difficult for cars," Van Wagoner says. "What it's really about is sharing the space."
There will be a pedestrian walkway through Gilbert's Corner, too, should you happen to be walking out that way in spring 2008, when the project will be complete if all goes according to plan. The walkway will cut right through the center, but because traffic will be moving more slowly through the intersection, your chances of surviving the crossing on foot should be quite good.
It will be something very new, or maybe very old. "There's an early-afternoon calm in our town," says the narrator of "Our Town." "A buzzin' and a hummin' from the school buildings; only a few buggies on Main Street -- the horses dozing at the hitching posts; you all remember what it's like."
Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
*
© 2004 The Washington Post Company