Expansion Coming to Courthouse Rd
If you don't like road construction, you'd better just buy some prepper supplies and stay home because we are about to be inundated with it. Of course, road improvements are fantastic when completed but a royal pain during the process. At the Planning Commission meeting this week (click the link for video of the meeting), Chris Rapp, the director of Public Works gave his quarterly review of upcoming road projects. Here is a little more info about what we should expect in the coming months. First up, the Courthouse Road expansion project:
VDOT has all the details about this project online but among the most notable to local residents are:
- The whole I-95 interchange will be moved south with Courthouse Road being realigned to meet with Hospital Center Boulevard at the Route 1 intersection.
- Winding Creek and Ramoth Church roads will be realigned so that they intersect and a light will be installed there.
- Courthouse Road will be expanded to 4 lanes from Route 1 all the way to the new intersection at Winding Creek/Ramoth Church.
- There will be a light in front of Colonial Forge High School as well
There will be a "Pardon Our Dust" meeting at Forge on May 17th and construction will begin in June. Couple this road work with the current Garrisonville road work, currently scheduled to be completed in October 2018, and congestion will be unavoidable for most in the short term. Look for more traffic on Mountain View as people utilize it to head to the highway. Speaking of...
...there will be more work on the HOT lanes with an 2 mile extension south of the current Garrisonville Road exits. Looking ahead just a bit, the Rappahannock River Crossing is in development as well. This project adds 2 lanes between Route 17 and Route 3 and will allow local traffic to cross the river without entering the highway's main lanes, something residents of our area have wanted for ages.
There are a few other projects in the works, with improvement projects on Brooke Road at Eskimo Hill and Mountain View at Poplar.