Chesterfield County plans one intersection with a monster price tag

Recently, Richmond has garnered a reputation as something of a transit wunderkind thanks to its bus route redesign, award-winning Pulse Bus Rapid Transit, subsequent 17% growth in ridership, and the dynamic new CEO at the helm of the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC). Meanwhile, Chesterfield County⁠—the locality to the city’s south that owns the other half of GRTC⁠—is busting its budget to double down on car culture.

Over the next decade Chesterfield plans to transform at least six of its widest junctions into so-called “superstreets,” multi-lane behemoths that shift the flow of traffic from perpendicular designs to 15-lane-wide, swooping intersections.

In a recent interview with the Chesterfield Observer, Jesse Smith, the county’s transportation director, boasted of the mooted superstreet’s benefits: “It provides for a high-capacity roadway, and also safety because you don’t have these intersections where [cars] cross paths in front of each other. It’s a way to eke out additional capacity without widening.”

Superstreets are a burden on the budget

Although the need to change infrastructure to enhance road safety is becoming the consensus across Central Virginia, the astronomical price tag of superstreets has caused many in the region to question their value. Just the redesign of the junction at Route 10 and Rivers Bend Boulevard—the first intersection slated to become a superstreet—is estimated to cost the county $64 million. The remaining five superstreets Chesterfield has in the works would similarly cost millions of dollars.

Compared to the $54 million the entire region pays to support GRTC, Greater Richmond’s sole transit provider, the price tag for this one intersection certainly seems outsized. Ross Catrow, the Executive Director of RVA Rapid Transit expressed his consternation with the superstreet’s colossal cost in a pithy tweet:

More than GRTC’s annual operating budget for a single street in Chesterfiled County—the same county that owns half of the bus company but would not run local bus service until the state offered to pay for it.https://t.co/1zEhtLh16h pic.twitter.com/PNfoYV8qK5

— Ross Catrow (@RossCatrow) August 22, 2019

The superstreet proposal from the private transportation engineering company behind the project, McCormick Taylor, assumes that today’s Route 10 which currently serves just 44,000 vehicles per day should expect a “traffic volume exceeding 105,000 vehicles daily by 2036.”

Daniel Herriges, Senior Editor at Strong Towns, finds such growth projections fanciful.

“Over 100,000 vehicles daily is a traffic volume you only see on full-scale freeways, not arterial roads like this. I have a very hard time imagining the road as currently designed accommodating that kind of traffic, with or without the ‘superstreet’ intersection,” said Herriges in an interview.

Herriges believes the lack of a demonstrated need for the superstreets makes them a bad investment for the county.

Speaking on a pattern he has seen with similar superstreet projects across the country, he said, “Companies like this often over-exaggerate projections to get this done. Traffic projections are based on the unrealistic assumption that the area will grow exponentially forever. Road conditions are part of their analysis and can drive that trend because you’re offering a subsidy to drive through that location. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.”

And they’re bad for people walking and bicycling

McCormick Taylor’s mockups of the Route 10 superstreet show 15 lanes of heavy traffic, and don’t even pretend to create safe spaces for people on foot or bike. Their simulation video utterly devoid of actual humans confirms as much.

Herriges agrees: “Superstreets tend to be enormously expensive to implement and improve vehicle service in a minor way but at the cost of all multimodal access,” said Herriges. “These intersections are absolutely horrible for people walking or biking. The whole point of this design is to create constant free flowing conditions for cars. There will be almost no time when traffic on both sides comes to a stop. As a pedestrian that means you have to play frogger to get across.”

Although the Route 10 superstreet project was expected to launch in September, so far no visible progress has been made to convert the intersection. After the wave of anti-developer civic activism unleashed by the county’s controversial Matoaca Megasite proposal, there is still a chance that these superstreets will never be realized.

For Chesterfield County’s sake, Herriges hopes that will be the case.

“Why would you spend all this money to create an environment that doubles down on car dependency? If you’re going to invest in safety you need to think about pedestrians and people on bikes. This design ignores the needs of anyone who’s not in a car,” Herriges said. “It’s designed to do only one thing: speed up traffic. It’s not that the evidence they’re producing is wrong, it that their priorities are wrong. It begs a values questions. Who are you building to protect?”