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Safety or congestion relief? Which takes precedence with the Virginia Department of Transportation?
That’s the question the Board of Supervisors is ««lring in light of recent efforts to continue the closure of Rt. 17 to tractor-trailers through Fauquier County until a spur to detour traffic around Warrenton is completed.
When the big trucks were barred from nine miles of Rt. 17 between Marshall and Warrenton in 1984, many of the drivers chose an alternate route over Chester Gap and through Flint Hill to the dual lane at Massie’s Corner. The Rappahannock supervisors objected, pointing out that the very same factors which make Rt. 17 dangerous - limited sight distance, narrow, winding roadbed, multiplicity of farm and driveway entrances onto the road - also apply to Rt. 522, and probably to an even greater degree. But while they authorized protest letter after protest letter, the board members acknowledged the futility of their effort, knowing that the voices from Rappahannock (with its 6,000 population) would be drowned out by the cries from Fauquier (with 43,000).
Since the closure, Rappahannock has experienced a three-fold increase in vehicles using Rt. 522. Accidents have also increased; one involving two tractor-trailers at Chester Gap resulted in the deaths of two elderly . Rappahannock residents.
State Delegate Raymond R. (Andy) Guest Jr. joined the Rappahannock supervisors in asking for relief; in July 1986, just six weeks after the double fatality, Highway Commissioner Ray Pethtel denied Del. Guest’s request for a truck ban on Rt. 522. “Although traffic conditions along this two-lane facility are not improving to any extent, we feel a truck ban is not appropriate at the present time due to the low number of truck related accidents,” the commissioner wrote.
(By comparison, the Highway Department records show 22 accidents and four fatalities involving trucks on the nine mile stretch of Rt. 17 between April 1982 and Nov. 15,1984, when the ban took effect.)
Since the rejection of their request for closure to tractor-trailers, the Rappahannock supervisors have sought - and obtained - widened shoulders and other work to decrease the hazards on Rt. 522, while regularly asking for the earliest possible reopening of Rt. 17, which they expected would come next year.
But last week, administrative assistant John McCarthy warned that the ban might not be lifted until completion of a spur from Warrenton to Rt. 645 which would cany traffic around the already congested town roads.
Supervisor Nelson Lane added he’d learned recently from Constance Kincheloe, who represents the highway district which includes Rappahannock, that “mounting environmental concern” is holding up completion of this last leg of the highway lmprove^e^T^r^af lJtitimiie^^ final portion is finished, the truck ban on Rt. 17 may be continued, Mr. Lane confirmed.
“It’s quite conceivable” that the parallel laning of the dangerous, curvy sections of Rt. 17 could be done by spring, Mr. McCarthy said. “But if the ban is tied to completion of that last leg, I can’t even begin to put it into a time frame. It would be years,” he said, adding that the spur crosses “environmentally sensitive areas.”
Maintaining a ban on truck traffic through Warrenton until the spur is constructed is not what was requested when the prohibition on tractor-trailers was initially
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