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grading of Rt. 211. He acknowledged that he, too, is concerned by the truck port in Front Royal but maintained that improvements to Rt. 211 are not part of some scheme to provide better access for that facility. “The ball was rolling on 211 years ago. It’s nothing new.”
“Conspiracy theories” are very easy and very tempting to formulate, said John McCarthy, Rappahannock’s county administrator. But there has been no mass of people working behind the scenes to bring this long-delayed highway project to fruition, he added. He described his bosses — Rappahannock’s five supervisors — as good and honest men who have difficulty in agreeing for six months on the same letterhead and maintained it’s inconceivable that all five would agree to a conspiracy involving state officials, the Warren County Board of Supervisors, the Virginia Transportation Commission, VDOT, and other state agencies.
“The inland port is a pet project of the current governor [which was] sprung on the Commonwealth” last year, the county administrator said. And if the inland port is going to put additional truck traffic on Rt. 211, “it’s going to do it whether there are two lanes or four lanes,” so the issue of the truck port is irrelevant to the proposed construction project, he added.
Mr. McCarthy acknowledged that Park Service counts show a decline in traffic entering Shenandoah National Park from Thornton Gap over the last four years. But he added that those same figures for 1988 show a 24 percent increase compared to 1987, while overall traffic on the 4.4 miles of Rt. 211 between Washington and Sperryville has climbed by 45 percent since 1974.
Mr. McCarthy emphasized that Rt. 211 is a U.S. highway, not a county road. “People in Florida, Colorado, and Texas have as much right to ride on this highway as you and I,” and they have the right to expect a safe highway, he said.
The four-mile stretch is not one U.S. highway, but two, said Robert Beatty, pointing out that it is U.S. 211 and U.S. 522 from Massies Corner to Sperryville. To the argument that dual-laning will significantly increase truck traffic, he said: “I don’t think the road will become popular
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