Letter to the Editor: VDOT Needs to Rethink Highway Ramp Plans

To the editor:

A group of residents in the Overlook community of Alexandria is urging Virginia’s Department of Transportation to heed strong opposition from residents and stop its plans to build a highway ramp directly next to their community.

The planned ramp is part of VDOT’s “HOT lanes” project, which entails using existing HOV express lanes as a toll road, ostensibly to improve traffic flow in and out of the D.C. metropolitan area. The end point of the northbound project is an exit ramp from the HOV/HOT lanes that will “fly over” 395-N and dump traffic onto 395-N just south of Duke Street.

The ramp’s extreme proximity to the Overlook neighborhood — only 75 feet from the nearest homes — threatens to cause great harm to the community in the form of additional pollution, noise, traffic congestion, and damage to a local stream, wildlife habitat and federally protected wetlands.

Concerned Residents of Overlook — a grassroots group formed after months of unsuccessful attempts to get VDOT to address the community’s concerns — believes VDOT failed to conduct adequate analysis of these potentially grave impacts on the Overlook and surrounding neighborhoods when the agency moved the endpoint of the HOT lanes project in 2011 from Crystal City to its current planned location next to the Overlook community. The move was forced by a suit brought against VDOT by Arlington County that cited concerns similar to those of the Concerned Residents of Overlook.

In its haste to meet the project’s building schedule, VDOT ignored best practices and federal requirements to analyze all potential impacts to the area surrounding the new ramp location and has pushed aside the objections of local residents.

By moving the ramp to our backyards, all HOT lanes traffic that would have continued to Arlington now must exit directly next to the neighborhood. Despite this major design change, VDOT did not analyze the impact the ramp will have on air quality and subsequently on public health of our neighborhood.

Although VDOT conducted studies of regional air quality and traffic, the studies did not address the impact specifically to the people with the biggest stake in the outcome – residents of Overlook and surrounding communities closest to the ramp. VDOT’s failure to conduct these “hotspot” analyses violates federal regulations, which require such studies before building can begin.

Worried about unhealthy levels of pollution, Concerned Residents of Overlook recently commissioned independent traffic and air quality experts to investigate VDOT’s claims that there will be no negative impact from the project.

Our take is that, just as in the Arlington case, VDOT understated or outright failed to analyze the negative impacts this ramp could have on surrounding communities. Because VDOT failed to do a thorough job, we have been forced to pay out of pocket to do it for them.

The group plans to use the information in a campaign designed to bring awareness of the potential for impact on public health and the environment to the media and elected officials.

Among the preliminary findings:

• The agency failed to use the most current traffic modeling tool to determine emissions levels. The newest model released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, provides far more precise modeling of the pollution impact of vehicular emissions over the 2004 model VDOT used for its analysis.
• Even though all HOT lane traffic must exit the project’s new end point adjacent to the Overlook, VDOT did no traffic analysis of the indisputably dramatic increase in volume and how it would affect surrounding communities in the form of congestion, pollution, noise, and environmental damage.
• Federal requirements for monitoring nitrogen dioxide (NO2) — cited by EPA as one of the most damaging pollutants to public health — were in place when VDOT started its Air Quality study, yet VDOT failed to analyze the levels of NO2 and several other vehicle-borne toxins that are known health risks.

Residents hope to engage VDOT, but also plan to petition the governor and secretary of transportation for a delay in the project until the full impact on public health and the environment can be determined.

Mary Hasty and Sue Okubo
Alexandria