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Work begins on Gainesville Interchange
It's taken more than a decade but work officially began last week on the Gainesville Interchange makeover.On June 24, officials gathered to break ground on the $267 million project to lift U.S. 29 over the railroad tracks and to lift Linton Hall and Gallerher roads over U.S. 29.
The project will be completed in 2014.
“This project is a long time coming,” said Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton, who was chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors from 2000 to 2006. “When I was on the board, it was scheduled to be in almost immediately and then the money ran out.”
It took several years for state officials -- primarily Prince William state Sen. Chuck Colgan (D-29th) -- to get the funding back but eventually, VDOT came through.
“This is going to do great things for Gainesville but it's also going to help Fauquier, Winchester and all those areas surrounding Prince William,” Colgan said.
Once work is complete, Gainesville will be a community that is totally unrecognizable from what it had been several short years ago.
Plans
VDOT is rebuilding the Interstate-66/U.S. 29 Interchange and is also lifting Linton Hall and Gallerher roads over U.S. 29 and the Gainesville railroad tracks.
U.S. 29 will also be raised over the railroad tracks and will be widened to six lanes around the interchanges.
Beneath the bridge, Norfolk Southern will have enough free space to add rail lines if the VRE commuter train is extended to Haymarket or Gainesville.
The north side of U.S. 29 ? across the road from the shopping center ? will be taken up by ramps for drivers to get on and off the Linton Hall Road Interchange. The extra lanes will run for several hundred feet so that U.S. 29 will be at its widest at the interchange and will taper back down to its current size in the vicinity of Virginia Oaks Drive.
When it is complete, U.S. 29 will have limited access. Currently, businesses up and down the highway each have their own driveways so cars can pull on and off U.S. 29 at will. That will no longer be the case after the road is widened -- access roads will be built behind the highway so traffic moves uninterrupted.
Temporary road
In the meantime, crews will construct temporary roads so traffic can be diverted around the construction.
“We can't reduce capacity,” VDOT engineer Avtar Singh, explaining that a temporary road is really the only way to get the job done without destroying the area's already-difficult traffic flow.
The $9.2 million temporary roads will replace Linton Hall and U.S. 29. Linton Hall traffic will be diverted to the temporary road that will be built parallel to the existing road, on the opposite side from the Gateway shopping center.
U.S. 29's replacement road will be on the north side of the existing highway, also across from Gateway.
The intersection will be built over the spot where Wendy's used to be, said Singh.
The detour roads will open in 2012 and once traffic is diverted, crews will begin work on the interchange and widening of U.S. 29.
Eventually, the temporary roads will be demolished with bridges and ramps built over their paths.
“We’ve come a long way from the early 1920s when Route 29 was constructed using mules, surplus military equipment and convicts under armed guards for heavy labor,” noted Brentsville Supervisor Wally Covington (R).
The intervening years
They've also come a long way since 1999, when Connaughton was first running for board chairman. The now-secretary of transportation said he knocked on doors in Virginia Oaks -- then the only development in Gainesville, and heard the same thing from everyone -- complaints about the Gainesville Interchange.
The interchange was almost the only thing on people's minds then, he said. The only other thing that got them talking was the impending arrival of the Giant grocery store, which meant they'd no longer have to drive to Manassas to buy groceries.
Back then, VDOT was due to start construction on the interchange in a few short years but when state funding dried up, the project was taken off the table completely.
Brentswood
Then in 2004, Brookfield Homes proposed a 6,800-home community in Gainesville. In exchange, the developer offered to pay to rebuild the Gainesville Interchange -- a $180 million project.
With no state funding in sight and traffic worsening by the month, supervisors agreed to consider the plan, drawing huge amounts of community opposition.
The sheer size of Brookfield's offer and the resulting opposition got the attention of state officials and by 2006, VDOT was again channeling money into the project. The Brentswood proposal was sunk and Gainesville ended up getting the state funding it had been promised so many years before.
The Brentswood plan made “a major difference,” said Connaughton, who chaired the board during the controversy. The amount of money Brookfield was ready to put up and the quick turn-around time they promised “created a great deal of state interest, renewed interest, in this project.”
Others have said Brookfield's offer essentially embarrassed state transportation officials into coughing up the money they had promised.
Since then, work has been proceeding steadily, although the price tag has gone from $180 million to $267 million.
And that only covers the interchange part of the project.
I-66
At the same time officials were celebrating the beginning of the interchange redesign, they were also celebrating the end of the most recent phase of the Interstate 66 widening.
That third phase of the project cost $103 million and added two lanes in each direction from Manassas to Gainesville. The widening also included new ramps between I-66 and U.S. 29 in Gainesville.
Although officials cut the ribbon on that project June 24, crews are still putting the finishing touches on their work. All lanes will be open by July 10.
Earlier, VDOT had already widened I-66 to eight lanes from Sudley Road to the Route 234 Bypass. That piece, the second phase in the overall Gainesville project, cost $46 million.
And even before that, crews built University Boulevard, a 1.3-mile, four-lane road connecting U.S. 29 with Wellington Road. That first phase of the Gainesville project was finished in 2006 for a cost of $18 million.
When the Gainesville Interchange finally opens in 2014 as the fourth and final phase, it will mark the end of the more than $435 million overall Gainesville transportation project.
More than 175,000 vehicles per day are expected to travel through Gainesville on I-66 by 2028. Two years ago, there were only 75,000.
“This really is the gateway to Central Virginia,” Connaughton said, noting that from Charlottesville to Winchester, everyone travels I-66 through Gainesville to drive east into Northern and Central Virginia. “We have got to make sure that people are able to move through this corridor as quickly as possible.”
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