East High Street. Long Street/250. West Main. Ridge/McIntire. From 4:00-5:30 each day, these roads are packed. High Street gets backed up clear past Meade, Long past Locust and sometimes to Park. Navigating Pantops during lunchtime and during evening rush hour is an exercise in patience. As the populations of the surrounding counties boom (Fluvanna, in particular), the number of people commuting to Charlottesville climbs correspondingly.
What are we going to do? It’s not possible to widen most of these roads — we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. The Meadowcreek Parkway and the 29 Bypass Bypass wouldn’t have any effect on this traffic. Public transit to and from population centers in Albemarle and the surrounding counties would be neat, but I don’t see it in the cards. The only solution that I see is a total overhaul of how planning works for the entirety of Central Virginia, creating viable centers of blue- and white-collar commerce all around the area, rather than centering on Charlottesville.
But that’s just one idea. What do you think will keep things from getting worse?
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