HRBT expansion: How officials are avoiding disrupting the shipping industry, national security

The Williamsburg-Yorktown Daily ^ | June 25, 2019 | Sarah Fearing

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

In the next year or two, the seabed between Hampton and Norfolk will start to change. Mud and sand will slowly move as a custom-built boring machine tunnels alongside the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.

Travelers funneling through the existing HRBT may not notice the adjacent construction just on the other side of the tunnel wall. Cargo ships and Navy vessels, carrying thousands of containers and sailors, may pass over the project’s construction completely undisturbed.

And that’s the way Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization officials want it to stay.

“It’s something we’re really proud of,” said Robert Crum, executive director for the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization.

Totaling about $3.8 billion, the HRBT expansion project is the largest in the history of Virginia, and one of the largest currently in the country.

But the critical project — aimed at reducing chronic congestion both eastbound and westbound in the existing tunnels — also slips directly beneath one of the East Coast’s largest shipping and Naval channels.

Building an entirely new tunnel in an important United States port, the Port of Virginia, requires some preparation to avoid impacting the economy, tourism and national security.

“The port is becoming one of the most powerful ports on the East Coast,” Crum said. “It moves products and goods to much of the East Coast economy.”

Eventually, when the new tunnel is built — the project is still in the design phase — it will help increase traffic flow and reduce backups, boosting the regional and national economy by letting trucks and cars pass through quicker.

“We’re talking about a major congestion point, we believe,” Crum said. “Not only in Hampton Roads, but in the state.”

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

PING.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[jdege]

“We’re talking about a major congestion point, we believe,” Crum said. “Not only in Hampton Roads, but in the state.”

And where is the next congestion point?

We had a highway construction project in my town that lasted decades. In its final years, there was considerable controversy over how slowly traffic moved through a major bottleneck, which resulted in a massive contradiction project to rework the intersection to eliminate the bottleneck.

Which meant another year of dealing with road construction. But when it was finally done, and all the lanes own to traffic, there was no longer a bottleneck.

There.

Instead, there was just as bad a bottleneck, 1/4 mile down the road.

[Don W]

It takes 20 years to design a road improvement that’s good for 20 years of growth, then it takes 20 years to build it. You end up with the same problems, and the same process begins again.