It is lightly used because:
1. It is 20 miles in each direction out of the way from Virginia Beach.
2. It really isn’t much better than the alternative. The alternative involves the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. With 460 you can pick your poison with the Downtown Tunnel and the High Rise Bridge, both equally as time consuming as the HRBT.
3. Adding a toll road isn’t going to make it any more palatable.
4. The true pusher of this road is the Port of Virginia. It is not really designed to relieve congestion, it is designed for developers like everything else. If they really wanted to relieve congetion, they would sink a tunnel and provide rail/highway service betweeen Downtown Newport News and the Norfolk Naval Base with a spur into Portsmouth, but since all those areas are already developed, the business lobby isn’t interested.
One of the worst mistakes ever made was turning down the offer made by the trucking industry to purchase Shirley highway. We really needed a roadway to separate the trucks from the cars ~ and now we have a mixed use roadway that moves as fast as the heaviest most underpowered truck at rush hour.