Dear George:

Just a few comments about the Meadowcreek Parkway.

1. I have favored the Meadowcreek Parkway since the time when I was on the Planning Commission in the 1980's. I favor it as a part of the entire plan, which has always included a Western bypass. I am less enthusiastic about it, and it presents additional problems, if no Western bypass is being built.

2. The position of some candidates -- that we should be looking for an Eastern connector to connect 29 North and 250 East -- seems to think that we have never looked at it. We have. In detail. In the 1980's we looked at it, with particular attention to where such a road might go. The only place that made any sense, considering the network of roads already there, was to go through the Pen Park golf course and through what is now Darden Towe Park. Any attempt to get from 29 North to 64 East is prohibitively expensive, because it requires going over the mountains near (presumably north of) Pantops. The only other suggestion that makes any topographical sense, but which was not considered in the 1980's, was to have traffic leave 29 North at Proffit Road, and upgrade Proffit Road and Route 20. If the purpose of the Eastern connector is to get through traffic off of 29 and the bypass, it turns out that there is not enough through traffic going in that direction to justify an enormous expenditure of money.

3. We have for 25 years noted that we need to have more roads paralleling US 29. Hydraulic Road to Rio Road and Route 743 serves that function for people who don't mind living west. Right now, Park Street and the Greenbrier neighborhood serve that function for people east of town. It is blindness to think that we can function without more roads paralleling 29.

4. To say that we should have a light rail system is to ignore the realities. Light rail is expensive. There is no money available for it. There is no place to put it. We can't make our bus system come close to profitability, and we would never be able to do so with light rail. The studies that have been done on light rail, or subways, or anything else that runs on a track, have shown that they only begin to make sense at MUCH higher traffic figures than we could possibly generate.

5. I agree with CALAC (I don't know who they are, but I agree with them on this). We have hashed and re-hashed this issue for 25 years. The traffic on Rio Road and Park Street have gotten steadily worse; indeed, since the widening of Rio Road this last summer, the traffic seems to have increased dramatically, so that it moves more slowly now that it has been streamlined. The through traffic through the Greenbrier neighborhood has continued to grow. No one has yet suggested another way to get a road parallel to 29 to take traffic off of 29.

It's time to build the road.

Lloyd Snook (electronic mail, February 13, 2000).