"Winding, shoulderless Rolling Road looks like a two-lane country road. But the Newington street has become a major artery, connecting Interstate 95, Route 1, the Fairfax County Parkway and what will soon be a much larger Fort Belvoir.

Thoroughfares like Rolling Road are the blood vessels that connect suburbia, the secondary roads that carry commuters to interstates, residents to supermarkets and children to school. They include Braddock Road in Fairfax County, Colesville Road in Montgomery, and even such larger highways as routes 7 and 50. They are the roads that Washington area residents traverse every day, sometimes several times a day.

Just months ago, Northern Virginia residents and elected officials were expecting hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to such roads. Now, because of budget cuts and state lawmakers' failure to reach a deal on regional transportation funding, drivers can expect only more misery.

The Virginia Department of Transportation recently announced a 51 percent cut in the region's road-building program. Dozens of projects have been eliminated or postponed indefinitely. And rising maintenance costs are eating away at what little remains.

"My youngest child is going to celebrate his fifth birthday sitting at a traffic light," said McLean resident Julie Hyams, who frequently uses Route 123, which had a key interchange cut from the state transportation budget. "Now the money that was allotted for improvement has gone 'poof,' and the roads are only going to get worse."

Without improvements, Beltway-type backups will soon reach suburban back yards as roads fail to keep up with the region's growth. Cars will continue to wait through four or five traffic signals to make a simple turn. Buses will fall further behind schedule. Even non-commuters will be affected: When feeder roads become crammed, drivers with an eye on the clock start taking shortcuts through neighborhoods, turning quiet streets into major commuter arteries.

"That is as accurate as it is painful," said Pierce R. Homer, Virginia's transportation secretary. The cuts mean that the $43 million Route 7 bypass job in Loudoun County, a 1.8-mile widening project that was fully funded last year, is $18 million short. So drivers will continue to crawl along in four lanes instead of the planned six. The road is rated F by the state, reflecting its stop-and-go conditions. The widening would have brought it up to a C, which means a stable flow of traffic during peak periods.

Leesburg resident William Bethke drives the bypass every day to get to a park-and-ride lot in Herndon, where he catches a Fairfax Connector bus for the 20-minute ride to the West Falls Church Metro station and on to his job in Crystal City. In the 3 1/2 years Bethke has been traveling the bypass bottleneck, the trip has gone from 10 or 15 minutes to 20 or 30 minutes.

But he doesn't think widening the road will solve its long-term problems.

"Those who now avoid it would then use it, and in three years we'll be back to where we are," he said.

Last year, the state announced plans to spend $376 million on Northern Virginia roads other than interstates over the next six years. The revised plan estimates spending $184 million over six years, according to VDOT. The money is targeted at the region's many roads that by VDOT standards are failing.

That cut means the outdated signalized intersection of routes 1 and 123 in Prince William County, where there are major backups during the morning and afternoon commute, will not be improved until after 2014. The intersection sits near Interstate 95, where a widening will soon send dozens more vehicles through it.

"It's terrible getting off of 123 onto [Route] 1 in the evenings," said Barbara Price, a law firm employee who has lived nearby for 15 years. Five years ago, she would budget three minutes to get through the intersection; now it takes 10.

"It gets worse every year," she said. A condominium development being built nearby will make it "even more horrible," she said.

Gone from the plan is $15 million to widen Rolling Road from two to four lanes near Fort Belvoir in Fairfax. It would have relieved F-level traffic that will worsen when an estimated 19,300 jobs are moved to the facility as part of the federal base realignment and closing process.

"They think it's a small road, but it's not," said Amina Imran, who uses it to get to the Parcel Plus store she owns in a nearby strip mall five miles from her Springfield home. The trip can take as long as 15 minutes.

Drivers say Rolling Road needs improvements not only to handle increased volume, but also to fix its dangerous curves.

"It stinks, because the road is two lanes, and it dips. And in bad weather, it's a horrible place to travel on if you don't have a truck or front-wheel drive," said Kristin Hinkle, who lives off Rolling Road and uses it daily to commute to her family's photography studio in Springfield and to pick up her kids from school.

Northern Virginia leaders have long complained that VDOT's funding formula short-changes the region, and that was one of the main reasons local leaders agreed last year on a host of regional taxes and fees that would have raised an additional $300 million a year.

Most of the money raised by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority was to be earmarked for the region's arterial roads, targeting choke points that could be fixed relatively cheaply but would have a big effect on daily commutes. But the state Supreme Court ruled the authority's collection powers unconstitutional.

"One of our larger concerns, as we add capacity on the freeway system, is that it will add pressure on the arterials," said Ronald F. Kirby, transportation planning director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. "It's a system."

The lack of investment in transportation will be felt acutely in the fast-growing outer suburbs, where congestion also is growing fastest.

According to projections by the Council of Governments, although the region's population will increase 25 percent over the next 25 years, traffic -- measured in lane miles of congestion -- will increase more than 40 percent. In the outer suburbs, congestion is projected to double.

Even some relatively new roads, such as the Fairfax County and Prince William County parkways, need substantial improvements to keep up with explosive residential growth and traffic counts.

"There's a lot of study and consternation going on," Kirby said. "When you get further out, in Fairfax and Loudoun and Charles and Frederick counties, those roads just don't have enough capacity."

On a recent morning, Grant Zachary, a commuter who uses Rolling Road every day, waited in traffic while a driver ahead of him tried to make a left turn. It took three to five minutes for oncoming traffic to clear. Meanwhile, traffic had come to a standstill.

In the six years he has lived in a development off Rolling Road, his short morning drive has gone from five minutes to 15.

"They need to do something," he said while picking up his dry cleaning. "It's loading up fast."

Imran, the parcel store owner, seemed resigned to her fate.

"So it's more traffic and no more roads," she said." (Eric M. Weiss, The Washington Post, May 5, 2008)