Cars are trucking along down Main Street on a sunny Fairfax day. Things seem to be running smoothly, and then traffic comes to a screeching halt — welcome to Old Town Fairfax.
The gridlock downtown, according to several descriptions, is blamed on many factors. The city, however, is not apologizing for its decision to switch two major downtown streets, Main and North streets, from one-way to two-way traffic last summer.
"It looks like it’s running well," said Alex Verzosa, the city’s transportation director.
Verzosa said the switch produced a few of hiccups, though, the first one being that the city cannot seem to convince people to use North Street instead of Main. Drivers heading eastbound on Main Street, or Route 236, are stuck in their ways and want to stay straight on Main, rather than follow the curve on North Street, he said. Taking North dumps cars back onto Main Street, just on the other side of the downtown area.
Add that problem to the traffic from the judicial complex, and a lot of gridlock occurs near the intersection where Main, North and West streets meet.
"A lot of court traffic exiting on West Street is affecting that intersection," said Verzosa. "I’m hoping when Massey Drive opens, it will divert some of the Chain Bridge Road southbound traffic."
BUT THAT IS not the only problem, according to drivers and downtown businesses. The lanes are narrow, and there are not enough signs, said Kevin Chon, a city resident.
"Traffic is so congested," Chon said. "If we had more signs, it would be beneficial to the city."
The city has periodically placed temporary, electronic signs near the approach to the intersection, but Chon said more permanent signs are needed.
Cars going westbound on Main Street have the same problem. Staying straight results in a lot of waiting at red lights, and a lot of traffic. Taking the North Street curve generally avoids all of that, according to Verzosa and Mayor Robert Lederer.
For Janice Levie, a city resident, the traffic switch was a determining factor in her recent change in jobs.
"The two-way traffic [downtown] added at least 15 minutes to my commute," said Levie, who quit her Herndon-area job partially because she wanted to find a closer one. "The concept I think is good, but for people like me, it’s terrible."
People like Levie, commuters traveling through the city, are the people city officials were targeting when they decided on the switch to two-way traffic. Lederer and City Council members wanted to make Old Town Fairfax more of a destination, instead of a thoroughfare.
That seems to be working, at least for Levie.
"We do need more of a presence of a city center," she said. "I rush through my own city, but I’ll walk around Old Town [Alexandria]; I’m no longer rushing by it now, though. I want to get out of my car and walk around."
Curt McCullough, a traffic signal system engineer with the city, said the switch was done primarily for economic and development reasons. Since there has been a delayed reopening of Massey Drive — the street that cuts through the center of the judicial complex — "as much
as several hundred extra vehicles per hour are being diverted onto eastbound Main," thus "substantially increasing congestion in that area," McCullough said, via e-mail to the Connection.
"Such a delayed reopening of Massey Drive was not anticipated at the time of the two-way changeover last August," he wrote in the e-mail.
The latest annual Old Town traffic counts, completed last October, showed about 72,000 vehicles enter the Old Town area every day. More than 30,000 of those vehicles are on Main Street, and more than 20,000 are on Chain Bridge Road, according to McCullough’s data.
Becky Stoekel, a business owner on Main Street, said things are only going to get worse when Old Town Village opens. Old Town Village is a mixed-use development scheduled to open later this year. Stoekel said the two-way switch was a political move done to appease the complex’s developers, and she said the traffic switch is actually having the opposite effect.
"It’s deterring people from coming down here," she said. "People are avoiding Old Town like the plague."
Stoekel, the owner of Executive Press printing company, said her UPS orders have increased times four since the traffic switch. It is partly because of the narrow streets and sharp turns, but it is only because there is nowhere to park, she said.
"We don’t have enough parking for [the employees], forget about the customers," she said.
One of the owners at Auld Shebeen, the Irish pub and restaurant on the corner of North Street and Chain Bridge Road, said the switch has been generally positive from his perspective.
"We now have people driving toward our front door, whereas before they were driving away from it," said Mick Boyle. "As for sorting out the parking, once that’s done, it will be great."
Stoekel is not so optimistic. The garage isn’t going to be enough, and there aren’t a lot of other options, she said.
The parking structure at Old Town Village will accommodate about 550 cars, but Stoekel fears Old Town Village’s employees and patrons will use up more spaces than that. And since the Webb lot no longer serves as a parking lot, and the Old Town Hall parking lot will be eliminated to make room for an extension of Kitty Pozer Garden, Stoekel said the City needs to recognize that current parking problems aren’t going to disappear.
But City Councilmember Patrice Winter said things still need to open up before people make their final judgments. Between Old Town Village, Massey Drive and the new Fairfax City Regional Library, it is hard to tell what the final result will be.
"What I’ve heard from constituents, change is always hard and difficult, but I do believe it was a good decision," Winter said.
"You sort of give something up to improve," said Boyle.