WASHINGTON — Fairfax County’s Board of Supervisors is expected to vote Tuesday to begin a construction project they say will help ease residents’ commute.
The plan is to widen Route 28 in Centreville to add an additional travel lane in each direction between the Prince William County line and U.S. Route 29 near I-66.
“It’s a really good regional project,” says Fairfax County Department of Transportation Director Tom Biesiadny. “It will benefit not only Fairfax County, but Prince William, Manassas and Manassas Park.”
The project will include bike and walking paths and a redesign of five intersections.
“By eliminating something we call split-phase timing — where one direction goes, then one direction follows that — if we can get each direction to go at the same time, we can reduce wait time at the intersection,” Biesiadny says.
Traffic is so heavy along that stretch of Route 28 that it’s not unusual for cars to come to a standstill, even at green-lighted intersections before 6 a.m.
Biesiadny says adding 50 percent more capacity through the area should be fairly painless, because the county already owns most of the land needed for expansion.
“So it’s actually a relatively easy piece to do — because we’re not going to need a lot of additional right of ways to do the widening with less impacts on the community which is the important piece,” Biesiadny says.
The supervisors are expected to approve an agreement under which the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority will provide $5 million for preliminary engineering and an environmental impact study for the project.
The entire project will cost an estimated $47.3 million, which will come from a variety of sources: the Transportation Authority, the state and perhaps local funding.
If all moves ahead as planned, groundbreaking is expected in December 2018, with an estimated completion date in December 2020.
The Centreville project is part of a regional plan by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority to expand capacity along the Route 28 corridor.
A project in Fairfax County to widen Route 28 north of I-66 into the Dulles area is underway, and the authority has approved a plan to widen Route 28 farther south in Prince William County.
