Virginia

[froggie]

that's gotta be one of the oldest steel through truss bridges in existence.  any older ones around?  any older bridge I can think of than 1882 is covered wooden, stone arch, suspension, or that one on US-11.

It's not Virginia, but there's a through truss bridge southwest of Meridian, MS that dates to the late 1840s.  Was still drivable in 2008, too.  See link for photos I took in 2000.

[Alps]

built in 1882

that's gotta be one of the oldest steel through truss bridges in existence.  any older ones around?  any older bridge I can think of than 1882 is covered wooden, stone arch, suspension, or that one on US-11.

VDOT says this one below (my 2009 photo) is from the 1870s.  It is the original Rappahannock River crossing for VA 21 and US 211 near Waterloo.



Mapmikey

¿Aquí?

[Mapmikey]

yes

[cpzilliacus]

It's not Virginia, but there's a through truss bridge southwest of Meridian, MS that dates to the late 1840s.  Was still drivable in 2008, too.  See link for photos I took in 2000.

That is exceptionally cool.  Thanks for sharing.

Have you ever seen the Bollman Truss Railroad Bridge that once carried a single-track railroad spur but now carries a recreational trail in Savage, Maryland? 

[hbelkins]

Once upon a time, VDOT had a feature on its Web site that had photos of most state primary and US routes. I thought it was on the VDOT Dashboard, but I'm having trouble finding it. Did they do away with it or do I just not know where to look?

[Mapmikey]

I was not aware of what you are describing (which is not to say it didn't exist).
VDOT does have some galleries with some good stuff here (there are vintage photos of the Norfolk tunnels and the original US 17 James River Bridge)
http://www.virginiadot.org/newsroom/galleries.asp

They briefly had a street-view type application several years ago but that went away.  I may still have it bookmarked on my work computer and maybe it can be seen at webarchive.org.  I will check tomorrow.

Mapmikey

[74/171FAN]

I was not aware of what you are describing (which is not to say it didn't exist).
VDOT does have some galleries with some good stuff here (there are vintage photos of the Norfolk tunnels and the original US 17 James River Bridge)
http://www.virginiadot.org/newsroom/galleries.asp

They briefly had a street-view type application several years ago but that went away.  I may still have it bookmarked on my work computer and maybe it can be seen at webarchive.org.  I will check tomorrow.

Mapmikey

Yeah that streetview sort of thing was called Virtual Cruise I think.  I tried using it a couple times, but it never really worked well for me for some reason.

[Mapmikey]

The link is still on my work computer but doesn't work.  It was called "VDOT's Drive It"
My memory of it was that it was extremely slow.

web.archive.org does not have anything for the address that was in my favorites list for this site.

Mapmikey

[hbelkins]

The link is still on my work computer but doesn't work.  It was called "VDOT's Drive It"
My memory of it was that it was extremely slow.

That's it. Perhaps it was rendered obsolete by Street View?

Kentucky now has something similar.

[froggie]

Virginia's EZPass fees may be going away:

https://twitter.com/RT_Thomson/status/442396939980931072

(hopefully this comes true)

[maplestar]

Virginia's EZPass fees may be going away:

https://twitter.com/RT_Thomson/status/442396939980931072

(hopefully this comes true)

It has passed both the House and the Senate with no votes opposed in either chamber, so all it needs is the governor's signature.

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?ses=141&typ=bil&val=SB156&submit=GO

[froggie]

Got an E-mail recently from the Elizabeth River Tunnels folks (building the parallel Midtown Tunnel and the MLK Fwy extension).  They plan to sign the MLK Freeway extension to I-264 as a VA 164 extension.

[1995hoo]

In the course of looking for some pictures of the old Landmark Center in Alexandria before it became a mall, I found these. The first is I-495 between the Dulles Airport exit (then Exit 12) and the Georgetown Pike/VA-193 exit (then Exit 13) in 1968. The second is of the Landmark area looking towards DC, presumably sometime in the early 1970s due to I-95 being under massive reconstruction. I had forgotten there used to be a Woodies at Landmark. I've always disliked that mall. Didn't like it when it was an outdoor shopping center when I was a kid. Didn't like it as an indoor mall. Reports this week are that demolition is to begin this fall. Good riddance. (Sears and Hecht's will remain. They own their own buildings.)

[cpzilliacus]

In the course of looking for some pictures of the old Landmark Center in Alexandria before it became a mall, I found these. The first is I-495 between the Dulles Airport exit (then Exit 12) and the Georgetown Pike/VA-193 exit (then Exit 13) in 1968.

Great find!  Thanks for sharing.  This image is probably taken from the Lewinsville Road bridge, with the camera looking north in the direction of Old Dominion Drive.

Has to be more recent than 1968, because the VDH project to widen the Beltway from Springfield to the George Washington Memorial Parkway (4 lanes to 8 lanes in one massive project) took place in the early-to-mid 1970's. 

The car in the slow lane is a 1973 or 1974 Oldsmobile Omega clone of the Chevrolet Nova.  The car in the left lane is a 1972 Buick Electra 225 ("deuce and a quarter"). Behind the Buick is a Ford F-series pickup truck, about 1974 or 1975. 

Today, this is where the two HOV/Toll lanes break off from the four "free" lanes when headed south from Va. 193, Georgetown Pike.

[1995hoo]

Thanks for the info. The person who had posted the picture said 1968, which is why I cited that year, but your analysis strikes me as more reliable.

[cpzilliacus]

The second is of the Landmark area looking towards DC, presumably sometime in the early 1970s due to I-95 being under massive reconstruction. I had forgotten there used to be a Woodies at Landmark. I've always disliked that mall. Didn't like it when it was an outdoor shopping center when I was a kid. Didn't like it as an indoor mall. Reports this week are that demolition is to begin this fall. Good riddance. (Sears and Hecht's will remain. They own their own buildings.)

Nice picture.  Thanks for sharing this one as well.

Highway-related comments. 

Did you know that Landmark was something of a bus hub when the so-called Bus-on-Freeway demonstration project (a/k/a Shirley Express) was getting started in the early 1970's?  In the off-peak, most of the buses running in the corridor (in both directions) would all stop at Landmark (they used the flyover from eastbound Va. 236 (Duke Street) to get in to the mall). Wish like Hades that this service had been maintained.  But a lot of people were much more obsessed with Metrorail. 

From the image above, it looks like the I-95 Busway (as it was called in those days) was largely complete (but not entirely on its final alignment) but there was plenty of work to be done in the interchange, and the conventional roadway (at least northbound) was still only two lanes.

Landmark comments.

Agreed.  That mall always impressed me in a very bad way.  Things were hard to find and the parking setup was clunky at best.  Though it never seemed to suffer from crime and criminals (which is what killed Landover Mall in Prince George's County and IMO damaged Springfield Mall).

[cpzilliacus]

Atlantic Cities: Putting a Price on D.C.'s Worst Commute

For a few giddy moments, it seems I've dodged the torture awaiting commuters into Washington, D.C., most any weekday morning. As I merge onto Interstate 95 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, 50 miles from the Pentagon, the traffic around me glides along at the 65-mph speed limit. No brake lights illuminate the predawn dark. I set my cruise control. Perhaps, I dare to think, this won't be so bad.

The illusion ends before I've covered a mile. Without warning or obvious reason, the highway's flow thickens to a viscous dribble. My speed drops to 30, then 15, then an idling roll slower than I can walk. It remains there for a minute before shuddering to zero. I sit.

It's 6:30 a.m. on a typical Monday on the outskirts of the nation's capital, and I'm mired in traffic the Texas A&M Transportation Institute reckons to be the worst in America, trumping even the titanic freeway logjams of Los Angeles. Here are highways so notoriously overtaxed that even on weekends, "speed" is more lovely abstraction than realistic goal. Here is a circumferential interstate – the famed Washington Beltway – that has become synonymous with stress.

[J N Winkler]

The link is still on my work computer but doesn't work.  It was called "VDOT's Drive It"

My memory of it was that it was extremely slow.

That's it. Perhaps it was rendered obsolete by Street View?

Kentucky now has something similar.

StreetView might have provided a convenient excuse to phase it out, but I'd suspect the real reasons had to do with usability and bandwidth.  There are some exceptions (e.g. Florida DOT's photolog), but in my experience online photolog viewers have a painfully slow frame rate and no "pin on map" method for selecting a starting point, which makes them awkward to search for features from a location with known map position but unknown milepoint.

The best use case for state DOT photologs, at least for road enthusiasts, is actually to download the full-size imagery (not the thumbnails) for a given route in advance, and scroll through it rapidly on the local hard disk using an image browser and a smooth-scrolling mouse, effectively "driving" the route by computer.  That is how I compiled lists of mileage sign destinations for various Interstates in Colorado and Utah; I could not have done this nearly as efficiently with StreetView because I had no advance knowledge of the location of each mileage sign.

However, this works only when the full-size imagery has a low enough resolution that it can be displayed on the screen without resampling, otherwise the image browser can't keep up and you see mostly a black screen with occasional flickers of image.  On my computer (1920 x 1080 screen resolution), this isn't a problem with WSDOT SRView (1376 x 1032) or Oregon DOT's videolog (640 x 480), but it is with some KyTC photolog imagery (older images are 1600 x 1200, while newer is often 2400 x 1800) and recent Utah DOT Roadview imagery (2012 vintage; older UDOT imagery is 1280 x 1024, newer is 3296 x 2472).  Florida DOT (1900 x 1426) is right at the margin where it becomes impossible, at least for my screen (I have to choose "Show actual size" to avoid the screen going black).

The bandwidth consumption associated with photologs is significant.  The industry standard is 200 images per mile per camera position (always front and right; some state DOTs, like KyTC, use three in a left-center-right configuration).  Depending on the pixel count per image, the disk storage burden for a complete primary state highway system can be quite large.  When I discovered Colorado DOT's photolog in 2013, I estimated the total storage requirement at 1.8 TB (1280 x 960 images, center-right configuration, both directions, 9144 miles of state highway:  that is, 7.3 million images at 0.25 MB per image, or 1.8 TB).  Even if you restrict yourself to one position and one direction (as I have tried to do to limit sun shadow on signs), a download of photologging for a full primary state highway system can easily be several multiples of a typical monthly bandwidth usage cap for a residential cable Internet account (mine, for example, is capped at 250 GB).

[cpzilliacus]

Washington Post: Highway historian looks at HOT lanes projects

Earl Swift, who wrote "The Big Roads,"  a fascinating history of America's superhighways, takes on the future of the D.C. area's highways in an article for The Atlantic Cities Web site.

[Laura]

Washington Post: Highway historian looks at HOT lanes projects

Earl Swift, who wrote "The Big Roads,"  a fascinating history of America's superhighways, takes on the future of the D.C. area's highways in an article for The Atlantic Cities Web site.

I love Earl Swift. Mike and I met him at a book signing in my hometown back in 2012. He lurks on here from time to time. I've been meaning to email him and let him know that Mike and I tied the knot.

[1995hoo]

My brother sent me the e-mail quoted below earlier today. I've written back to ask him for the source of the information about the house's owner being allowed to use the access road in question onto and off of I-66. I've passed the road in question hundreds of times over the years, both on I-66 and on Virginia Lane, and I may have used it illegally to enter the highway one time (not that I would ever admit that publicly if I had....), but I didn't know there was a house down the end.

I note he used the "classic" Google Maps interface, which I appreciated....

Here's a weird real estate/zoning quirk.

So this "authorized vehicle only"  access road off of 66-eastbound, but before Virginia Lane is not only a shortcut for emergency vehicles to get up to Virginia Lane and the houses/communities there, but it's also somebody's driveway!

https://www.google.com/maps?ll=38.890399,-77.211246&spn=0.18,0.3&cbll=38.890399,-77.211246&layer=c&panoid=_0ozyZRY309JYp4hmF9TNg&cbp=,95.25,,0,13.190002&output=classic&dg=ntvo

See the view from Virginia Lane itself:  https://www.google.com/maps?ll=38.890638,-77.209959&spn=0.18,0.3&cbll=38.890638,-77.209959&layer=c&panoid=1iRkupPTaSwtuKya-4PReA&cbp=,215.09,,0,16.75&output=classic&dg=ntvo

It's an old late-1800s farmhouse that got stranded down there when 66 was built.  That access road is off of the house's driveway, so he's allowed to use it when getting on or off I-66.  Quite odd!

(zoom back out of streetview and flip to satellite for a good look)

Edited to add: My brother just responded to my query as follows (the first sentence refers to the house in question).

Yeah, I had no idea it was there either.  During the snow on Monday, the driver parked his car blocking the W&OD at the court just south of his driveway.  Some of the lunatics that commuted by bike that day were bitching about it on the Bike Arlington Forum and a one of the users there knows the owner and posted those links to make them aware of why he parks up on the street (although that he shouldn't block the trail) and that he can access that maintenance road.

[cpzilliacus]

My brother sent me the e-mail quoted below earlier today. I've written back to ask him for the source of the information about the house's owner being allowed to use the access road in question onto and off of I-66. I've passed the road in question hundreds of times over the years, both on I-66 and on Virginia Lane, and I may have used it illegally to enter the highway one time (not that I would ever admit that publicly if I had....), but I didn't know there was a house down the end.

Oh yeah, that house was there long before that section of I-66 was built in the late 1970's early 1980's.

We did field work there a year or two ago, and it did not seem that anyone was home (my people were there from 5 AM to 10 AM). 

The "ramps" are mostly used by Virginia State Police and VDOT's Safety Service Patrol to turn around using the Virginia Lane overpass (since there are no median crossovers due to the rail line being there).

[froggie]

In the absence of official documentation, I'm not convinced that the owner of that house is authorized to use the I-66 access.  I dug back through my scans of older Fairfax County maps...as best as I can tell, that house has always been accessed off Virginia Ln.  It's also worth noting that there used to be a station stop on the old W&OD on the south side of his property, named Green on the Fairfax County maps and in the book about the W&OD.

[cpzilliacus]

In the absence of official documentation, I'm not convinced that the owner of that house is authorized to use the I-66 access.  I dug back through my scans of older Fairfax County maps...as best as I can tell, that house has always been accessed off Virginia Ln.  It's also worth noting that there used to be a station stop on the old W&OD on the south side of his property, named Green on the Fairfax County maps and in the book about the W&OD.

I agree. 

They almost certainly do not have the right to access the Interstate from their home, and are supposed to use Virginia Lane (a very nice paved driveway runs from Virginia Lane to their property). 

But the chain-link fence gates that could be used to deny movement from Virginia Lane to either side of I-66 have been open for so long that it was impossible for me to even move them - at all - the last time we were there - the bottoms of the gates are that deeply embedded in dirt and gravel.

That applies to the gates connecting Virginia Lane to the westbound side of I-66 as well.

EDIT - yes, the W&OD did run right by there, though it's not as obvious since I-66 was built, since the W&OD trail deviates substantially from the path of the railroad to use the Virginia Lane structure to cross I-66.

[1995hoo]

In the absence of official documentation, I'm not convinced that the owner of that house is authorized to use the I-66 access.  I dug back through my scans of older Fairfax County maps...as best as I can tell, that house has always been accessed off Virginia Ln.  It's also worth noting that there used to be a station stop on the old W&OD on the south side of his property, named Green on the Fairfax County maps and in the book about the W&OD.

I thought the same, but I didn't e-mail my brother back to say so for two reasons–(a) it'd feel a bit dickish and we don't always get along anyway and (b) he's just repeating what someone told him. "Accessing that maintenance road" to reach his driveway is not the same as accessing I-66.

BTW, it's interesting to note on Street View that the guy doesn't have a mailbox along Virginia Lane. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled next time I use that road. (Other houses have standard street-side mailboxes.)