Any local would advise allotting plenty of time when traveling through the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel. Traffic is a given.
“The HRBT is one of our most congested corridors in the region,” said Pavithra Parthasarathi, the deputy executive director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization.
The HRBT Expansion Project aims to ease this congestion along a roughly 10-mile stretch of I-64 across the mouth of the James River, from Mallory Street in Hampton to Patrol Road in Norfolk.
The project includes doubling the number of lanes, making shoulders wider, replacing and rehabilitating bridges, elevating roadways, increasing sound walls and installing technology to predict traffic flows.
The work over the last few years has involved digging a pair of tunnels beneath the riverbed - each more than 8,000 feet long.
“It's an extremely complex project, because not only do you have the roadway side, you have the marine bridge side, the tunnel expansion side, the tunnels themselves and then all the electrical systems,” said Ryan Banas, the project director at Virginia’s Department of Transportation.
Banas said the two parts of the project that will likely have the biggest impact on traffic are adding lanes and shoulder improvements to give cars more room to pull over and emergency vehicles more space to get through.
“Today, we have two tubes, and each tube carries two lanes of traffic, so four lanes total across the harbor,” he said. “At the completion of this project, we will have eight lanes total across the harbor.”
The idea is that eight lanes will carry more travelers than four, though some studies have shown that adding lanes doesn’t always fix congestion issues. Scientific American, for example, reported that adding lanes can actually have the opposite effect, inducing demand.
“When you increase capacity are you now encouraging more cars to use the facility?” Banas said.
But he said this won’t be the case in Hampton Roads.
“The reality is we have a crossing that was designed for 70,000 cars a day,” he said. “Right now, we're pushing, almost every day, nearly 100,000 vehicles.”
The expanded HRBT will be able to handle 140,000 vehicles a day. He said this isn’t asking more people to show up, but meeting the demand that’s already there.
“With the modeling that we've done, we believe that 140,000 vehicles gets us well into the future,” he said.
The policies can make a difference, too.
Two of the lanes will be free for any driver to use. The other two express lanes will be free for drivers who have at least one other passenger with them. Solo drivers can use those lanes, but they’ll have to pay a toll, Banas said, noting this will help mitigate traffic.
Busses will also be able to use those express lanes to expand travel options for commuters, Parthasarathi said.
HRBT construction started in 2020 and is on track to be substantially complete in 2027, meaning it will be finished enough to be useful to the public, Banas said.
More than 90% of the project — roughly $3.7 billion out of the total $3.9 billion — is being funded locally, said Todd Halacy, executive director of the Hampton Roads Transportation Accountability Commission. The money is coming from regional sales and gas tax collections, he noted. HRTAC manages those funds.
Halacy said the project will make the road safer and travel times more reliable. It’ll have economic impacts, too.
“By not making HRBT improvements, I think traffic would continue to build,” he said. “Our local economy would continue to suffer, and we would risk losing valuable military assets due to our increasing inability to move goods and services.”
