Crews To Start Clearing Away Stone Road Bottleneck

Construction crews will soon begin to eliminate one of Centreville’s most troublesome traffic chokepoints by widening to four lanes a narrow stretch of two-lane roadway that connects Stone Road and Westfield Boulevard in the Sully Station area.

The logjam is an almost mile-long section of Poplar Tree Road from Sully Station Drive to Braddock Road. The two-lane road links the wider, four-lane Stone Road and Westfield Boulevard, and creates a commuting headache when drivers hit the brakes as the road narrows.

Fairfax County recently approved a $5 million contract for the widening project and the contractor, Tavares Concrete from Lorton, should be on the job within the next month or so, said Michael R. Frey, Sully District county supervisor. Money for the year-long project comes from a 2007 transportation bond issue, Frey said. Also, local development fees helped pay for about $800,000 in pre-engineering costs, Frey said.

 “It’s been a long time coming and should be very helpful for folks who are living along,” Poplar Tree, said Frey, whose district office sits near the road. “It should help ease some of the congestion.”

The logjam was nothing that traffic engineers wanted to create.

“Nobody would design an hourglass bottleneck roadway,” Frey said, “and put 4,000 feet of two-lane road in the middle of a four lane on either side.”

Westfield Boulevard near Route 28 has been four lanes for years and Stone Road was upgraded to a four-lane by the developers who built the Sully Station II community in the late 1980s. However, no provision was made to widen Poplar Tree that linked the two together.

Commuters took to the Westfield-Stone route as a way to avoid the growing congestion on the local highways and major arterial routes. Traffic on the Westfield-Stone route was exacerbated as more families moved into Centreville and density increased.

“It’s not all cut-through traffic,” Frey said, “a lot of those on the road live right here and are just trying to get to work in the morning and home in the afternoon.”

The pre-construction phase has been arduous as county crews worked with landowners for the expansion project. Although most of the right-of-way was acquired when the road was first built, standards have changed and some additional private property was needed. Thirty-eight home owners along the route were impacted, but no houses were actually acquired. The acquisitions ranged from strips of land, three homes lost their swimming pools, to the granting of temporary construction easements. The county paid for any property it took.

Utility relocation crews are already at work along the route and Frey said he hopes to have a “Pardon our Dust” public meeting within the next two months to give residents a chance to talk with the contractors over what they plan to do. And, once the project is completed, the road will probably get a name change, to either Stone Road or Westfield Boulevard, to make it easier to navigate through the area, Frey said.