Stewart says E-ZPass Express Lanes part of problem, calls for widening I-95

Corey Stewart is the At-large Chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors. He oversees the second-largest county government in the state. 

Potomac Local Publisher Uriah Kiser caught up with him to talk about the region’s traffic congestion and transportation woes. 

Kiser: Let’s talk transportation. That’s on the minds of just about everyone who lives in Northern Virginia.

We’re fresh off the heels of successes announced by Governor Terry McAuliffe: We’re getting the extension of the E-ZPass Express Lanes extension to Fredericksburg, we’re about to break ground on the I-66 E-ZPass Express Lanes project both inside and outside the Beltway, so as those projects advance, what’s left?

What are some of those critical projects that you see for the region, especially as they impact Prince William County residents, and how are we working as a region to solve these transportation problems?

Stewart: Well, the E-ZPass is not a panacea. It doesn’t solve all of the problems and, in fact, in an many ways it’s exacerbated some of the problems, especially in the [Interstate] 95 corridors.

So, what we need to do is, we need to continue to widen [Interstate] 95. Currently, the main lanes are widened to the bridge over the Occoquan River. It’s my intention to push the state to widen the lanes all of the way back, at least all of the way through Prince William County and perhaps behond that to elminate this bottleneck that we still have, despite the E-ZPass, despite the express lanes, we’re still going to have some blockages there and that needs to be fixed.

Also, in Prince William County, we’ve had our own road-building program for several years. There are still stretches of Route 1 that need to be improved.

Route 28 all the way from the Fairfax [County] line to the City of Manassas, it looks terrible and in addition to that its a real bottleneck fro commuters leaving Prince William County and coming back home in the evening. That’s got to be fixed.

We’ve got a lot of other road projects but those are the priorities, at least for me.