Tunnel Vision: Rolling the Dice with Tunnels

By Brendan O'Hallarn Wednesday, August 11, 2010

From the time I was a little kid, I’ve absolutely loved games. There’s nothing quite like beating in the brains of your friends or siblings at something totally meaningless.

I learned chess at age 6. When I started playing bridge, I needed clothespins to hold all those cards in my hand. As I grew through childhood, I started to crave more and more complex strategy games. I hosted a weekly role-playing Dungeons & Dragons game at my house on Saturday mornings, an activity whose secrecy we guarded like it was the Skull and Bones society. Otherwise it would have been wedgies all around.

I’m 39 now. My whole family is coming from Canada for Canadian Thanksgiving in October. What am I looking forward to most? Game night!

I know, I know. I’m off on a tangent again.

But I was thinking about games on Monday night when, on a hunch, I veered right out of Old Dominion University. I thought I’d try to escape from Norfolk through the Midtown Tunnel, instead of lining up in the predictable queue for the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, in my drive home to Williamsburg.

In the summer, you know what you’re going to get at the HRBT – a rolling traffic backup that stretches from the Bridge to Granby Street, about seven miles. If you just mouthed the words “seven miles” in incredulity, well, you don’t commute in South Hampton Roads.

The Midtown Tunnel, however, is the ultimate risk-reward play.

Three roads intersect at the entrance to the tunnel, which is only one lane in each direction. However, far fewer cars navigate the bridge every day, especially during beach season. So if your feeder route to the tunnel lineup moves quickly (like Monday) you can save 15-20 minutes. It's like drawing an inside straight.

But when things go wrong – such as the day of that gigantic storm on a Thursday at the end of July – you can pick wrong and end up completely stranded. I barely escaped Norfolk before the streets flooded that day. It's like going to jail without passing Go and collecting $200.

The City of Norfolk keeps nagging the state government in Richmond to both approve and help fund a doubling of capacity of the Midtown Tunnel, adding a second tube under the Elizabeth River, linking Portsmouth and Norfolk.
Construction on the $1.9 billion expansion has been pushed back from its original start date of later this year. The state government isn’t promising to find money whenever the tunnel doubling begins.

It’s a pain, because for anyone who works in downtown Norfolk, and ODU is close enough, a second span of the Midtown Tunnel would be the single best traffic improvement the region could undertake. As any commuter knows, once you’re through that tunnel, it’s smooth sailing, either north over the Monitor-Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel (never backed up), south along I-664 to the Outer Banks or Elizabeth City in North Carolina, or continue west along 460 until you intersect with I-95. It’s the ultimate escape route.

There is that issue of the cool $1.9 billion needed for the project, however. A private consortium has offered to foot the cost of building the second tunnel, for the right to add tolls on the Midtown AND Downtown Tunnels for as much as $17 per round trip, something that would make commuters use that much more strategy in the commuting decisions they make every day.

Because I don’t suppose they’ll take Monopoly money for the tolls.

Brendan O’Hallarn writes Tunnel Vision for WYDaily, chronicling his four-day-per-week commuting odyssey from Williamsburg to Old Dominion University. Got a traffic inking? Write Brendan at brendan@wydaily.com.