Or maybe Dulles airport........just ask Bruce Willis........of Pulp Fiction.......Die Hard......




Map shows the I-66 corridor under study inside the Capital Beltway. (VDOT image)
A traffic study to support Virginia’s plan to create high-occupancy toll lanes on Interstate 66 inside the Capital Beltway shows just how difficult it’s going to be to fix this highway.
In fact, it doesn’t even sound like one highway as much as a cluster of different roads stitched together. How do you smooth out the traffic flow and give commuters a trip of reliable length when there’s no one particular peak during the morning or evening rush? The high-occupancy vehicle rules are much less restrictive in practice than in theory. Traffic volumes are uneven along the nine-mile route. And traffic volume turns out to be just one factor slowing trips.
Three public meetings are scheduled for next week to review the design for the inside-the-Beltway HOT lanes, which the state government hopes to open in summer 2017. But let’s look first at the study for the Virginia Department of Transportation that lays out what problems the plan hopes to ease and why this effort is so challenging.
Where traffic comes from
I-66 isn’t a steady stream of east-west traffic. Big clusters of traffic approach the highway from several different directions with several prime destinations along this shortish route. During the 5:30 to 9:30 a.m. rush, nearly 38 percent of all eastbound traffic comes from the Dulles Connector Road (Route 267), while 29 percent comes from I-66 west of the Beltway and another 29 percent comes from the Beltway south of I-66. While I-66 crosses the Potomac River into the District, many commuters are going to get off before that for destinations in Arlington County.

During the 3 to 7 p.m. rush, 42 percent of the westbound traffic comes from Arlington County and 40 percent starts from the District. Their primary destination is I-66 west of the Beltway; next is the Dulles Connector Road for targets that include Tysons Corner and Dulles International Airport. Another big cluster is bound for the Arlington area.
Those varied origins and destinations mean that even within the short path of the highway, the traffic is unevenly distributed. The traffic volumes are lightest between the Beltway and the Dulles Connector Road, a stretch a bit over two miles on the west side. Then the heaviest volumes occur between the Dulles Connector Road and North Westmoreland Street, a stretch a bit over a mile long.
How they travel
I-66 inside the Beltway is HOV2 in the eastbound direction from 6:30 to 9 a.m. weekdays and in the westbound direction from 4 to 6:30 p.m., but the carpoolers have a lot of company. Exemptions apply to approved hybrid vehicles, law enforcement and traffic coming from or going to Dulles Airport.