State will mothball rest stops for possible reopenings
TREVOR WRAYTON/VDOT
The rest stop south of Ladysmith on northbound Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County is among those slated for closure.
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It's a long shot, but Virginia officials are hoping that they will be able to find a way to reopen 19 closed rest stops on the state's interstate highways in a couple of years.
The state is going to mothball until at least 2011 the 18 rest areas and one welcome center slated for closure and eventual demolition because of budget cutbacks.
"We want to wait till we exhaust all options on commercialization [of the rest areas] before we make the decision to get rid of all of them," said Jeff Caldwell, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation.
However, federal law prohibits the commercialization of rest areas along interstate highways, except for placing vending machines in rest stops, said Cathy St. Denis, a Federal Highway Administration spokeswoman. Facilities established before 1960 are exceptions to the law.
The rest stops' primary service is free public toilets. They also provide a place for truckers to nap, tourists to pick up brochures for attractions, families to picnic, and dogs to relieve themselves.
Long-distance travelers stopping at the Ladysmith rest areas on Interstate 95 in Caroline County yesterday were dismayed at the coming closings.
"We use them a lot," said Sandra Jacobs from Hamilton, Ontario. She and her husband, Stan, and their two dogs stopped at Ladysmith on their way back to Canada after one of their frequent visits to their daughter in North Carolina.
"These are so much better than we have in Canada," Stan Jacobs said. "In Canada, you pretty much got to run to the bushes."
In the Richmond area, in addition to the Caroline rest stops, VDOT will close two areas on Interstate 64 in Goochland County and two on Interstate 85 in Dinwiddie County. The two stops on I-64 in New Kent County are among the 23 rest areas and welcome centers that will remain open.
VDOT will be putting the 19 closed stops into mothballs -- stripping out useful items, turning off utilities, draining the plumbing, boarding up the buildings and putting up steel gates -- at an estimated cost of $570,000, Caldwell said.
The 18 rest areas are to be closed July 21 and the I-66 West Welcome Center at Manassas on Sept. 16.
The Commonwealth Transportation Board has cut the state's six-year transportation program by $2.6 billion to make up for recession-driven revenue shortfalls.
Closing the rest stops is part of VDOT's plan to make ends meet this year and should save about $8.6 million, officials said.
Putting the soon-to-be closed highway rest stops back in operation eventually "would be our hope," state Transportation Secretary Pierce R. Homer said yesterday. "But absent a change in federal law or an infusion of transportation funding, that's not likely."
The state's tourism industry wants to give it a try.
"We're hoping to keep that dialogue open with VDOT . . . to keep the rest areas open permanently," said Megan Svajda with the Virginia Hospitality and Travel Association.
The group hopes to find ways to help finance the state highway agency, she said, beyond the motor-fuels tax, transportation's chief revenue source in Virginia.
Though the General Assembly has failed to come up with a fix for the state's transportation woes three times in the past four years, "their ears are a little more open than in the past," Svajda said.
A powerful coalition of truck stops, fast-food restaurants, gas stations and the visually handicapped doing business at locations near interstate highway exits has blocked all earlier efforts in Congress to commercialize the rest areas.
"When the state is operating a business that is on the right of way, it really hurts the businesses at the [interstate] exits," said Holly Alfano, vice president for government affairs with the National Association of Truck Stop Operators. "It's not a level playing field."
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine wants Congress to allow commercialization of rest stops, said his spokesman, Gordon Hickey, but he has ruled out taking money from other state functions to pay for keeping the travel facilities open.
"Transportation is a self-funded agency," Hickey said. The governor "is not going to take money from public safety and education and social services and put it into transportation."
"We obviously have communicated to local governments and private industry that we would be open and receptive to local or private funding" to keep the rest areas open, Homer said.
"No one stepped up."
Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or
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Reader Reactions
I say shut them all down. There’s hardly an Interstate exit without a dozen McD’s and hotels around them. The private sector already provides the same service as these state run rest areas and you can buy a big mac to boot.
As for truckers, there are lots of truck stops out there. If there is a need for more some enterprising person will build one.
Maybe Kaine could eliminate one or two of his DNC trips that we pay for and keep at least a couple of the rest stops open?
I thought Mark Warner was bad but Kaine is so bad he makes the previous bad look good.
People should have looked at his term as mayor of Richmond before they voted for him.
#1 They aren’t shutting down the roads.
#2 Yes, looks like a few more out of work people.
#3 Are you so lazy that you can’t hold it for an extra minute until you can pull off to a gas station or McDs?! It’s not like rest areas as within such a close proximity that you can stop at one every 10 minutes. Finally, keep it in your pants, NO ONE wants to see you wiz on the side of the road.
#4 I can think of at least a dozen things right now off the top of my head that are more important for the General Assembly to concern themselves with. In no particular order: Rising crime, homelessness, blight, poverty, lack of a livable minimum wage, old and decaying infrastructure, education, environment… and the list goes on… automobile travel is somewhere allll the way at the bottom if you ask me.
I’ve seen this a comment a few times, that this is a moneymaking scheme because of all the indecent-exposure tickets the cops will write (actually, I think in VA the crime would be simply “public urination”, since “indecent exposure” refers more to flashers and other such creeps).
Let’s do the math. Based on a quickie Google search, I found that urinating in public is a Class 4 misdemeanor with maximum fine of $250. The state estimates it will save $8.6 million by closing the rest stops. That means the cops will have to write at LEAST 34,400 indecent exposure tickets. It’d probably be a lot more than that because of court costs, people getting less then the maximum, and some of those tickets being thrown out for whatever reason.
That’s an awful lot of tickets. Writing an indecent exposure ticket requires a lot of work, too. Unlike speeding, where they just sit on the side of the road and let the radar gun do its thing, they’d have to actually visually see someone’s privates or hear the splashing sound and be able to testify to that fact. If the urinator goes at least a little bit into the woods, like most of us would, then the cop would have to actually follow the urinator into the woods. I’m not even sure the law applies to someone who’s alone in the woods when they do their business.
In short, there is no reasonable way this could be considered a moneymaking scheme.
It is pretty obvious that for the past two decades automobile travel has not been a priority with the General Assembly.
This is nothing but a money making scheme. Courts will be flooded with people charged by deputies and state troopers for “indecent exposure” as they pull off the side of the interstate to answer the call of nature.
Once again, a tip of the hat to King Kaine and his wonderful leadership.
Does this mean that the 3 or 4 employees I always see sitting outside the rest area in the shade on their cell phones will be out of “work” ?
Seems to me if our reps in Richmond have more open ears now that the rest areas are closing, they should be at work right this minute trying to compromise on a road funding plan before they decide to actually start shutting down the roads themselves.
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