Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
I&#x27;m not surprised. I&#x27;ve taken this road before during the 2017 Eclipse. Its a path that connects major parts of the country together, but there are no alternative roads to take if this one road closes.<p>Other locations have &quot;Backup&quot; highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here.<p>I&#x27;ve been told that Virginia once had plans to build additional highways &#x2F; alternative roads in cases of these emergencies, where the main road gets closed off for some reason. To do this, Virginia was planning to sell some coast-space to oil rigs and fund the new infrastructure.<p>Alas: the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010 killed that funding plan, and with it, the plans for new highways.<p>-----------<p>Instead, the state of Virginia focused on building additional lanes to the already existing highways. Which... doesn&#x27;t help in these times of emergency, and still doesn&#x27;t help in terms of day-to-day traffic either (most day-to-day traffic is bottlenecked at the offramps, where highways turn into traffic-light controlled, slower local roads).<p>You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic. And you also need &quot;backup highways&quot; to handle emergency situations, such as a jack-knifed semi-truck blocking all lanes due to some snow-accident.