Background

As many of us have, I too contact VDOT each tune our road gets bad. The past few times they've graded, they dug into the edge of the road creating a secondary ditch. So now water builds and can not run off into the actual ditch.

This causes two issues
1. The water runoff erodes the edge of the road, and
2. At the low points this causes the road to hold the water underneath the compacted top layer, thus creating a perfect setup for these potholes to form

October 11th I met with the VDOT Hillsboro Regional manager and a licesned engineer from his office.
Here are the key take-aways from the meeting

• -The grader shouldn't cut in the edges as they are, although some people prefer it as it would require them to remove grass between the ditch and the road. They can do this a few inches at a time.
• -Our road is 3-4 inches too low. It is cost prohibitive to bring in more gravel to raise the road to the proper level. He mentioned it would be over 200k to bring the level up where it should be.
• -They will create 'drain chutes' at the low points of the road for the water to exit the road bed at the low points.
• -They estimate the grader cost about $2k per hour to run. They said they can do 3-4 miles in a day.
• -VDOT allocates $25Million for the reconstruction/improvement of state maintained gravel roads. It is allocated to each county by the number of 'lane miles' each county has, Loudoun having the highest amount.
• -The money isn't given to the county but the county tells VDOT how to spend its allotment.
• -The VDOT Engineer said our Road is good candidate to be paved as its already 20 ft wide and no through traffic.

If you didn't know, there was a big push to have Old Wheatland Rd paved. The VDOT Engineer said he went to the Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors meeting the previous Tuesday. Basically said about 30 people were for it, and 1 person who was 'representing' others was against it.

The VDOT reps basically said, if I wanted The Narrows paved, its very possible but I would need to gather a list of people for it to present to our Supervisor, who the would put it on an agneda to be voted on so it can be added to the list to be paved.