March/April 2008
Tunnel Visions
We might as well make the best of the spare time while stuck in endless traffic.
By Michael Jon Khandelwal
Every few months, the writers of Hampton Roads Magazine get together at “Headquarters.” It’s in an unassuming building, buried deep within Virginia Beach. Not many know it’s there. We like it that way.
Our editors are clever. They don’t send out meeting notices or reminders, but just start cooking food. Writers are always hungry, and we have an uncanny sense of when free food is coming, so it’s usually a packed room.
Last fall, we ate lasagna, and the conversation turned to this issue’s Best Of feature. One Readers’ Poll question idea that we bantered around the table was: “What is the best way to kill time while stuck in traffic at the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel?” This got me thinking.
I get stuck at the HRBT a lot. Most of my friends do, too. I even know some people who—and I know this is terrifying—actually commute back and forth through the tunnel every day.
When I got home that evening, I wrote down a list of what I do while stuck in traffic there:
-Look at the attractive women driving the other cars.
-Tailgate—I bring ground beef and a Coleman stove in my trunk. This also encourages the people waiting in cars around me to join in.
-Work on my model ship hobby. The salt air and the view of the aircraft carriers inspire me when I am gluing the parts together.
-Make tea.
-Imagine I am fighting in the revolution alongside George Washington. I always try to warn him about Alexander Hamilton’s instability, but he never listens.
-Write poems about being cast away on the rocks of a man-made island.
-Sing sea chanteys (only if someone else is in the car with me).
-Use a dry erase marker to write on my windshield to communicate with the car ahead of me. Sometimes I forget to write backwards, and I just end up confusing everybody.
-Change my oil (only every 3,000 miles).
-Catch crabs with a piece of raw chicken tied to a string and tossed over the side of the bridge. After I pull up a few dozen, we have a crab boil on the bridge shoulder. Usually, traffic is still stopped when we’re done eating, so we can catch a few more crabs for a second helping.
The best thing I do, though, is imagine pies hitting the faces of the ladies and gentlemen who pretend to speak for all Virginians in the General Assembly. You know who they are. They’re the ones who funded the empty beltway and barren expressways that run around and through Richmond.
They funded those useless roads by taking money from Hampton Roads. Money we generate with our ports, our tourists, our businesses and our taxes. Instead of providing vital infrastructure to the commonwealth’s strongest economic engine, these honorable men and women would rather build the proverbial “bridge to nowhere.”
This has got to stop. But, it will take a strong will from all of us, Southside and Peninsula alike, to stand up and demand the money we’re literally owed. I come back to this again and again, but if you look at the money spent on road construction throughout time by the state, Hampton Roads has received 20 percent less per capita than, say, Richmond. But, we have 20 percent more people here, and it costs us 20 percent more to drive a car here, due to the substandard roads. And, we account for a lot more than 20 percent of the state’s gross domestic product. I don’t see any ports in Petersburg, aircraft carriers in Appomattox, beaches in Bristol or fighter planes in Fredericksburg.
They want to build a third crossing and also expand the Monitor Merrimac Bridge-Tunnel. But, I feel safe when I say that most of us want to expand the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel as well. I understand the point that the current—although flawed—plan will help the ports, and I’m all for helping our ports. But, why not expand both tunnels? Why not also build a third crossing? Why not build for the capacity needed in the future instead of the capacity needed years ago?
Of course this will mean a lot less time to pursue all my hobbies when I am stopped in traffic at the tunnel. I’ll have to write fewer poems about isolation, and the blue crabs might become over-populated.
Perhaps it’s impossible for the state to be a good steward with our money. Maybe we’d be better off if legislators just burned the cash they steal from us and set up a series of crab pots along the interstate leading to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel. Smelling all that food, I’m sure all our local writers will flock there, ready to render their own opinions of their favorite ways to waste time while stuck at the tunnel. Hopefully, some of them will like to sing sea chanteys.
