How much traffic do we have in Rappahannock County?

by Don Audette, Summer 2005

One way to measure development in Rappahannock County is to monitor the amount of traffic on its roadways. For example, back in 1960, the number of vehicles on Rt. 211 at Massie's Corner was 2,900 vehicles per day. For 2003, the year of the latest Virginia Department of Transportation traffic figures, the count was 6,100. A doubling in 43 years is not as bad as some of our neighboring counties have experienced.

Compare that with Rt. 211 at Clevenger's Corner. In 1960, the traffic was also 2,900 vehicles a day. But by 2003, it was up to 17,000 a day, more than a five-fold increase. This increase was due to development in Culpeper County, particularly along Rt. 229, where that road feeds into Rt. 211 at Clevenger's Corner. The author ran a regression analysis of past and current VDOT data, and added data from a build-out of Clevenger’s Corner that used VDOT and Institute of Transportation Engineers "daily-trip" criteria. The analysis results show that, with Culpeper County's planned development at Clevenger's Corner, the traffic on Rt. 211 could be as high as 45,000 vehicles per day by the year 2020.

The map shows traffic counts at various points along routes 522 and 211 in Rappahannock County.

The map shows the daily traffic on the main roads through Rappahannock County for 2003. The numbers are what VDOT calls "Annual Average Daily Traffic," which is "the estimate of typical daily traffic on a road segment for all days of the week, Sunday through Saturday, over a period of one year."

One notable aspect of the main roads through Rappahannock County is that two of them, US 522 and VA 231, are Scenic Byways.
US 211 (Lee Highway) might qualify as a Scenic Byway or as a National Historic Highway. Back in the 1920s and 1930s this highway—which ran from New York City to San Francisco—was regarded as the southern counterpart of the famed Lincoln Highway, which was the northern transcontinental highway between the two cities. Either designation would require a grassroots effort but could help deter development along these routes.