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King of the Road

Posted on: Wednesday, 24 August 2005, 09:00 CDT

BY Earl Swift

THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

HIS DAY OFF, and Scott Kozel is devoting it to something he loves: Hes behind the wheel of his big Buick, steering it around a curve on a just-opened highway outside of Richmond, admiring the concrete and steel all around.

The roads surface, unstained ash-gray, shimmers under the midday sun. Overpasses are unblemished by time and vandals. The median is crisply mowed, the shoulders free of litter and weeds. It looks less a highway than a computer simulation.

What Kozel fastens on, however, are things that might easily escape attention. The way the highway banks ever so slightly as it sweeps left. Its arc as it does so, no doubt true to the states prescribed minimum radius of 1,821 feet for a flat-terrain freeway designed for travel at 70 mph. Interchanges overbuilt in anticipation of ratcheting traffic loads. Collector-distributor lanes straddling the main line, siphoning away congestion at especially busy crossroads.

A very ample design, Kozel muses. He points to a diamond-shaped interchange. Built with enough room to add a cloverleaf, should that be warranted in the future.

He nods, cataloging the details. In a short while, hell steer his LeSabre home, post the data hes gathered on his Web site which specializes in the arcana of highway history and design in Virginia, the D.C. area, Maryland and West Virginia and share it with the world.

And, funny thing: The world will eat it up.

Kozels Web site, called Roads to the Future, answers all manner of questions about the Old Dominions roads how and when they were built, why they were built where they were, how much traffic they carry, the genius of their engineering. It does so with such specificity and such disinterested language that its become a go-to source for government officials, journalists, historians and students.

You might learn there, for instance, that the lowest-volume stretch of interstate highway in Virginia is the 29 miles along I- 64 from Clifton Forge to Lexington, which on an average day hosts 8,400 to 9,400 vehicles.

Or that I-64 wasnt complete from Richmond to the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel until August 1978, when a last, 6.5-mile gap was closed between Norge and Virginia 143 near Williamsburg.

Or that the two spans of downtown Norfolks Berkley Bridge are among only 11 drawbridges in the national Interstate Highway System.

Perhaps youd be intrigued to learn that Jersey Barrier, the slope- sided concrete median wall used on much of the countrys expressways, is often cast-in-place or slipformed onto a concrete footer with steel dowel anchors, so that a tractor-trailer impacting at a 15- degree angle at 60 mph will be successfully redirected.

It might surprise you that the maelstrom of Northern Virginia concrete where interstates 95, 395 and 495 converge is not, and has never been, the Mixing Bowl, though commuters call it that all the time. Its correctly termed the Springfield Interchange; the Mixing Bowl is a few miles away at the Pentagon, where I-395 meets Va. 27.

Did you know that 325.51 miles of Interstate 81 falls within the states boundaries, and 266.95 miles of I-64, and 178.93 of I-95? Theres more than 60 of 77, and nearly 75 of 66.

All on the site hours of research, of scouring obtuse engineering journals and government tracts, backed up with Kozels field work. His Web page on Baltimores eight-lane Fort McHenry Tunnel, the widest underwater tunnel in the world, includes links to 62 photos he took during its construction in the mid-1980s and 30 he snapped on its opening day photos taken, keep in mind, by a man who lives in southwest Richmond.

So exhaustive is Kozels approach that an entire section of his Web site examines the Web site itself whos using it, where theyre from, when they make contact. A visitor may thus learn that in June, Roads to the Future scored 548,640 hits, an average of 18,288 per day. Usage peaked at 2,801 hits per hour.

The No. 1 source of visits? Google, with 3.74 percent of all referrals to the site, followed, at 1.59 percent, by a search engine written in Chinese. After American visitors, most come from Taiwan though Brazil, Hungary, Thailand and Turkey figure prominently in Kozels fan base.

The sites reliability comes thanks, in no small measure, to Kozels painstaking work out of doors. With his Buicks odometer ticking toward 50,000, his assignment today is to snap a few pictures of Va. 288s newest section, a 16.7-mile stretch of four- lane that is the western piece of a perimeter highway ringing the capital.

He spends a lot of time on the road, feeding a curiosity that began in his Chicago boyhood: At about 9 or 10 years old I got into reading World War II stuff, he says, and I got really interested in being a pilot. When his eyesight killed that ambition, Kozel, who is now 52, transferred an interest in aviation to something I could actually do on the ground.

And actually, driving on an interstate is a lot like flying . Compared to older-type highways, a modern interstate the curves, the hills its a lot like being in a plane.

Love for the open road dovetailed with his earlier passion for maps of studying the way cities are laid out, the paths taken by highways, the changing landscape.

Kozel came to understand that our cities have been remade to accommodate cars, that well over half our downtowns footprints are devoted to driving and parking them, that our once-pedestrian culture in which people lived within walking distance of work or streetcar, and shopped, schooled and worshiped within blocks of home was erased by them.

He came to appreciate that most of our major overland roads nonetheless predate the car that they follow older, not-so-major rights of way that began as turnpikes or plank roads or stagecoach routes, which in turn were built on the trails used by Indian hunting parties, which themselves followed the tamped earthen highways created by animal herds.

That genesis is not so easy to see today, from the soundproofed, air-conditioned cabin of a car doing a mile a minute, but consider Virginias own I-81, which began as a buffalo trail, was used by the Shawnee and Cherokee and Monocans, then became the great Valley Road that opened the lands west of the Blue Ridge to European settlers down from Pennsylvania. Eventually the road became U.S. 11, which today braids with its interstate successor.

Kozel followed the old roads on maps and the new ones in his car, and was about 18, he figures, when he began to notice the grace of highway flyovers, the cuts that smoothed the way through mountains, the sheer volume of earthmoving required in building the simplest two-laner.

When I started driving in 1968, the interstate system was about 60 percent complete, Kozel says. So I definitely saw some key corridors before they were interstates.

A good portion of my interest is related to major construction, watching it get done.

Most of his early driving took place in Northern Virginia, where Kozel completed high school. He attended a two-year college in Pennsylvania, and would eventually earn a bachelors in information systems and a masters in science.

By that time, hed spent two decades turning his avocation into vocation, first with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, where he had a job in highway safety improvement design, and later with the Virginia Department of Transportation as a construction inspector in Waverly and Petersburg, then as a member of the agencys Road Design Unit in Richmond. Since 1983, hes been off the road, in information systems.

Hes quick to note that he is not a civil engineer. I dont design highways, he says. Still, he learned much from his time in design that banked turns, or superelevations, are rated for certain speeds based on their geometrics, that road builders view hills as vertical curves, that median width, lane width, shoulder width, barrier heights all play roles in the driving experience, however subtle.

And he is eager to share his knowledge, as well as carefully measured opinions. I didnt like the 30-foot grass median. I thought it should have been wider, he says of a highway en route to 288. Still, its a pretty nice freeway.

And: This is the I-64/288 interchange three-level, pretty impressive. All three of them 65 mph. Very ample.

His VDOT job has zero bearing on his Web site hobby, Kozel says: Roads to the Future is not endorsed, sponsored or authorized by the agency. It is not an organ of the state. It trades in information readily available to anyone willing to devote the time and effort to research.

Its just that there arent many people with so much time or energy to dig out, for the sheer heck of it, the fact that the first section of federally authorized interstate highway in Virginia was I- 95s Emporia Bypass, or that one out of three vehicles traveling the 30-mile overlap between I-64 and I-81, between Staunton and Lexington, is a large truck.

It would take years to ferret out all the information that Kozel has amassed on Virginia 288: The site boasts 581 photographs he took of the western sections construction, essays on concrete and asphalt, a chronology that dates to the mid-1960s.

Kozel stops the Buick, takes a few photos. He has a few favorite stretches of road, though his site, ever-judicious, doesnt go overboard about them. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is pretty amazing, he allows. Interstate 895 is quite impressive. And the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel, for its view, the engineering, the sheer feat of building, is hard to beat. Going north is probably one of the most impressive views from any highway in the country.

Kozel pushes his silver-rimmed glasses up his nose and guns the Buick back into traffic. A map lies open on the seat beside him. It shows the highway as a dotted line. Beneath the LeSabres wheels, however, Va. 288 is 10 inches of continuously reinforced concrete pavement laid atop 3 inches of asphalt-stabilized open-graded drainage layer, laid atop 6 inches of cement-stabilized aggregate material, Type 1, No. 21A, with 4 percent cement by weight. The whole rests on a bed of No. 1 open-graded coarse aggregate and No. 21B dense-graded aggregate.

Its fact. Check the Web site.

* Reach Earl Swift at 446-2352 or earl.swift@pilotonline.com.

Source: Virginian - Pilot

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