Lorton task force: staff warns road‑diet would worsen peak congestion, recommends targeted fixes instead

Fairfax County transportation staff told the Lorton Vision Task Force on the evening’s meeting that a proposed conversion of Lorton Road from six lanes to four would not remove enough traffic and would substantially worsen PM peak congestion, based on a 2045 travel‑demand forecast used for the study.

Tom Burke, senior transportation planner with Fairfax County Department of Transportation, said the team ran sensitivity tests comparing the adopted comp plan baseline and the task‑force preferred land‑use scenario. "We ran it with six lanes and we ran it with four lanes," he said. "There's about a thousand trips difference on Lorton Road — the volumes with Lorton six and Lorton four don't change all that much," he said, adding the westbound PM volume‑to‑capacity ratio approached 1.54 and delays rose roughly 50 percent…