American Dream

King of the roads
By EARL SWIFT, The Virginian-Pilot
© August 21, 2005
Last updated: 1:41 AM

Scott Kozel’s Web site

Quotes:

HIS DAY OFF, and Scott Kozel is devoting it to something he loves: he’s 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 road’s 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 state’s 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, he’ll steer his LeSabre home, post the data he’s 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.

Kozel’s Web site, called “Roads to the Future,” answers all manner of questions about the Old Dominion’s 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 it’s become a go-to source for government officials, journalists, historians and students.

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 Kozel’s fan base.

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

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

© 2005 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com

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