Five-Year Forecast: Get Ready, Set . . . Sit

More than $10 billion in road and rail improvements will be made in the Washington, DC region over the next five years, promising to create traffic jams on nearly all of the region’s major commuter routes as well as on neighborhood streets. In anticipation of this work, Virginia has named a “Congestion Czar” to coordinate the work. Virginia has also budgeted $58 million to pay for incident management crews, electronic message signs, Web sites, updates that can be sent to cellphones and other portable devices, and shuttle buses and information centers at shopping malls.