Welcome to the Roadscapes Wednesday segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Roadscapes Wednesday will feature roads and infrastructure related topics. Geek Alabama Editor / Publisher Nathan Young is often called the “road geek” for a good reason, Nathan loves roads and loves talking about roads!
Virginia built the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel to solve a transportation problem. It worked so well that just seven years after opening, traffic had already reached a level engineers hadn’t expected until 1980. So Virginia built a second crossing. And now it’s doing it again.
In this episode of Beyond the Exit, we explore the remarkable story of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) on Interstate 64: the original 1957 crossing, its 1976 twin, and the massive $3.9 billion expansion reshaping one of the most important transportation connections in coastal Virginia.
Discover why the Navy’s shipping channel called for bridges AND a tunnel, how engineers created artificial islands and lowered enormous prefabricated tunnel sections into the harbor, and how a giant tunnel-boring machine named Mary—honoring NASA engineer Mary W. Jackson—built the next generation of tunnels beneath Hampton Roads.
From the Chesapeake Bay and Naval Station Norfolk to Willoughby Spit, Hampton, and the Peninsula, it’s a story of engineering ingenuity, regional growth, and a highway struggling to keep pace with the traffic it helped create.
Will the latest expansion finally be enough? Have you driven the HRBT or worked on one of its generations?
Categories: Roadscapes Stuff
