Closed rest stops send bad message

This is not a pretty picture: A happy family from New Jersey (or Maryland or Vermont) is traveling down Interstate 81. Little Johnny in the back seat has to go to the restroom.

After asking how much farther the rest stop is, the family finally learns that the rest stop has been boarded up. Closed. Virginia is no longer open to tourists traveling its interstate highways.

That’s the unfortunate signal the Commonwealth Transportation Board is sending to tourists driving through Virginia this summer. The state may save a few dollars by closing the rest areas, but the obvious sign the state is sending to tourism may be far more costly.

Beginning sometime after the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the financially beleaguered Virginia Department of Transportation will close 19 rest areas along its interstate highways. The agency had proposed initially closing 25 of its 42 rest stops, but an outcry at a series of public hearings around the state prompted the agency to keep six of them open.

The decision to close the rest areas came as the transportation board whittled $538 million from the state highway system’s six-year spending plan, effective July 1. The board anticipates saving as much as $10 million by closing the rest stops.

Now that’s a savings worth striving for, but did the transportation board consider the message the closed rest areas send to travelers driving through the tourism-rich state? If the state can’t sustain rest stops along its interstates, what other services are at risk? It’s a fair question.

Britt Drewes, a spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation, said the department is working with tourism officials to get the word out about the rest area closings. In other words, take advantage of the rest stops that remain because it could be a long ride to the next one.

Signs along the highways giving the distance to the next rest area will also be changed.

Seven of the 19 stops to be closed are on Interstate 81, while Interstates 85 and 95 will lose four each. Two each will be closed on Interstates 64 and 66.

Drewes said when the rest areas are closed, crews will place barricades at the entrances and winterize the plumbing. And then the decaying process will begin, hastened along by critters who will find a new home in the cracks and crevices of the rest stops once populated by humans.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine took note of the potential for decay last week when he said, “I don’t support the image” of decaying rest areas along Virginia’s highways. But he called the closures “the best choice” given the limited resources available to the Department of Transportation.

Some critics have suggested the transportation department could achieve a substantial savings with efficiencies throughout the agency — efficiencies that would save more money than closing the rest stops on the interstates. If that’s true, it would be the most prudent way to cut spending in the next six years.

And the message to tourists traveling through Virginia would be much kinder and gentler. That message? Virginia wants you and it can provide for your most basic needs as you travel through our scenic and historic state.

The alternative reflected by the barricades at the rest stops is that Virginia is no longer open to tourists. Virginia can do better than that.