Loudoun County and other transportation officials broke ground on a major north-south connector road in what is currently an empty field on Friday. The missing link to fill in Loudoun County’s road plan will be known as Northstar Boulevard and is expected to be ready for driving sometime in 2025.

The project places a brand new four-lane road through mostly undeveloped land, but neighborhoods, gas stations, and strip malls with Tropical Smoothie Cafes have been steadily popping up in the area in recent years.

Few jurisdictions in the D.C. region are building new roads, but Loudoun County says they are trying to fill in “missing links” of its roadway network, as the pace of growth has outpaced existing infrastructure. Rural areas have quickly turned into suburbs as the county grew from 315,000 in 2010 to 428,000 in recent years.

A decade ago, the county identified 100 places where roads simply ended, but they’ve since filled in some of those projects like the Loudoun County Parkway, Glouster Parkway, Claiborne Parkway, and now Northstar Boulevard.

The nearly two-mile long, four-lane road — with accompanying 10-foot wide trails on each side — is planned to connect Evergreen Mills Road to Route 50. Officials say it will alleviate traffic and provide more direct routes in the growing county filled with zig-zagging directions because of the incomplete road network. When this project and another south of Route 50 are done, it will create an uninterrupted 14-mile north-south connector. 

The $90 million project was in part paid for by a $25 million federal grant, state, and local funding.

Loudoun County Supervisor Matt Letourneau says the county is lacking ways to connect the southern part of the county, where most of the growth has occurred, to the middle and northern parts.

“Residents around here do a lot of driving around to get places that’s not particularly direct,” Letourneau said. “So we’re going to be reducing a lot of that congestion that exists today.

“It will connect these parts of the county that are growing rapidly, that we don’t have the connections for today.”

He said many in the southern part of the county shop and use services to the east in Fairfax County, but he says he wants county residents to shop and get to places within their own county.

But some urban planning watchdogs say the road is indicative of the wrong type of development. While this connection may make sense from a county development perspective, it fuels more unsustainable car-centric development. The Coalition for Smarter Growth also stresses that this project could balloon into a broader highway network, like the outer beltway, also known as the bi-county connector, which it opposes.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the organization, says Northstar Boulevard will likely start with the four lanes and traffic lights as it is being developed now. But can imagine a future in which the Virginia Department of Transportation will argue that this corridor or one near it will need to be widened and street lights replaced with interchanges to meet demand. Meanwhile, new roads eat away at rural land and accelerate the rate of car-centric development.

“The long-term cost of poorly planned growth is being passed on to future taxpayers,” he said. “The alternative (to this future) is walkable, mixed-used communities like we used to build — towns.”

Schwartz says officials appear to be building an outer beltway link by link rather than drawing attention to it by calling it an outer beltway.

“They’ve condemned Northern Virginia into a ceaseless cycle of road building,” Schwartz said. “It is not enhancing the quality of life.”

Letourneau, who has been a strong advocate for Metro’s Silver Line extension into the county, says Loudoun can’t choose between roads or transit.

“It’s got to be both working together where it makes the most sense,” he said. “The type of density that you have in this part of Loudoun County is not going to support a lot of transit services.

“To get from point A to point B… to take the kids to the dance class or gymnastics or school, we’re not going to be relying on transit for that. We have to have a road network, which is why it’s vital that we still are able to build roads in this region.”