The $3.9 Billion Fix for the Region's Worst Commute: The HRBT Expansion
Two new tunnels under the harbor, bored beside the old ones — the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion is the largest highway project in Virginia history, and Virginia Beach commutes are its reason to exist.
Every Virginia Beach commuter has a Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel story, and none of them are about the view. The HRBT — Interstate 64's twin two-lane tunnels between Hampton and Norfolk, opened in 1957 and 1976 — is the region's defining bottleneck, a chokepoint where a single stalled car can back traffic to Williamsburg and where summer beach traffic turns Fridays into exercises in regional patience.
The fix, under construction since 2020, is the most ambitious road project Virginia has ever attempted: the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel Expansion, budgeted at about $3.9 billion, boring two new tunnel tubes with a massive machine named Mary — in honor of Mary D. Jackson, a Hampton civic leader — widening I-64 on both shores, and rebuilding the artificial islands. When complete, the crossing will carry four lanes each way, separating local and through traffic in a way the region has needed for a generation.
The project's stakes for Virginia Beach are everyday, not abstract: the crossing is one of only two harbor tunnels serving a military-and-port economy that cannot simply route around the water, and every improvement to its reliability changes commute math from the Oceanfront to the Peninsula shipyards.
Until the new tubes open, the old rules stand: check the HRBT before you commit, consider the Monitor-Merrimac crossing on I-664 as the pressure valve, and never — the veterans are unanimous on this — never trust a Friday afternoon in July. The biggest road project in state history is, at bottom, a promise that someday you won't have to plan your life around a tunnel.
