Virginia Roads - VA 7



The above cutout shield is in Falls Church.


Truck warning sign on VA 7 WB approaching I-81, telling truckers how to avoid Winchester's small streets and many turns.


A rarely posted school route, unfortunately taken at night so you can't see it's VA 9158. Taken from VA 7 WB near Winchester.


EB from Berryville to Leesburg. The GreenWay is a new highway extending the Dulles Toll Road westward so that you, too, can pay a toll to head to Washington, but the green shield guarantees you won't even be able to tell what highway it is when traveling at speed. Sneaky, huh? Besides the different sign sizes and colors in the last photo, "Business" should be all caps and smaller, like the "EAST" on the other sign.


(Insert standard NJDOT joke.) Also, these EB signs shouldn't mix the route number with the street name. Although that's often violated and with good cause, there's no good cause here because no one would bother memorizing a 4-digit secondary number instead of a simple name.


Let's make the same caption westbound!


WB at a newly minted state highway in 2013, less than a year after SR 7100 shields were patched over with the new primary designation.


In February 2011, construction was running full tilt to add a Metrorail line to Dulles Airport. It swings into VA 7's median from VA 267 and leaves again at Chain Bridge Road, VA 123. I've never seen so many cranes at once on a single project.

Find one thing right on this Tysons Corner mall sign, courtesy Lou Corsaro.


WB and EB state-name shields.


Things get uglier eastbound. While a beltway, by definition, doesn't really have directionality, it would help to sign I-495 as NB to Maryland and SB to the other destinations (consistent with the way it's signed on assemblies, as you see in the last photo).


In 2011 (clearly the year for VA 7 construction), the interchange was reconfigured during the addition of HOT (toll or HOV) lanes to the Beltway. The former EB-NB cloverleaf ramp was taken out shortly after these photos were taken, replaced by ramps to and from the HOT lanes to the south and a left turn to head north. Given that Chain Bridge Rd. makes a shortcut for that movement, losing the direct ramp should be no big deal.


Yes, yes, black on white guide sign, strange font on the regulatory sign, afterthought "lbs", very cool, very nice. But is South West Street not equivalent to Southwest Street? It's actually on the northwest side of Falls Church and heads more east-west than north-south, and to make matters worse, South West St. becomes just plain West St. as it heads farther south. I won't have this.


Still more cutouts, and visit the US 29 page for another assembly from this intersection. These appear quite a bit older than the cutout shield on top of this page, perhaps in the 1960's.


Continuing east to Falls Church, where the road is briefly divided with help of a poor excuse for a traffic sign. Tallwood, as you can almost make out, is a pre-colonial brick residence built in some year out of some form of something. Hey, I had nowhere to stop for a better photo.


This building just east of the Seven Corners (which, despite a US 50 underpass, is still as confusing as it sounds to navigate) is not an auditorium or museum, or, as some have speculated, a spaceship - just a Sears.


Eastward to the end of VA 7, which gets custom one-piece signs in Alexandria by virtue of that being an independent city. The I-95 sign directs traffic onto Russell Rd. SB, but then via VA 236 west to VA 241.

To US 50
To US 522
To I-81
To VA 37
Onto VA 286
Onto I-495
To VA 123
Onto US 29
To I-95
Onto US 1
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