Brookfield Homes is offering $111 million in land and road improvements for the right to build a "town center" and up to 6,000 new homes in Gainesville, VA.

A developer is proposing to build thousands of homes in western Prince William County and provide an unprecedented $100 million-plus in road improvements to the area, including the extension of carpool lanes on Interstate 66.

Brookfield Homes, which promotes itself as one of the 20 biggest home-building companies in the country, wants to create a town center of restaurants, shops, office buildings and a 100-acre park that would be surrounded by about 6,000 homes near Gainesville, if rezoning is approved next year.

Some of the items in this offer are quite useful, especially the proposal for a Virginia Railway Express station and commuter lot. However, the core problem of too many cars on too little road is not being addressed. North-south travel on US 29 through Gainesville and Warrenton is already reaching the nightmare stage, and actually traversing Gainesville via the unlit, narrow, and disjointed Linton Hall Road guarantees a bout of road rage. 12,000 more cars, sigh.

Once again, the PWC Board of Supervisors and VDOT have left the guidance of our region's growth to those with purely financial interests, the land developers, and saddled the region's commuters with a sentence served daily on our roads. But, hey, maybe I can convince the wife that I need XM Radio now. Silver linings and all that...