Loudoun County roads leave commuters zig-zagging to get around missing links The county, one of the fastest-growing in the country, is changing so quickly that its roads haven't caught up with all the new buildings and people, yet. There are more than 100 places in Loudoun, county leaders say, where there are missing links - a road starts, it jogs along nicely, then at some point, it stops dead. In recent years, as developers have bought up land and transformed farmland to suburbs, county leaders often required the businesses to pay for some of the infrastructure that would be needed when the new homes were filled with families, offices with workers and stores with shoppers. The system developed as a way to try to keep up with road needs even when the commonwealth - which is responsible for building and maintaining most roads in Virginia - couldn't keep pace with the growth. But when the housing market slowed and construction got delayed, so did the road projects tied to those subdivisions. That left a problem: Gaps in busy roads as neighborhoods nearby mushroomed. Now county leaders are trying to get a handle on all those roads to nowhere. They're pulling together maps, legal agreements, possible funding sources and timelines - and spending tens of millions of dollars to link up some of the dead ends. In some cases, they'll pay for projects knowing that legal agreements with developers ensure the county will eventually be reimbursed. The state will end up fronting the money in some of the cases, and the county will pay outright for others. In the meantime, with all the new homes and more than half of Loudoun residents commuting to jobs outside the county, people are crowding onto local roads, zig-zagging and looping around and inching their way to work on a road network that can feel like a maze. "We moved here from New Jersey, and that was our biggest surprise," said Sangram Deshmukh, who works in information technology. On maps some things are so close by. But in order to access those places, you have to go around things. Sometimes it makes sense for two roads to be connected, but they are not connected. It's really frustrating. At social events the traffic and weird roads often come up, he said, with people bemoaning the lost time. Why, people wonder, hasn't anyone fixed such an obvious - and frustrating - problem? "This all transpired because there was no transportation money for many, many years, no money for road projects," said county supervisor Matt Letourneau. At the state level, there is always a tussle between rural areas that need funding because of poor road conditions and urban and exurban places that need money to alleviate congestion, said Jonathan Gifford, a professor of transportation policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. In a rapidly growing area, that tension poses a dilemma, he said. Is it the responsibility of the state to just build a road wherever a developer wants one? How do you balance transportation and land development?