The Virginia Department of Transportation will soon undertake a study on the safety of U.S. Route 58.

The high-traffic road runs through Suffolk and carries on east to the ocean and west all the way to the state line. The study will focus on a 71-mile stretch of it, particularly areas in Suffolk, Courtland and Emporia that see high volumes of traffic in the morning and evening, as well as high volumes of crashes.

The study aims to preserve and enhance the capacity and safety of the road while accommodating economic development and avoiding wide-scale road widening projects.

We consider most of those goals worth, if lofty. But “accommodating economic development” is government-speak for adding more businesses — more restaurants, more warehouses, more retail centers, more of just about everything — to the road. All of those things bring with them two things — more traffic and more intersections to allow that traffic to get where it’s going.

Too many restaurants and too many warehouses are what caused the high-volume, congested area of Route 58 in Suffolk west of the bypass. It was bad before CenterPoint built warehouses there, and it’s gotten worse.

A widening project is under way in that area and has resulted in dozens of residents and businesses having to move to make way for the road. We wouldn’t want to see that happen again farther down the road, not in any of the jurisdictions where good folks live and fine business people operate, but especially not in Suffolk.

As such, VDOT should focus its efforts on studying the safety and capacity of the road while avoiding widening projects. Allowing more and more businesses to open on or near the road should be a low priority and avoided if at all possible. Businesses that do open should accommodate the additional traffic with real solutions.