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Hampton Roads

Hampton Roads is the name of both a body of water and the region of land areas which surround it in southeastern Virginia in the USA. Hampton Roads is notable for its year-round ice-free harbor, for U.S. Navy, Air Force, NASA, and Army facilities, shipyards, coal piers, and hundreds of miles of waterfront property and beaches, all of which contribute to the diversity and stability of the region's economy.

The water area known as Hampton Roads (informally known locally as "the harbor") is one of the world's biggest natural harbors, and incorporates the mouths of the Elizabeth River and James River with several smaller rivers and itself empties into the Chesapeake Bay near its mouth leading to the Atlantic Ocean.

The land area includes dozens of cities, counties and towns on the Virginia Peninsula and in South Hampton Roads. As defined for federal economic purposes, the Hampton Roads metropolitan statistical area (MSA) additionally includes several communities in northeastern North Carolina and Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. Officially, the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News, VA-NC MSA) has a population of about 1.7 million, the 33rd-largest metropolitan area in the United States.

The area is steeped in 400 years of American history, and hundreds of historical sites and attractions in the area draw visitors from around the world each year. The harbor was the key to the Hampton Roads area's growth, both on land and in water-related activities and events. Ironically, the harbor and its tributary waterways were (and still are) both important transportation conduits and obstacles to other land-based commerce and travel. Creating and maintaining adequate infrastructure has long been a major challenge. The Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) and the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel (MMBT) are major harbor crossings of the Hampton Roads Beltway which links each of the largest Seven Cities of Hampton Roads. In 2007, the new Hampton Roads Transportation Authority (HRTA) was formed under a controversial state law to levy various additional taxes to generate funding for major regional transportation projects, including a long-sought and costly third crossing of the harbor of Hampton Roads, which claims to be "America's First Region."