Pedestrian bridges are back in the news in Arlington this month with some pedestrian safety advocates protesting the proposed removal of an existing pedestrian bridge in Rosslyn. It's understandable to be a bit confused by Arlington's approach - why are we ripping down pedestrian bridges in Rosslyn, while building a new pedestrian bridge on the W&OD Trail over Langston Boulevard and proposing a new pedestrian bridge between Crystal City and National Airport? The reason is that Pedestrian Bridges are only an effective safety mechanism in certain limited contexts. In most contexts, they are an infrequently-used and expensive waste of time that are used as an excuse to not make actual useful safety improvements.
Kenmore Middle School and Carlin Springs Elementary school have a sustainable access problem - in addition to being located at the edge of the County, they are surrounded by barriers, dead-end streets, and poor bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure leading to low walking & biking rates, high parental drop-off rates, and the inevitable traffic and safety problems that result. One project that could start improving this situation is what Sustainable Mobility for Arlington County calls the "Kenmore Connector Trail" - a walking & biking trail on the west side of Carlin Springs Road that could connect Kenmore & Carlin Springs across Arlington Blvd to the W&OD Trail.
Arlington prides itself on its public engagement, but when there is a fundamental disagreement on the basic design of our streets, public engagement becomes a frustrating, repeated rehashing of the same arguments rather than a productive and collaborative conversation about what might make a particular street unique. Arlington needs a Street Design, Operations and Maintenance Guide — a set of localized standards, tools, interventions and policies that reflect not just professional engineering standards, but also community-driven values.
I have heard some variation on that sentence more times than I can count at public engagement sessions, County Board hearings and civic association meetings: “Cars just come speeding around that corner.” They shouldn’t be able to. A street designed for pedestrian safety uses a solid, dependable and simple technique to force cars to slow down, the “corner radius.” Arlington is building streets using corner radii that are much larger than our policies say they should and they don’t seem to be taking into account a key concept: “effective” versus “actual” curb radii. The end result: drivers can whip around a corner at a high rate of speed making them much more likely to kill or severely injure a pedestrian in the crosswalk.
Unlike most counties in Virginia, Arlington owns and maintains the vast majority of the County’s roads… but not all of them. Highways like I-395, I-66 rightly belong under the control of the Virginia Department of Transportation, but for other streets in Arlington, the value proposition is much less clear.