Oxon Hill Road to be redesigned with bike lanes and traffic circles.

This is a welcome improvement. 

Construction to improve safety and bike and pedestrian access on Oxon Hill Road could begin in the spring as part of an agreement with the community to maintain the residential character of the area, Prince George’s County officials said.

Hubbard said construction is expected to be completed two years from the start of construction.

The project will include about a 2.5-mile stretch of road from just south of National Harbor to Fort Foote Elementary School. Hubbard said the project will include bike lanes and sidewalks on both sides of the road. Space also will be provided for on-street parking.

Traffic circles will replace several existing signals to improve traffic flow on the road, she said. Residents had requested traffic circles, because lights alone did not alleviate traffic on the road.

Hubbard said the project’s estimated cost is about $14 million, with funding coming from the county’s Capital Improvement Program.

Oxon Hill Road has had a long history of being an unsafe road, said Jim Hudnall, public relations officer for the Oxon Hill Bicycle and Trail Club, an organization that promotes bicycling and bike safety in southern Maryland.

Hudnall said he and his wife, Jane — Fort Washington residents who live near Oxon Hill Road — have had problems sharing the road with motorists when they have biked. People trying to get to bus stops often have trouble crossing the street with oncoming traffic, he said.

While it seems that everyone is happy with this solution, there is still a push to move the Potomac Heritage Trail to the road and away from the Potomac.

She said that she would like to see the Potomac Heritage Trail, part of a network of locally managed trails between the Potomac River and the Allegheny Highlands, run along Oxon Hill Road.

“We have two primary concerns: protecting the value of homes in the community and addressing the rush-hour back-ups,” Bick wrote. “The Potomac Heritage Trail would avoid the need to widen the road. . . . The biggest advantage would be saving the historic character of the road and the value of our homes and our community.”

Comments

[Jim Titus]

Sloppy use of terminology in the article makes some of the comments difficult to decicpher, but this does not seem to be a case of someone trying to push the Potomac Heritage Trail away from the Potomac.

Currently, the PHT is on Oxon Hill Road; and it will continue to be on Oxon Hill Road when the road is widened and bike lanes are built. Ms. Bick is arguing that the PHT should instead be a sidepath and the road not widened at all (she might be happy if PHT instead followed the Potomac because her main preference is to not widen the road at all).

Some of the people in the neighborhood have opposed widening the road to create bike lanes because they view the bike lanes as a Trojan Horse, which creates a roadway wide enough for two lanes in each direction, which is what they really want to stop. Conversely, if they believed that the bike lanes would slow the traffic on Oxon Hill Road, they would be all in favor of it.

Believing that county road agencies live to widen the asphalt footprint, they accepted the bike lanes as better than 2 more general travel lanes.

[washcycle]

Thanks for the context Jim.

[Rootchopper]

Oxon Hill Road is a mess. Simply repaving it would be a massive improvement but this sounds great to me.

[David Blair]

This sounds very useful. But, why does it start "south of National Harbor?" The most dangerous part of the road is the winding hills from national harbor bike trail to the south end of national harbor. There are also no through street that allow you to avoid that stretch.

[Jim Hudnall]

The section of Oxon Hill Road that will be rebuilt with bike lanes, sidewalks and traffic calming is 1.5 miles from HarborView Avenue (the southern-most entrance to National Harbor from Oxon Hill Road) to Fort Foote Elementary School south of Fort Foote Road North. This includes the dangerous part of the road David that refers to.