WABA's Arlington Boulevard Trail Concept Plan

WABA recently put together a detailed Concept Plan for the Arlington Boulevard Trail, with hopes that it will lead to more investment in the corridor and a complete and better trail. This is similar to the 1999 Concept Plan that WABA wrote for the Metropolitan Branch Trail (but hopefully will follow a faster timeline). Without rewriting the whole thing here, I'll just quote a bit of the summary.

Much of the Arlington Boulevard bicycle route already exists in the form of off-road paths and wide service roads with little traffic.Building just 1.3 miles of bridges and 8.1 miles of protected bicycle lanes (or off-road shared-use paths) would create a continuous trail,22 miles in length, on both the north and south sides of Arlington Boulevard. A basic, interim version of this focused on at-grade improvements and “low hanging fruit” could be built for just $2-4M,while a high quality path with grade separated crossing of major obstacles would cost $20-40M as redevelopment allows for increased investment.

The map below gives a pretty quick view of what is envisioned. 

Mostly what is needed to bring this idea to fruition is paint, maintenance and some trail widening. The major capital improvements including a connection from the Marine Corps Memorial to the south span of the Roosevelt Bridge, new trail or protected bike facilities through the Seven Corners region, a bike/ped bridge over I-495, 

It really is kind of a no-brainer. There are a lot of trails in the pipeline right now, but after that, there aren't that many options in the urban core. This is one of them. 

Comments

[DE]

When I read that release I didn't understand the part about building 1.3 miles of bridges. That's a lot of bridges to build and can't be cheap, so I wonder if that's what they really mean--maybe they mean 1.3 miles of lanes on bridges?

[darren]

I wish WABA would have included the evolving South Arlington spur in this concept

https://twitter.com/bikepedantic/status/535849567053701121

[Daniel]

Arlington Blvd West of 495 is a biking disaster. It also ignores the fact that all the businesses at this point are on Lee Highway. Better to swing the 'Path' north to Lee highway on fairview park Dr. Plus it gets you close to the Dunn Loring and Vienna metro stations. It then dead ends right where 50 dead ends. Fairfax Circle where they combine to become Fairfax Blvd.