It's hard to imagine a time when the Mt Vernon Trail didn't connect to Rosslyn or Crystal City, but the overpass on the north end and the connection to the tunnel under the train tracks across from the airport weren't built until the late 1980's as this 1987 article from the Post points out.
The $2 million project will include the first pedestrian overpass to cross the George Washington Memorial Parkway, at Rosslyn, and will allow direct access from Arlington to the Potomac River for the first time since the parkway was built in 1932.
Other improvements planned for the Mount Vernon Trail include a connection at National Airport to a closed pedestrian tunnel that runs under train tracks and to Crystal City.
"It will allow walkers and bikers to safely ride from the Mount Vernon Trail onto the streets of Crystal City," explained Mark Kellogg, the public works planning supervisor for Arlington County.
Byrne said that within a year a portion of the Mount Vernon Trail will be relocated along an access road to Fort Hunt Park by paving a small portion of trail next to the road. He added that similar improvements involving paving a trail next to roadways will be made at several points between National Airport and Memorial Bridge where the trail crosses roads
They also painted a yellow line down the middle of the trail and straightened and leveled a curve on the southern end. Interestingly, some people thought this was a bad idea because the trail was just too dangerous for more traffic.
According to Linda Hulvey, director of emergency nursing at Mount Vernon Hospital, five to 10 bicyclists are treated at the hospital on a typical summer weekend. "When the weather gets warm, the number of people we treat for bicycle accidents goes up significantly."
WABA saw it a bit differently, though they agreed that the trail was badly designed (and still is in some ways)
"In the opinion of {the Washington Area Bicyclist Association} the Mount Vernon Trail was not designed by people who fully understood how bicyclists ride," said Peter Harnik, vice president of the association, who works for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.
"The yellow stripe would help . . . . I think speed limit signs are not really realistic because bicyclists don't know how fast they are going. Fifteen miles an hour is very fast for that trail," Harnik said.
According to U.S. Park Police records, nine accidents on the trail have been reported since Jan. 1. About 10 trail accidents have been reported to the bike association in the past six weeks. Each organization says it hears about only a small proportion of such accidents.
One WABA member wrote in shortly afterward to ask for a 12-foot wide trail, which NPS has recently started to deliver (so it doesn't even take 30 years for LTTE to do their magic!)
And then this is interesting too
One of the most publicized accidents on the trail occurred in September when Shirley Metzenbaum, wife of Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), received severe head injuries when she fell from her bike.
"I didn't think the trail was so curvy. The last thing I remember was looking in my rear view mirror for Howard . . . . Maybe what happened is {the trail} zigged and I zagged," Shirley Metzenbaum said in an interview last week. She said she incurred blot clots to the brain and still has blurred vision and is unable to drive. She said her doctors tell her she should be fully recovered by September. She said she is not certain that the accident was the fault of the trail.
I lived in the Ft. Hunt area of the trail in the mid-70's. At that time, the MVT was a fantastic place for a high school kid to bike out to Mt. Vernon and then into Old Town Alexandria for the adventure of going to the Dockside buildings stores and eating at The Strand sandwich shop. And NO ONE called it a multi-use trail. It was a BIKE TRAIL. Period. Ah, the good old days.
Posted by: Curmudgeonly but still riding | November 15, 2015 at 05:23 PM