Arlington County is accepting comments on the Washington Boulevard Bike, Pedestrian, Roadway Enhancements through Wednesday, March 8th. That project proposes instituting a road diet on Washington Boulevard between McKinley Road and Lee Highway, and (mostly) buffered bike lanes between Sycamore and McKinley.
The roadway isn't being rebuilt, but the travel lanes are being narrowed from a total typical width of 37' to 22'. This may slow traffic down, but when the speed limit is 30mph and the 85th percentile speed is 34-37 mph, slowing down traffic is a feature, not a bug.
The narrowing of travel lanes needed to create bike lanes and their buffers, combined with high visibility crosswalk enhancements, help change the character of the street from an automobile dominated environment to one that better accommodates other users. This helps reduce travel speeds, which does have a direct and positive effect on pedestrian safety.
Other sections of the road are narrower and there, parking will be removed. In fact, it looks like more than half the parking on the road will be removed.
The concept plan, would remove on-street parking from the street frontage of 21 of the 72 single family homes that directly front/face Washington Boulevard along this corridor. Nearly all of these homes have private parking available in driveways.
That might seem like a lot of parking to lose, but
The County understands that removing parking can be difficult for people who have come to rely on it. However, we believe the impacts are manageable and the benefits to the community could be worth the tradeoff.
File under "Things not said often enough."
In front of the Lutheran Church, they'll add in 12 back-in parking spaces and paint the lane green.
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This would have been awesome when I lived in the area.
Having the trails were nice to avoid the traffic on Washington Boulevard to get to Westover was nice but the lack of good signage pretty much always meant that I would miss a turn here and there.
Actually feeling like I'm okay taking the most direct route (that actually has street signs) would have been vastly preferable.
Posted by: drumz | March 06, 2017 at 11:18 AM