Army Navy road diet would make room for a PBL

Shortly after I wrote about this project in January, Arlington County had a public workshop about the Army Navy Drive Complete Streets project.  Some more material from that meeting is now available. Nothing official has changed about the concept so far, and yet it's possible that the workshop results in some changes. 

On the bike network map above, you can see how Army Navy connects so many of the facilities together and becomes part of the Columbia Pike to 14th Street Bridge route. 

The project will create a bi-directional Protected Bike Lane on the south side of the street, transit lanes for the Joyce to Hayes section and landscaped medians. It will make room for this by reducing travel lanes. No word on which lanes will be for Navy and which for Army.

On the west side, the bike lane will pass behind a floating bus stop, but won't extend the bike lane on Joyce to connect to it...

and on the east it will have bike boxes and a connection to the shared lanes on 12th.

There are quite a few driveways on this stretch so careful attention will need to be paid to how these cross the PBL. The PBLs will only be 10' wide, which is 2' less than NACTO recommends. And then I have a lot of questions about how cyclists will transition to and from the PBL, but I like the general idea of this for sure. 

Construction is expected to begin in spring 2020, and be complete in spring 2022. That's roughly the time that the new Army Navy Country Club Access Road, which will provide cyclists access from the Columbia Pike area to Pentagon City, goes forward.

Comments

[Will]

The trail marked in red over by Boundary Channel is the one I ran recently on a return from Pentagon City. It's interesting they call it an existing off-street trail. I mean, kind of, but anyone not familiar with single track riding wouldn't be comfortable there. It'd be great to improve that to be a rideable connection, it links the north side of Potomac Yards park to the MVT and 14th St Bridge, cutting around a mile of distance off the next shortest route. It's a huge deal, so they should go full steam ahead.

[washcycle]

Will, the picture above doesn't show the detail well enough. If you go to the original and zoom it, it's dashed to show that it's a proposed trail.

[Chris Slatt]

That trail will be paved as part of the Boundary Channel Drive Interchange Project...sometime.