New Army Navy design widens the protected bikeway, adds protection

The northern half mile of Army Navy Drive could sport a 12-foot wide protected bikeway, with protected intersections by late 2023 according to new plans presented this week by the County. The new 30% design makes several improvements over a prior design that already had a lot to like. 

The road diet design presented in 2018 created a bi-directional bikeway on the south side of the street, transit lanes in the Joyce to Hayes section and landscaped medians. The new design makes a host of changes to make the bikeway better. For starters, the bikeway, a bidirectional protected bike lane, will be 12 feet wide instead of 10, thus bringing them up to the width recommended by NACTO. 

At Joyce, they created a protected intersection for most traffic (bikes going south on Joyce are not protected, but there are no bike lanes on Joyce north of Army Navy). 

At the Pentagon City Mall they also added a protected intersection corner island and protected the bike lane in the SE corner.

At Hayes, they moved the NB Hayes bike lane to the outside, to the right of the right turn lane; added an island and bend-out to the SW corner and started the protected SB bike lane on Hayes.

At Fern they added a bend out and island to the SW corner and to the east of that they've added trees to the PBL buffer (not shown)

Eads is basically the same for cyclists, but they are working on a protected bike lane on Eads as part of a separate project. 

East of Eads the buffer between the PBL and road traffic is changed from a striped buffer to a raised one with trees in it and it's made much larger to allow cars to queue there when turning. Drivers would cross the bikeway and then wait in the buffer to turn on to Army Navy treating them like two separate roads. 

This is so much better than the previous plan, IMO. But still there's opportunities to make more improvements, as this twitter thread notes. 

Even though the meeting is over, they're still looking for comments. 

Comments

[fairlington rider]

Found it odd that nobody chimed in despite it being such a major project. This will be big as some of the parcels along the south side of A/N Drive are redeveloped in the coming years (Metropolitan/Amazon Place) or recently-completed (next to the Doubletree).

Ideally the goal should be to:
1) allow for stree-free biking within Pentagon/Amazon City from Potomac Yard all the way up to A/N Drive (and all areas within)

2) allow for multiple points of entry/exit:
2a) The Long Bridge axis is dependent on factors outside of the scope of this project
2b) The Hoffman-Boston connector is also not covered by this
2c) I'd like to see the feasibility of a second trans-railroad crossing in conjunction with the new Crystal City VRE Station. Maybe it would be a bridge, based on the whiz-bang project proposals.

Right now there are really only two access points from the North/South "bike highway", the MVT, one at Four Mile Run and one at CC Water Park. That's not good enough!