The Interim Draft of the Arlington Master Transportation Plan came out in June and is available for public comment. This plan was written to guide transportation planning in Arlington through 2030. It's pretty extensive - and bold. It breaks transportation into 6 elements, one of which is biking - which is pretty good considering that only 0.69% of all commutes in Arlington are by bicycle (in DC it's 1.16% and in Richmond it's 1.09% - who knew Richmond was so good).
The five objectives
of the Bicycle Element of the MTP are to:
1. Complete the
Primary and Secondary Bikeway Networks;
2. Increase
bicycling use to a level where 50 percent of residents report using a bicycle
for transportation purposes at least occasionally;
3. Improve
bicycling safety and bring public perception about the safety of bicycling in
Arlington in line with actual conditions;
4. Manage and
maintain the existing and future network of bicycle facilities and services to
ensure that it can safely accommodate greater demand; and
5. Make intermodal trips involving bicycles convenient and time efficient
At first glance these goals lacked a way of being measured, so I was unhappy with them. But later in the report they give pretty specific metrics (miles of bike lane swept per month, League of American Bicyclists Silver and Gold standards, number of bikes on buses, etc...) so they've thought about that too.
I don't bike in Arlington as much as I do in DC, but it was hard for me to find any holes in their plans. The Appendix has a list of projects (funded, priority one, county, network, etc...) and it includes everything I've ever wanted out of Arlington (except a direct connection from Memorial bridge to Arlington Boulevard, which would involve crossing Arlington National Cemetery and Fort Meyer). Here are the priority one projects.
This includes projects I've asked for, like the connection to the North Tract and a connection from the TR bridge to the Iwo Jima memorial (with clever framing, you could line this up so that the trail heads directly for it - that would be fantastic). Included elsewhere are the Mt. Vernon Trail extension, the Four Mile Run Trail-Shirley Highway crossing, the Boundary Channel Bridge underpass, and pushing trails through some of Arlington's biggest cycling barriers like the Pentagon, Army-Navy Country Club, the Cemetery, Shirley highway etc. In fact reading the plan is almost enough to make one giddy.
Except...plans have a way of not being followed through on. It's easy to promise the sun and the moon when it just goes on paper, but when the rubber hits the road the money can be hard to find. That's when the project starts becoming a victim of what Richard Layman calls "satisficing." All too often "a plan is just a list of things that never happen." Let's hope in this case, that's wrong.
Great post; very informative. Some promising stuff there in the Arlington plan.
Posted by: iconoclasst | July 14, 2006 at 01:45 PM