Two people dash across the wide Seminary Road to catch a DASH bus. Image by Google Maps.

On Saturday, the Alexandria City Council voted 4-3 to change Seminary Road from four lanes to three, plus bicycle lanes, to reduce rampant speeding and make the road safer for people walking and bicycling. Last week, the Montgomery County Planning Board reversed an earlier decision and will keep a safety-enhancing “road diet” on Little Falls Parkway.

Both of these cases demonstrate how important it is for residents across our region to pay attention to elected officials’ values and policy stances, and also to advocate directly with elected officials and appointed boards.

Alexandria chooses a road diet for Seminary Road

Seminary Road is a four-lane east-west road with an interchange at I-395. Speeding is rampant and people say they feel unsafe bicycling and walking here. In a 2014 exercise, Alexandria officials asked residents where they’d like to bike but can’t today, and Seminary was a top choice. The 2016 master plan lists Seminary as a priority location for bike lanes.

Therefore, city staff designed three options: 1) keep four lanes; 2) two lanes west and one lane east, with painted bike lanes; 3) one lane each way with a center turn lane, and “buffered” bike lanes, which would have a wider one-foot striped area (but no physical barriers, at least not yet) separating the bike lanes from the rest of the roadway.

Some drivers and residents of nearby neighborhoods said they feared “gridlock” and other drivers cutting through neighborhoods, though Alexandria’s experience with similar changes on King Street in 2016 showed no such effects. Arlington’s Chris Slatt also pointed out last week that road diets on Walter Reed Drive Wilson Boulevard, Shirlington Road, and North Harrison Street came with warnings of similar dire consequences which did not come to pass.

The city’s Traffic and Parking Board, an appointed citizen commission, voted in June to add two “Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons” instead of reducing the number of travel lanes. Three members of the board chose four lanes while two, including past GGWash contributor Kevin Beekman, opposed it. A group of Seminary Hill residents appealed the decision to the City Council, and advocates for and against then began vociferously lobbying councilmembers.

After a lengthy meeting with hours of public testimony Saturday, the council narrowly voted to uphold the residents’ appeal. The council voted 4 to 3 to select Option 3, the change to two lanes each way, a center turn lane, and buffered bike lanes. City staff recommended sticking with the Traffic and Parking Board’s four lane option (after trying to suggest a strange compromise in June which nobody liked), but a citizen Transportation Commission, Environmental Policy Commission, the DASH bus system’s board, and a majority of speakers at Saturday’s hearing endorsed Option 3.

Vice-Mayor Elizabeth Bennett-Parker conducted some of her own research, driving and walking the road and tracking her travel times, but colleague Mo Seifeldein suggested boad members shouldn’t do that. While some civic association leaders testified against the road diet, other residents at the meeting pointed out that “many Alexandria civic associations exclude town homes, condos, apartment complexes, & renters,” as Erin Meter put it. (The Seminary Hill Association voted last week to make renters eligible for membership, possibly heralding a shift in this exclusivity generally.)

Ultimately, Mayor Justin Wilson, Bennett-Parker, Canek Aguirre, and Redella “Del” Pepper voted for Option 3. The three councilmembers in opposition were John Chapman, Amy Jackson, and Seifeldein.

Alexandria road safety advocates worked very hard to organize support for this change, and it paid off. Especially given the close vote, it’s also clear that voters’ choices for council matter, such as their decision to elevate Wilson to the mayor’s seat (in Alexandria, a position basically equivalent to council chair). Some other candidates in last year’s primary had evasive answers on issues like this, which meant that when our volunteers and readers did a blind comparison exercise, the differences weren’t as clear; we’ll work to improve that process in 2022 and for other races sooner.

Efforts by advocates to build coalitions were also very important, said Jim Durham, chair of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (BPAC) and a resident of the Seminary Road area. He said, “we also engaged other individuals and organizations, such as citizen members of the Commission on Aging and the Commission on Persons with Disabilities, volunteer organizations such as the Partnership for a Healthier Alexandria and Alexandria Families for Safe Streets, and families and youth in the project area. Building a broad coalition for safe streets is groundwork that needs to be done in advance of a specific campaign.”

Montgomery Planning Board felt heat and balks at the price tag

Little Falls Parkway runs through county parkland, connecting Massachusetts Avenue and the vicinity of downtown Bethesda. It’s two lanes south of River Road and four to the north, but the county narrowed a short four-lane segment to two lanes in 2017. Chevy Chase resident Ned Gaylin had been killed by a driver when crossing the parkway along the Capital Crescent Trail, and there had been eleven other crashes involving a person bicycling or walking over the prior two years.

Some drivers complained about not having more space to travel faster, though the road diet only added seven seconds to the average trip. After a contentious debate, the county Planning Board, which controls the parks department, voted 4-1 in June to restore four lanes. To try to address safety, board members asked to move the trail to the nearby intersection of Arlington Road, so trail users would cross at a traffic signal — not one of the options staff had studied.

Safety advocates continued to argue this crossing would not be safe, and that included three members of the county council’s Transportation and Environment committee: Tom Hucker (District 5), Evan Glass (at-large), and Hans Riemer (at-large). They asked the Planning Board to reconsider its decision as incompatible with the county’s Vision Zero goals.

On September 12, the board heard a budget presentation from its staff and grapped with an estimate that it would cost approximately $2.5 million to plan and build the new trail crossing at the light, which they had put that in the budget for 2025-26. If the board wanted to do this sooner, that would mean delaying a master plan for Brookside Gardens and constrution at Little Bennet Day Use Area in Clarksburg for a year. On the other hand, if the board delayed a trail change beyond the six-year plan, they could accelerate a cricket field in Wheaton and work for Brookside.

“The existing interim condition is safe and functional as it is,” said planning staff. Board member Natali Fani-Gonzalez, who had voted for the change in June, then moved for the further delay. “I am not willing to jepoardize any of these projects that we’ve been talking about,” she said. Gerald Cichy, who also had voted to remove the road diet in June, joined her, as did chair Casey Anderson, who’d voted to keep the road diet, and past GGWash contributor Partap Verma, who joined the board since the prior vote. Tina Patterson was the only member to vote no.

In this case, the most immediate cause of the board’s reversal seems to be the financial impact, but during the discussion, board members, especially Fani-Gonzales, emphasized that safety was the top prioriy. It’s quite likely that hearing from more residents and especially elected officials had an impact. Those officials are in office because Montgomery County voters chose people who’d prioritize safety.

In both Montgomery County and Alexandria, a June of bad votes for road safety turned into a September of good ones. This will only continue, and happen in other jurisdictions, if residents who support safer streets and sustainable transportation systems get involved in their communities and work to build coalitions.

Correction: This article originally misstated the date of a September 12 budget presentation. That has been corrected.