Walkers were left out in the cold after the blizzard

If you try to walk around in many parts of our region, particularly in the suburbs, it’s easy to get the feeling that you’re an afterthought, at best. Governments’ actions in the recent “Snowzilla” blizzard show even more clearly how being “multimodal” is more lip service than reality.

In Fairfax County, sidewalks in neighborhoods and along major arterial roads were impassable a week or more after the storm. Schools in Fairfax, Arlington and other jurisdictions closed for seven consecutive weekdays, putting many parents in a bind. Children lacked safe routes to school and safe places to wait for buses.

This was no simple issue of having to prioritize; as Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Sharon Bulova told residents, the Virginia Department of Transportation, which plows all of Fairfax’s public roads, was not going to clear the sidewalks, and the county had no plan to either.

Continue reading my latest op-ed in the Washington Post.