Hearing on Plans to Extended Custis Trail Along I-66?

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 62236 wrote:

It’s possible that gravity will suddenly reverse itself, or that a bag of money will appear in my lap. It’s also extremely unlikely. Getting bike lanes out of a widening project on 7 is similarly unlikely. I’d love to see it, I just don’t believe the political will exists to do it. (Doing so would mean obtaining additional ROW and funding, and if you listen to the people controlling the commonwealth’s big money pots, they just aren’t interested in anything but new highways.)

Edit to add: I’m sure there will be some talk of bike facilities in the early discussions, but they’ll do the usual disappearing act by the time the final design is done, with the “too expensive” reason given (in a multi-hundred-million dollar project).

I know there is talk of making the new lane HOV. I think some of the money for this would be from the Tysons Tax District, which I believe is not controlled by the Commonwealth. It could also be placed on the list of projects to be funded by the new NoVa tax (assuming that holds up in court) where Fairfax County holds a bit of sway.

If anything, VDOT is leaning the other way, toward ripping out service roads when needed to install additional through lanes. They definitely don’t seem interested in creating new ones. And where service lanes don’t exist, there’s usually some reason (i.e., something in the ROW) which makes it hard to put a bike lane there.

I know on Little River Tpke the service lanes are disconnected, and in a few places it would be possible to connect them – it was never done because LRT was widened incrementally with little if any real planning (at least back in the days when service roads in neighborhood commercial centers were in fashion). My understanding is that the Annandale Transportation plan involves removal of the service lanes, but not all the room made available would go to widening LRT further.

I am less familiar with the service lanes on Rte 50.

When I have a chance, I will consult the FFX county bike plan (of course that plan has not yet been approved)

[lordofthemark]

http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/northernvirginia/route_7_widening_-_reston_ave_to_dtr.asp

apparently the VDOT plan is for a 10ft wide shared use path only.

[mstone]

@lordofthemark 62244 wrote:

http://www.virginiadot.org/projects/northernvirginia/route_7_widening_-_reston_ave_to_dtr.asp

apparently the VDOT plan is for a 10ft wide shared use path only.

That plan says 10ft shared use path on each side. Dollars to donuts one of those turns into a sidewalk or disappears (BTDT; also, VDOT hates having sidewalks on both sides because then people would kinda expect a 4 sided crosswalk instead of a vehicle LOS-friendly 3 sided crosswalk). ADA minimum is 3 ft, with a 5ft practical minimum. So my crystal ball says that the total cyclist accommodation will be…5 feet of extra sidewalk, if we’re lucky. That’s actually about what would be required for an on street bike lane, but the on-pavement treatment would need to deal realistically with intersections whereas the sidewalk can be arbitrarily shunted around to make traffic flow easier. (No, I’m not cynical…)

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