Improved water park access?

[lordofthemark]

From the transitway update:

The community has expressed concerns about people riding
bicycles on sidewalks in Crystal City, particularly near the
Water Park.
…

Staff propose to install a curb ramp to improve the link between the onstreet
bike lanes on Crystal Drive and the Mount Vernon Trail
connection

That would be quite a good thing in my opinion, though I am not sure how it would work for someone heading south from the Water Park into CC. I have been using this detour to avoid the MVT construction/mulch, and generally go waterpark, do the driveway in front of Crystal Palace, to west bound on 18th to Eads. What would help me completely avoid the sidewalk would be to cut straight through from the waterpark ascent to the driveway, but I guess Crystal Palace does not want that. Unless there is going to be a signalled crosswalk right at the new curb ramp, I don’t think I would use it to access the SB Crystal Drive lanes to get to 18th. But it would of course help in the other direction.

Topic

[LeprosyStudyGroup]

Yeah I really scratched my head when they recently rebuilt that area on the east side of the street (that will eventually be a covered bus stop I guess?) with seemingly zero consideration of the fact that it is directly next to one of the busiest trail entrances in the entire area, and there is no reasonable way for cyclists to exit from the trail and either head south to the access road or safely cross the street without bumbling through a maze of pedestrians and poles and cars and curbs.

[consularrider]

Darn and I was hoping that this meant I could get to the water (Hidro) park without having to ride on one of the two limited access highway bridges. Wrong country.

[DrP]

@LeprosyStudyGroup 129988 wrote:

Yeah I really scratched my head when they recently rebuilt that area on the east side of the street (that will eventually be a covered bus stop I guess?) with seemingly zero consideration of the fact that it is directly next to one of the busiest trail entrances in the entire area, and there is no reasonable way for cyclists to exit from the trail and either head south to the access road or safely cross the street without bumbling through a maze of pedestrians and poles and cars and curbs.

So, is it possible to make sure all road-related construction plan approval processes in Arlington have a “bicyclist” approver in the mix, like Bike Arlington approves it or the ABAC? It seems that all sorts of recent plans are not doing well on the bicycling front.

[dasgeh]

@DrP 130010 wrote:

So, is it possible to make sure all road-related construction plan approval processes in Arlington have a “bicyclist” approver in the mix, like Bike Arlington approves it or the ABAC? It seems that all sorts of recent plans are not doing well on the bicycling front.

The proper person would be one of Arlington’s two bicycle/pedestrian planners, but there are only two of them. What we really need is an UPDATE TO THE BIKE ELEMENT OF THE MASTER TRANSPORTATION PLAN. And more training for the engineers on bike-related issues.

[chris_s]

@dasgeh 130030 wrote:

The proper person would be one of Arlington’s two bicycle/pedestrian planners, but there are only two of them. What we really need is an UPDATE TO THE BIKE ELEMENT OF THE MASTER TRANSPORTATION PLAN. And more training for the engineers on bike-related issues.

Training, training, training, training. For all of the bike-friendliness in the planning department we have a bunch of relatively car-centric engineers doing the actual designs.

[Author]

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