Take Action TODAY: Nash Street Protected Bike Lanes

[chris_s]

Level of Effort: 5 minutes at home, in your PJs
Deadline: TODAY, Thursday July 23rd

In 2015 many of you spoke up for including protected bike lanes in Rosslyn in the updated Sector Plan. In 2019 many of you spoke up for keeping them and improving them during the implementation work of the Core of Rosslyn Transportation Study. Both times we succeeded, but those protected bike lanes are under attack yet again. A development project is moving forward and while it is “leaving space” for the protected bike lanes on Nash Street along its project frontage, it is building street parking in their place instead of a protected bike lane.

Speak up today for 2-way protected bike lanes on Nash Street. It’s a simple online form. Here is a good starting point:

This development needs to live up to the vision of the Rosslyn Sector Plan and the Core of Rosslyn Study and build two-way protected bike lanes on Nash Street all along the project frontage. The current plans are only one direction and are buffered, not protected. People need a physical barrier like parked cars or curbs separating them from cars to feel comfortable biking someplace as busy and urban as Rosslyn. If street parking is built here now in place of the protected bike lanes, you are simply setting our community up for another ugly fight sometime in the future when you decide it is finally time to implement the Sector Plan and build the protected bike lane. Avoid that confrontation, making biking safer and more pleasant now rather than later, save the County the cost of building physical protection on the taxpayer dime, and build those protected bike lanes correctly now, as part of the development, not later as part of a separate construction project.

TAKE ACTION | PROJECT DETAILS

Topic

[scoot]

Parked cars are in fact part of the physical separation between southbound bicycles and automobiles, in addition to the buffer, if I interpret the design docs correctly. The design resembles Wilson Blvd west of Oak for cyclists heading up the hill. Encroachment (and thus dooring hazard) from parked cars could be a similar issue here if the buffer is not maintained somehow. Otherwise the climb looks more comfortable with the new design than the existing street.

The downhill bike lane does appear to have been replaced with parking. Because surface-level storage of private property is surely the most efficient use of public ROW in a dense urban neighborhood with premium transit options and thousands of garage spaces.

If my travel patterns are remotely representative, this block of Nash will see far more bicycle traffic heading uphill than downhill. It’s my preferred route from Key Bridge to the Wilson-Fairfax corridor, but I have always used Clarendon to Lynn the other direction.

[Author]

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