FABB encourages everyone to take a moment to support funding for important transit, safety, pedestrian, and bicycle projects in Northern Virginia as well as oppose wasteful, oversized road projects!
The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) is deciding among a range of projects competing for its six-year program of regional funding. The NVTA is accepting public comments through Sunday, May 19, through its feedback form.
The NVTA is a regional funding and planning body that solicits applications for competitive transportation project funding every other year. NVTA staff then evaluate projects based on a combination of specified criteria and public comment. Your input makes a difference!
The Coalition for Smarter Growth (CSG) is making it easier to provide feedback by preparing a list of recommendations and helpful background information. Plus, the CSG has created this webpage to make it easy for you to provide your input to NVTA.
FABB supports Speaking Up! for projects that not only make bicycling better but that foster more walkable, transit-oriented mixed-use communities, which tend to improve safety and accessibility for everyone.
In Fairfax County and local cities, the CSG recommends expressing your support for:
- ALX-029 – Safety Improvements at High-Crash Intersections
- CFX-018 – Northfax Network Improvements – Northfax East-West Road
- CFX-019 – Blenheim Boulevard Multimodal Improvements
- FFX-136 – Braddock Road Multimodal Improvements Phase II (Humphries Dr to Southampton VRE-017 – VRE Backlick Road Station Improvements
- And many others as shown here.
We also need riders to weigh in on and urge changes to projects that, while providing benefits for bike and pedestrian infrastructure come with proposed designs featuring oversized roads that prioritize fast vehicle traffic and increase project costs (not to mention pollution). These include:
- FFX-134 – Frontier Drive Extension and Intersection Improvements.
- FFX-135 – Route 7 Multimodal Improvements (I-495 to I-66).
- FFX-138 – Seven Corners Ring Road Improvements.
In the space provided at the end of the feedback form, you can make general comments on how NVTA and member jurisdictions can improve their project selection and evaluation. CSG recommends sharing thoughts like:
- It is good to see more project applications this round that improve accessibility for all users without relying on widening roads or building interchanges that simply make the region more car-dependent. Please prioritize these projects in this and future rounds.
- NVTA’s “congestion reduction” metrics receive too much weight and do not fully take into account the reality of induced demand in which every 1% increase in roadway capacity causes a 1% increase in traffic over time.
- NVTA should take into account that investing in local streets and bike/ped facilities for walkable, bikeable, mixed-use, transit-oriented communities DOES reduce the amount of driving on the region’s highways.
- It’s time to take climate change seriously – studies show that Northern Virginia must both rapidly adopt electric vehicles and lower per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) (by at least 20%) to meet its climate targets. NVTA’s evaluation needs to consider a project’s impact on VMT.
The time to act is NOW! Speak Up and let our officials know here that a sustainable, economical, and environmentally sound transportation future demands more bikeable, walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented communities.
