The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) wants to hear from Virginians about what would make our roads safer. For bicyclists—and everyone who walks, rolls, or otherwise travels outside a motor vehicle—this is an important opportunity to make our voices heard.
VDOT is updating Virginia’s Strategic Highway Safety Plan (SHSP), the five-year plan that guides roadway safety efforts across the Commonwealth. A short statewide roadway safety survey is open through August 23, asking Virginians to identify their most pressing safety concerns and recommend strategies to reduce crashes, injuries, and deaths. FABB encourages every Fairfax County bicyclist to complete the survey.
What To Tell VDOT?
Virginia cannot achieve its safety goals without making bicyclists, pedestrians, and other vulnerable road users a priority. Survey respondents should choose options or add feedback using the “Other” option that support plans to:
- Build connected networks of protected bike lanes and shared-use paths. Facilities should not disappear at intersections, bridges, interchanges, and other difficult locations.
- Provide physical separation on high-speed roads. Painted bike lanes are often inadequate where traffic is fast or heavy. Protected bike lanes and shared-use paths provide meaningful separation from motor vehicles.
- Make intersections and crossings safer. Expand protected intersections, bicycle signals, leading pedestrian intervals, median refuges, raised crossings, and designs that slow turning vehicles.
- Reduce dangerous vehicle speeds. Use road diets, narrower travel lanes, traffic calming, raised crossings, and other proven designs that encourage safer driving.
- Fix dangerous highway interchanges and ramps. Redesign high-speed entrance and exit ramps to slow drivers, improve visibility, and provide safer crossings for bicyclists and pedestrians.
- Close gaps in bicycle and pedestrian networks. Prioritize projects that connect existing facilities so riders are not suddenly forced into fast-moving traffic.
- Use repaving to improve safety. Whenever VDOT resurfaces a road, it should evaluate opportunities for bike lanes, road diets, better crosswalks, and other low-cost safety improvements.
- Design for people of all ages and abilities. Bicycle infrastructure should be safe and comfortable for children, older adults, people with disabilities, and less-confident riders—not just experienced cyclists.
Safety Should Be Built Into the Road
The central message is simple and can be added to the survey’s final request for comment: people make mistakes, but those mistakes should not cost someone their life. Virginia should embrace a Safe System approach that reduces dangerous speeds and designs roads, intersections, and crossings to prevent mistakes from becoming fatal crashes.
VDOT’s survey gives us an opportunity to explain what we experience on Virginia’s roads and what needs to change. The responses will help shape the next Strategic Highway Safety Plan and future safety investments across the Commonwealth.
Please complete the survey before August 23 and use the comment sections to tell VDOT specifically what would make bicycling, walking, and rolling safer in Fairfax County and throughout Virginia. Make sure the voices of vulnerable road users are heard.
