Keep these Unsafe Street Designs out of Barcroft and the rest of Arlington
Level of Effort: Choose Your Own Adventure
Date and Time: Tue 2/25 ~6pm

The planning for Barcroft Apartments, Arlington's greatest remaining bastion of affordable housing is about to conclude and it is all looking great, except for two weird and unsafe street designs featuring wide lanes and painted buffers that will encourage speeding and lead to crashes and injuries.  These unsafe street cross sections are the result of recent enforcement of a long-standing portion of the fire code governing aerial access that requires 26 feet of unobstructed clear width in the roadway.  This provision applies to all construction that is 30 feet tall or higher.  That means that this is not just a Barcroft issue, if this code continues to be enforced in this way, then wider unsafe streets will come along with nearly all future construction in Arlington County, including single-family home neighborhoods (residential zoning in Arlington allows buildings up to 35' tall).

Please take action via one or both of the following avenues:

1) Email the County Board <countyboard@arlingtonva.us> using the talking points below.  Deadline: Monday 2/24 at 3pm

2) Sign up to speak at the County Board Meeting on Tuesday 2/25 at roughly 6pm. A group of folks will be meeting up at Fireworks Pizza before the meeting and walking over together to speak.  If you are interested in speaking at the meeting, either in-person or virtually, please fill out this super-quick form and we will send along instructions for signing up and additional details of the timeline as they become available.

Suggested Feedback

Suggested Talking Points

  • Wide travel lanes lead to increased speeding, more impervious surfaces exacerbating our stormwater issues, longer pedestrian crossing distances making crossing the street less safe, and contribute to the urban heat island effect.
  • While this has appeared as part of this Barcroft Apartments approval, it will impact nearly all future development in Arlington County.  Aerial access enforcement is also likely to unsafely widen Grant Street adjacent to the proposed Melwood redevelopment and has inhibited the installation of protected bike lanes in various projects throughout Crystal City. It applies to all construction that is at least 30' tall - that is nearly all multifamily development and likely a significant percentage of single-family home construction as residential zones in Arlington allow houses up to 35' high.
  • Unlike many other parts of the fire code that are dictated by the State, this provision is within the County Board's control.  Aerial Access requirements are located in Appendix D of the International Fire Code which has been adopted by the County Board into our local fire ordinance.  The County Board has already amended Appendix D for other reasons, they can amend it to solve this problem as well. There is clearly applicable-precedent for this - Alexandria, Virginia's locally-adopted Appendix D does not contain these aerial access provisions and Fairfax County's fire code does not appear to incorporate Appendix D at all.
  • ASK: Replace these unsafe street design cross-sections with safe designs that feature 10' wide travel lanes and no painted buffers and strike the Aerial Access provisions from Appendix D of the Arlington County Fire Code ordinance now - these provisions don't appear to have been consistently enforced in Arlington in the past and there have been no obvious ill-effects and they do not appear to be required of new development in our neighboring jurisdictions.

Example Email to modify as desired

The Street Cross Sections "ST 86-40" and "ST 61-40" proposed for Barcroft in the updated Form Based Code are overly wide and unsafe.  They would lead to speeding vehicles, expose pedestrians to unnecessarily-long crossing distances, and include additional unneeded pavement that would exacerbate stormwater and urban heat island issues.  These designs are the result of the relatively recent enforcement of the aerial access road provisions of our local fire code without thought to the detrimental effect on street safety and the environment that these designs will have.  

Please amend these street designs to remove the unsafe lane widths and painted buffers and act to remove all Aerial Access Road requirements from the Arlington County Fire Code. Neither Alexandria nor Fairfax County appear to have these requirements; Arlington appears to be the outlier in requiring these unsafe street designs.

EMAIL THE BOARD SPEAK AT THE BOARD MEETING (Join our Coordination List) LEARN MORE (SusMo Fire Code Letter) LEARN MORE (Barcroft)