Repeating Past Mistakes on Crystal Drive
Level of Effort: 90 minutes, at home in your PJs
Date and Time: Tue 9/6 7-8:30pm

The good news is a 2nd, eastern entrance is coming to the Crystal City Metro.  It will provide a more convenient transfer to VRE, MetroWay BRT service, and eventually new Amtrak service.  The bad news is that the current design repeats the same mistake we've seen over and over again in Crystal City: creating new demand for pick-up and drop-off immediately adjacent to unprotected bike lanes.

Parking in the Crystal Drive bike lanes has been a problem for over a decade; the ParkingDirty project in 2016 found that one stretch was consistently blocked more than 60% of waking hours. OurStreets' Data-protected Bike Lane project in 2019 found one stretch was blocked for more than 90% of morning, lunch & evening rush hours.

Despite this, and despite numerous citizens raising this concern during the July 2021 WMATA public hearing on the project, Arlington County & developer JBG Smith appear poised to create this same problem again, by leaving the existing paint-only Crystal Drive bike lane unprotected directly adjacent to the new Crystal City Metro 2nd Entrance.

This will create additional conflict for people biking, and encourage sidewalk riding which creates conflict for people walking, particularly those coming to and from the new metro entrance.

Suggested Feedback

Come to the September 6th public meeting and tell the design team that the design for this important transit project must improve to solve, not exacerbate conflict.  The cost to protect the small stretch of adjacent Crystal Drive bike lane would be a rounding error on this $90+ million project, but would go a long way to preventing yet another weak link in the Crystal City Bike Network.

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