Take Action for a Better Arlington

Arlington is seeking input on their legislative agenda for next year.  In Virginia where state law largely governs the "rules of the road" and localities retain only the powers explicitly granted to them by the Commonwealth, these legislative agendas are important for defeating many barriers to sustainable mobility. 

We think it is important to support bike safety legislation that nearly passed last year (allowing bikes to yield rather than stop at stop signs where there is no conflicting traffic, allowing parents to ride next to their kids, and allowing bikes to follow pedestrian walk signals so they can benefit from leading pedestrian intervals) as well as supporting a move toward the comparative negligence standard rather than Virginia's contributory negligence standard that stacks the deck against vulnerable road users.

The Northern Virginia Transportation Authority (NVTA) controls a tremendous amount of your tax dollars and doles it out to regional transportation projects.  It is required by law to prioritize projects that provide the most congestion reduction compared to their cost.  The problem: they completely fail to model "induced demand", a well-understood phenomenon that says new lanes miles of road in urban and suburban areas, if free to use, induce additional trips and longer trips in cars, erasing the congestion improvements the project aimed for, and often making them worse.  This modeling failure causes NVTA to dole out huge amounts of money to road expansion projects, far from jobs and transit, exacerbating traffic, accelerating climate change, and poisoning our air.  Just this month NVTA used nearly 50% of its available funding for the year to approve new highways that will add an estimated 50-74 million additional vehicle miles to our roads every year, and emissions equivalent to burning an additional 3 million gallons of gasoline each year to our air.* 

The time is right to tell them to stop.  They are currently asking for your feedback on what they should prioritize in their next major transportation plan.  Tell them we cannot continue to invest in environmentally-damaging road projects.  We must make it easier to walk, bike, and take transit. We must allow more people to live close to work, school, shopping, and transit. Step 1: properly modeling these road projects to expose them for the boondoggles that they are.