FABB Blog

Want to support more bikeable and walkable communities in Fairfax County and the region and have an enjoyable and interesting evening at the same time? Sign up now for the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s annual “Smart Growth Social.” 

The event is one of the Coalition’s main fundraisers. In addition to food and drink, it will feature Arlington Supervisor Katie Cristol, a forceful champion for more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly communities, to offer a “smart growth pep talk.”

The social is on Tuesday, October 16, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at Eastern Market in Washington DC. Tickets are $30 per person and you can buy them here. 

Please consider supporting this worthy cause and joining like-minded supporters of better bicycling in the region. 

There are lots of improvements that we’d like to see on Route 1. Here are a few:

• Safer and more accessible transportation: Implement modern bus rapid transit along the centerline of Route 1; safer streets for walking and biking with protected bike lanes, continuous sidewalks, and narrower travel lanes; and a new street grid.
• Attractive urban design and park space: Build to the sidewalk and allow for ground floor retail, town greens and plazas, and buildings that get taller when they are closer to transit. 
• Housing affordability: Preserve housing affordability for the diverse population living in nearby garden apartments and include a range of housing affordability in new development.
• Health and the environment: Include modern stormwater management to deal with excess runoff, expand stream buffers and restore streams, and expand parks and recreational opportunities for children and adults.

Creating a green, walkable, and transit-friendly urban community along Richmond Highway is critical to the future of Fairfax. Email the county now to support a sustainable and inclusive plan!

Come join us explore East Falls Church – an area centered on the Metro station and on the cusp of big changes. Divided by I-66 and split between two jurisdictions, the area is surrounded by well-loved neighborhoods, with parks and the booming W&OD bicycle trail. New buildings and a plan for transit-oriented development offer the chance to bridge the highway and knit together the community. Come hear the successes and struggles of the planners, community members, developers, and bicycle advocates at the front lines of this evolving neighborhood.

Our tours are active, so please wear sturdy shoes and sunscreen, and bring a water bottle!

Upon registration, you'll receive a reminder email 24-48 hours before the event with further details, the starting location for the event, and a map and transit directions. We strive to make all of our events transit-accessible.

From the north: There are few good routes from the McLean area and points north. You could use Old Dominion Dr to Old Cedar Rd. Toward the end of the road there is a paved trail into Bull Neck Stream Valley Park. Follow the trail to Spring Hill Rec Center and L on Spring Hill Rd. Continue under the Toll Road to R on Spring Hill Rd. Continue across Route 7 to the station.

Using funding from developers with significant interests in land in outer suburban locations, researchers at George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis have issued a new report arguing for massive investment in highway infrastructure. Experts at the Coalition for Smarter Growth disagree.

"The GMU report is based on flawed and outdated assumptions and would lead our region down an unsustainable development path," said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth (CSG).

"The report ignores the fundamental shifts in real estate demand, changing demographics and market demand. The GMU view would also leave behind Prince George's and older parts of eastern Fairfax and eastern Prince William counties," said Cheryl Cort, Policy Director for CSG.

"While dressed up with an acknowledgment of transit, the report is focused on justifying a wasteful expansion of highways which would fuel more spread-out development and yet more traffic," said Schwartz. "This includes real estate mogul and 2030 Group backer Til Hazel's primary goal of an outer beltway in Virginia."

The Coalition for Smarter Growth has identified the following flaws in the GMU analysis:

1) Ignores fundamental changes in the residential real estate market: The report relies on population projections which continue to include old assumptions about growth in the region's outer suburbs and still don't fully reflect the dramatic long-term shift in real estate demand.

Demand for housing with long commutes has collapsed and may never recover given high gas prices, the ever-smaller percentage of households with children, and the strong demand of millennials, retiring baby boomers and empty nesters to live in walkable, urban and transit-oriented communities. (See Christopher Leinberger, Walk the Way: The Economic Promise of Walkable Places in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.)

2) Uses old regional activity centers data: The report uses the old regional "activity centers" data, instead of the most up-to-date activity centers, which means it omits and ignores many of Prince George's County's Metro stations, Fairfax's Route 1 corridor and a number of other older commercial corridors which are planned to be efficient transit-focused centers. This omission biases the report toward sprawling auto-dependent areas.

3) Fails to acknowledge the failure of highway expansion to fix congestion: Transportation experts have acknowledged that highway expansion in metropolitan areas typically fails and that the new capacity induces more auto-dependent development leading to a return of congestion in as little as five years.

4) Fails to fully account for the benefits of transit and transit-oriented communities: The report fails to acknowledge the critical importance of transit to manage peak hour commuting. By offering a high-capacity commuting alternative, transit offers tens of thousands of Washington area residents an alternative to driving in traffic. The report also fails to note that mixed-use transit-oriented communities not only shift many trips to transit, but they also maximize walking and biking trips and shorten many car trips.

In this environment, building more roads and transit without addressing development patterns is a recipe for failure. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a study finding that expanding roads in metropolitan areas increases traffic after just a few years. An outer beltway would not relieve traffic, but like most new beltways, it would spark development in undeveloped rural areas.

We need to use our scarce resources, first, to fix potholed roads, crumbling bridges and our aging Metro system and, second, to create a more energy-efficient land-use and transportation system. If we don’t offer alternatives to so much driving, then high oil prices will keep eroding family finances and threaten our economic and national security. High gas prices and changing demographics — young workers and downsizing empty-nesters and retirees — are increasing demand for more walkable, convenient and transit-accessible locations.

Build a network of transit-oriented communities. A network of walkable, mixed-use, compact neighborhoods at Metro and commuter rail stations will be far more cost-effective than merely adding transportation capacity.
Reinvent commercial strip corridors. Redevelop thousands of acres of parking lots and one-story buildings as part of that network.
Address the east-west jobs divide. Locate employment at 15 Metro stations in Prince George’s County; Wheaton and Glenmont in eastern Montgomery County; and Route 1 in Prince William and Fairfax counties.
Locate homes in or near major job centers. For example in Tysons Corner, the Red Line/Interstate 270 corridor and Loudoun’s Route 28 corridor.
Locate jobs in centers with transit and mixed uses. Maximize peak-hour transit trips on rail, buses, vanpools and carpools, and take advantage of reverse commute opportunities.
Enhance neighborhood accessibility. Invest in walking and bicycling routes to schools, libraries, stores and parks, creating alternatives to driving on traffic-choked arterial roads.
Fix major commuter corridors. Simply widening corridors such as I-66, I-95, I-270 and Route 5 will fuel more-distant development and even longer commutes. Focus on express buses with dedicated lanes, combined with zoning to manage development in outer areas.
Finish Dulles Rail and the Purple Line. Tie them to well-designed development and add Purple Line crossings of the Potomac at both ends of the Beltway.
Commuter rail. Invest in VRE, MARC and Amtrak.
If we can accomplish these tasks, our future will include more transportation choices and more convenient access to work, school and services.

Over the history of the mobility report, many commuters have moved farther from where they want to get to each day. "That increase in distance was enough to explain the increase in travel time," said Joseph Cortright, the study's author.

A reexamination of the traffic data in that light shows that commuters' experience nationwide has not been universally bleak, he said. "In some cities, we've seen total travel times at peak hours actually decrease, because people are now driving shorter distances." He pointed to Portland, Ore., as one example. Even the D.C. region dropped from second to 12th place on peak travel time in this reworking of the data from the previous mobility report.

As with the mobility reports, the data Cortright used do not quantify how miserable you are on Interstate 66 at the Capital Beltway in the morning or on the inner loop through Bethesda in the afternoon. But they suggest something individuals can consider: The effect on their travel lives of being closer to work and in a community that offers options that include transit riding and walking.

For policymakers, Cortright suggests, the study asks whether their goal should be to increase road capacity for the sake of increasing peak-period speeds, or instead to concentrate on land-use plans that don't segregate home, office, commerce and entertainment into widely separated zones reachable only by cars.

Working to ease traffic jams in the steadily urbanizing suburb, the county's Transportation Department is drafting proposed rules that would limit parking in new developments near Metro lines. Such parking limits have already been adopted by the Board of Supervisors as part of the plan governing Tysons Corner's transformation into an urban hub.

But imposing maximums in other parts of Fairfax where transit-oriented development exists would represent a significant departure in a suburb where generations of planners drew up plans around the automobile.

"We often like to say that too much parking can be a traffic magnet," said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. "If we're going to address traffic and make a walkable community in Fairfax, it's important to get the parking right."

"You're really talking about not allowing developers to build parking spaces? How can you limit the number of cars somebody owns?" Cook said.

He and other skeptics wonder what would happen to people who purchased a townhouse with limited parking but then switched jobs or encountered some other circumstance affecting their ability to commute to work by Metro.

"They can't take the Metro if it goes the wrong way," Cook said.

true costs of free parking are rolled into the cost of a house or office building. If anything, Shoup said, Fairfax has promoted cars for too long.

"If you look at it from the air, it looks like a parking lot," Shoup said.

An analysis by real estate consulting firm Robert Charles Lesser & Co. found that, compared with the rest of the Washington metropolitan area, Fairfax attracted a smaller percentage of the fastest-growing segment of householders - those with one or two people per dwelling - in the past decade. Many of them prefer walkable communities, Schwartz said.

"The millennials, in particular, are sort of the Zipcar generation," Schwartz said.

Bike to Work – No, Really.

We know that the prospect of biking to work in D.C. area traffic can be intimidating, but if you follow the rules of the road and use the resources above, it can actually be fun! It costs less than other modes, allows you to get a workout on the way to and from work, generates no pollution and means one less car on our congested roads.
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Unfortunately, it can also be sweaty. One option is to ride slower. If your workplace doesn’t currently provide showers or storage space for your bike, talk to your employer about adding these amenities.