As the City Council considers approving Alexandria’s e-scooter pilot program for another year, several of the city’s boards and commissions have written letters asking that scooters be prohibited from city sidewalks in one form or another.
A draft recommendation being presented to the City Council tomorrow (Tuesday) includes banning sidewalk riding in Old Town and along Mount Vernon Avenue, which runs through Arlandria and Del Ray.
(Updated at 1:40 p.m.) With the acquisition of a Clean Waters Act permit, the Potomac Yard Metro station has been cleared to start construction.
On Friday, Nov. 15, the Army Corps of Engineers issued the final permit required for construction on the Metro station to start in the wetlands, staff said at a Nov. 19 meeting. The announcement was followed by a small round of applause from the Potomac Yard Metrorail Implementation Work Group (PYMIG), a group that’s been meeting since 2011 to consider issues related to opening a Metro station in Potomac Yard.
The squeaky wheel on the bus may get the grease, as the Alexandria Transit Company Board of Directors has directed staff to find a way of restoring or replacing a bus line through Seminary Road cut from current plans to overhaul the bus network.
DASH, the city’s bus system, is preparing to shift its bus service from a model focused on widespread coverage of the city to one that focuses on high-frequency service in densely populated corridors.
A long-planned bus rapid transit network (BRT) that would run through Alexandria’s West End is moving forward early next year, though the dedicated bus lanes featured prominently in the conceptual stage might not make it into the initial designs.
The city’s vision for the West End Transitway is a series of transit improvements to create a reliable, accessible bus line that would run from the Van Dorn Metro station to the Pentagon, hitting West End destinations that aren’t accessible by Metro, like the Mark Center, Southern Towers, and the perhaps soon-to-be-redeveloped Landmark Mall.
If you’ve ever wanted to get more involved in city governance, now is your chance.
There are several vacancies for boards in Alexandria. Many have certain requirements, like being a member of the Planning Commission or a representative of an impacted group, many groups also have public members who represent the community and are not required to be affiliated with any particular group.
It’s all hands on deck at the Transurban offices as the company prepares for the launch of the new I-395 Express Lanes this weekend.
The 395 Express Lanes — which run from Edsall Road in Fairfax County up eight miles to the 14th Street Bridge, passing through Alexandria’s West End — are scheduled to switch over to High Occupancy Toll lanes this Sunday, Nov. 17.
After a series of community meetings, a public hearing is scheduled next week for a plan that could radically reshape how the city’s DASH bus network operates.
The big selling point of the new plan is that it would increase the frequency of buses in the city’s current and planned high-density corridors, like Potomac Yard and the Landmark/Van Dorn Corridor. In many of these locations, buses would be running at least every 15 minutes all day, every day.
The Capital Bikeshare’s expansion in Alexandria has hit some serious snags that has resulted in at least a two-year delay in the arrival of new stations.
In 2017, the City of Alexandria approved 10 new Capital Bikeshare stations, which would have included a push into the West End and Potomac Yard. The plan was to install them in 2018, according to the Washington Post, but that didn’t happen. Then the city’s FY 2020-29 Capital Improvement Program cited summer 2019 as the proposed completion date, but that hasn’t happened either.
(Updated at 11:45 a.m.) Virginia Railway Express (VRE) is moving forward with plans to upgrade Alexandria Union Station — not to be confused with D.C.’s Union Station.
On Oct. 24, the VRE submitted concepts for a requested development site plan to improve accessibility to the train station at 110 Callahan Drive, which also serves Amtrak.
(Updated 12:05 p.m.) A few bus routes through Alexandria’s residential neighborhoods could be axed as the city shifts the transit service from a coverage focus to a ridership focus.
At a meeting at the Burke Branch Library last night (Thursday), representatives from DASH and the Department of Transportation and Environmental Services presented plans that would increase the frequency of service on the population-heavy periphery of Alexandria. The trade-off, however, is that certain areas currently served by bus routes in the residential core of the city could lose those routes.
The City of Alexandria is once again preparing to shut cars out of the end of King Street and convert it into a pedestrian-only walkway.
A plan is currently in the works to close the 100 block of King Street to car traffic on weekends to turn the area near the waterfront into a pedestrian boulevard. At the Waterfront Commission meeting yesterday (Tuesday), city staff presented the timeline for when that closure could happen.
