On Jan. 8, I made the following statement to the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (NVTC), which co-owns Virginia Railway Express (VRE) with the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission. The NVTC staff were directed to forward my comments to VRE staff for a response.
For more than a decade, I’ve asked the Commission to improve pedestrian and bicycle access to public transportation in Northern Virginia, especially for Metrorail and VRE.
Tonight, I visited the VRE website to look for information on bicycle access. Such information is difficult to locate and not very useful.
VRE still prohibits regular bicycles on all trains, although it now owns a full fleet of railcars specifically designed to accommodate bicycles. To find the bike-on-rail policy on the VRE website one must navigate through “Service Information” then “On-Board Policies”.
To find out about bicycle parking at VRE stations, one must navigate the VRE website through “Service Information”, then “Station Locations” and then click on information about each individual station. According to the VRE website, 8 of the 18 VRE stations have no bicycle parking facilities at all, although three of those VRE stations are near Metrorail stations that do have bike racks. In addition, the Alexandria and Franconia-Springfield VRE stations are adjacent to Metrorail stations where WMATA has rental bike lockers, but the VRE website does not provide that information.
Of the 10 VRE stations where bicycle racks are reportedly present, the
VRE website provides almost no information as to the number and quality, the basic design, or the specific location of the bike racks, except to note that the bike racks at Burke Center are in the new parking garage. Evidently, none of the remaining VRE stations offer weather-protected bike racks, and no VRE stations provide bicycle lockers, except at the two WMATA stations that I cited earlier.
The web page for each VRE station shows a vicinity highway map for motor vehicle access, but no maps or links to maps depicting routes for pedestrian and bicycle access are displayed.
At the same time, the VRE website indicates that VRE is providing free
parking for 8,241 motor vehicle spaces and that the motor vehicle parking volumes at six VRE stations exceed 90% capacity.
Before further expanding free motor vehicle parking for VRE customers,
VRE should provide quality bicycle parking in the form of both rental bicycle lockers and weather-protected bike racks at every suburban station.
I also urge VRE to establish a bike-on-rail policy for regular bicycles, now that every VRE railcar is designed to accommodate bicycles.
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“VRE should provide quality bicycle parking?”
VRE is basically a rush-hour-only commuter service run on a shoestring budget. It doesn’t own the tracks, it doesn’t own the stations, it doesn’t own the parking lots, and it doesn’t own the bike racks.
It does own the railroad cars. But given their perpetual fiscal situation, you can see why changing bike policies isn’t at the top of their to-do list.
While VRE does indeed have both fiscal and logistical constraints, the agency and participating localities have somehow managed to provide at least 8,241 *free* motor vehicle parking spaces for VRE riders, more than one free parking space for every VRE customer. The cost of these “free” motor vehicle spaces is conservatively *thousands* of times what it would cost to provide adequate bicycle parking facilities, and using land adjacent to transit stations (even peak-only commuter rail) for auto parking is hardly the most effective use of such valuable real estate.