Panel discussion – 2013 Fairfax Bike Summit
Last Saturday, Champe Burnley, Allen Muchnick and I attended the Fairfax Bike Summit, hosted by Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling (FABB). They did a great job, and attracted ~160 attendees. There’s no reason to repeat FABB’s great recap, but here’s what made an impression on me.
Tysons Corner, aka Tysons, is already the 12th largest central business district in the US, and destined to become the 5th or 6th largest, along with population increasing from 20,000 to over 100,000. Parking capacity, now 138,000 spaces, will not be expanded commensurately. Transit, walking and biking, and living and working in place will have to make up for it, with the new Metro Silver Line, new bus routes, a new infill grid street layout, and connections to regional trails. The basic plan was shown at the Summit. No one’s pretending that Tysons will be a new urbanist paradise, but it will be a lot better than it is.
This transportation modeshift will need a major marketing effort, explained speaker Robert Thomson, aka Dr. Gridlock. To some degree, don’t we need to be doing this everywhere?
There wasn’t a lot of non-white skin present, and there was at least one good talk on the topic: how do we reach other audiences, where the need for low cost, healthy transportation, and recreation, may be even greater?
Reston is now a Bronze Bicycle Friendly Community, but Fairfax County lags behind celebrated, Silver-rated Arlington and Alexandria. This was apparent on the ride to GMU: I got lost. There’s little signage along the W&OD to mark cross streets, so no way to tell where you are. While there were signed bike routes from there to GMU, they stopped and started in weird places, and regular street signage was poor. What street an I on? Which 6 lane cross street have I come to?
To play it safe, I joined a convoy to the after-Summit get-together. Riders included David Patton, and some enthusiastic young bike advocates:
Fairfax Bike Summiteers convoy to Coyote restaurant.
Afterward, I followed David to the Vienna Metro station, where I could make my way to the W&OD, or just take the train, which I did. It’s always great to chat with David, and hear what he and Arlington are up to. He’s Arlington’s bike-ped coordinator. Arlington has been collecting tons of data: automated bike counts on streets and trails, crash data, etc. And they’re putting it all online, for others to use and create apps with. More about that soon.
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