On December 2, 2024, VBF Board Member Allen Muchnick delivered a public statement at Northern Virginia’s joint annual transportation public meeting before senior representatives of the six state and regional transportation agencies identified above.

VDOT’s Northern Virginia District, which comprises Virginia’s Planning District 8, is uniquely required by state law to hold such an annual public meeting. 

Allen’s statement, grounded in Transportation for America’s three guiding principles for smart transportation investment, is posted below.

Northern Virginia Joint Transportation Public Meeting
December 2, 2024
Statement of Allen Muchnick, Member
Virginia Bicycling Federation
and Active Prince William Boards of Directors

Good evening.  I’m Allen Muchnick, a City of Manassas resident and a long-time board member of the advocacy groups Active Prince William and the Virginia Bicycling Federation.

For more than seven decades, our region has repeatedly expanded major roadways in a futile quest to fix traffic congestion.  The result is a fiscally and environmentally unsustainable highway network, dysfunctional and ugly suburban sprawl, and inequitable and life-threatening mobility challenges, especially for households without multiple personal vehicles.

It’s time for Virginia’s transportation agencies to embrace the three guiding principles for transportation infrastructure investment articulated by the national advocacy group Transportation for America:

  • Design for safety over speed
  • Fix it first, and
  • Invest in the rest

Designing for safety over speed is essential to reduce Virginia’s unacceptable epidemic of traffic violence.  In 2023, Virginia traffic crashes killed 907 people, including 133 pedestrians, and injured nearly 64,000 people, including nearly 1700 pedestrians.  It’s past time to aggressively retrofit all of Northern Virginia’s multi-lane commercial arterial roadways to establish more survivable design speeds, as part of a comprehensive Vision Zero strategy.

Fixing our mobility infrastructure requires much better maintenance of Virginia’s pedestrian and bicycle facilities.   VDOT’s 2004 Policy for Integrating Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodations states, in part:

  • VDOT will maintain bicycle and pedestrian accommodations as necessary to keep the accommodations usable and accessible ….. 
  • For sidewalks, shared use paths, and bicycle paths built within department right-of-way, built to department standards, and accepted for maintenance, VDOT will maintain these bicycle and pedestrian accommodations through replacement and repair.

However, VDOT still performs little maintenance and repair of its shared-use paths and sidewalks, except in response to reported complaints. After construction, the pavement is left to deteriorate for decades and is fixed only after repeated complaints.  VDOT still has no annual budget or established policies and procedures to adequately and proactively assess and maintain its active mobility assets.

Thank you for this opportunity to comment.  We urge VDOT to better support active mobility in the years ahead.