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On May 8, 2025, Active Prince William’s co-chair, Allen Muchnick, delivered the following statement at the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s spring 2025 Six-Year Improvement Program public hearing for VDOT’s Northern Virginia District:<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Good evening.\u00a0 I\u2019m Allen Muchnick, co-chair of Active Prince William.\u00a0 We advocate for improved active mobility and public transportation throughout greater Prince William, for healthy, livable, equitable, and sustainable communities.<\/p>\n Last December, VDOT\u2019s NoVA District office released an analysis of the roughly 5,000 miles of locally planned but currently unfunded active transportation facilities throughout the District<\/a>.\u00a0 That non-exhaustive analysis estimated the present-dollar (2022) cost to create those already planned active mobility facilities to total roughly 14 billion dollars.<\/p>\n At the present rate at which standalone active mobility projects are funded, it would take hundreds of years to complete those already planned active mobility facilities. \u00a0The NoVA region needs a study to figure out how to more effectively fund active mobility infrastructure.<\/p>\n Since 2010, VDOT\u2019s roadway reconfiguration program<\/a> has wisely reallocated excess travel lane space in Fairfax County<\/a>, to cost-effectively retrofit bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements on many dozens of roadways during scheduled resurfacing, while also reducing speeding.\u00a0 However, Prince William and Loudoun Counties have largely been excluded from this program, because their local transportation planners were not notified early enough of the candidate road resurfacing projects.\u00a0 We urge VDOT\u2019s maintenance division to extend this earlier notification of repaving candidates to all Virginia counties.<\/p>\n The alignment of US Bicycle Route 1 through Prince William County is a prime example where retrofitted bike lanes or paved shoulders are desperately needed.\u00a0 Although AASHTO and VDOT established this route more than 40 years ago<\/a> and a VDOT consultant re-evaluated the route\u2019s alignment through NoVA more than a decade ago<\/a>, the bicycling conditions on several Prince William route segments just get worse.\u00a0 The County\u2019s online Bicycle Skill Level Map<\/a> labels Old Bridge Road, part of Minnieville Rd, Aden Rd, and Fleetwood Dr\u2014all lacking bicycle facilities and posted at 45-MPH–as \u201cRoads to Avoid\u201d and tags Hoadly Rd and Tanyard Hill Rd as \u201cLow Comfort\u201d.\u00a0 VDOT\u2019s 2015 Bicycle Level of Service Map for the NoVA District rated those segments similarly.<\/a>\u00a0 It\u2019s long past time for VDOT and the County to fix those embarrassing and potentially deadly deficiencies.<\/p>\n Despite the hundreds of miles of VDOT-owned shared-use paths and sidewalks throughout the NoVA District, VDOT still performs little maintenance and repair of such assets, except in response to reported complaints. \u00a0After construction, the pavement is left to deteriorate for decades and is fixed only after repeated complaints.\u00a0 VDOT still has no annual budget or established policies and procedures to adequately and proactively assess and maintain its active mobility assets.\u00a0 As a first step, the Virginia Transportation Research Council<\/a> might be asked to study how to best accomplish this perpetual maintenance.<\/p>\n Thank you for this opportunity to comment.<\/p>\n ###<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On May 8, 2025, Active Prince William’s co-chair, Allen Muchnick, delivered the following statement at the Commonwealth Transportation Board’s spring 2025 Six-Year Improvement Program public hearing for VDOT’s Northern Virginia District: Commonwealth Transportation Board’s Pre-Allocation Public Hearing for the Northern Virginia District, May 8, 2025, Statement of Allen Muchnick, Co-Chair, Active Prince William Good evening.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[237,164,66,46,149,297,318],"tags":[186,259,327],"class_list":["post-2588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-active-prince-william","category-advocacy","category-bike-trails","category-maintenance","category-public-hearing","category-trails","category-vdot","tag-active-prince-william","tag-commonwealth-transportation-board","tag-pre-allocation-hearing","post-preview"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2601,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions\/2601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.activepw.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCommonwealth Transportation Board’s Pre-Allocation Public Hearing for the Northern Virginia District, May 8, 2025, <\/strong>Statement of Allen Muchnick, Co-Chair, Active Prince William<\/strong><\/h4>\n