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01-19-04, 12:00 PM
To skeptics, the urbanists point out that the old system is at a breaking point, and drivers are paying a huge cost. Recent studies have linked the ills of suburban sprawl -- traffic congestion, pedestrian accident rates, long commute times and a resulting decline in walking -- to America's new obesity epidemic. A study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project measuring the health effects of sprawl found that people who live in areas where "nothing is within easy walking distance of anything else" are more likely to be overweight and have high blood pressure. The same study also found that it is generally safer to walk in the centers of old cities than in their sprawling suburbs. New York City, Manhattan in particular, is the safest place of all. The suburbs of the cities in the American South and Midwest are the least safe. Washington falls somewhere in the middle -- the city is a decent place to walk, its outer suburbs are not.
At a confusing but legal crossing near Target on Route 50, with a stoplight but no crosswalk, a Latina and I are imperiled by a conscientious motorist. We are in the middle of the roadway, waiting for a lull in eastbound traffic. As we wait, a light-colored sedan draws to a stop in the nearest lane. The driver, an older man, smiles at us and gestures, "Go! Go!" We hesitate. There are two additional lanes of traffic beyond this car. We have no way of knowing whether drivers in those lanes will stop. We raise our hands apologetically and wave the driver on. He isn't moving. "Go! Go!" he waves again. He's sitting stock-still in traffic in a 45 mph zone where the speed is often closer to 60. The longer he sits there, the more likely it is that some distracted driver yammering on a cell phone or tinkering with a CD player will slam into all of us. (Later I learn that Virginia law requires that motorists yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, and stop completely if they are driving under 25 mph.) We get across, eventually, but not everyone does. Most pedestrian accidents nationwide -- 59 percent -- occur in situations like ours, where a crosswalk is not available. And if cars happen to be moving at high speed, the peril is great -- the chance of surviving after being hit by a car moving 40 mph or more is only 13 percent.
At Fairview Park, the Taj Mahal of interchanges heaves into view. It is a triple-decker threat that catches me off guard, like a waterfall that suddenly confronts a distracted canoeist. In the distance are green hills and dales dappled with corporate headquarters -- Verizon, Raytheon.
On the map, the interchange is a blue spaghetti tangle where Route 50 fragments into up ramps for the Beltway and Fairview Park Drive. And in reality there is no provision at all for pedestrians. I now have two choices: I can backtrack several miles and try to cut through a subdivision, or I can continue climbing to the top of the interchange. Up there, above the Beltway, I see a man in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, running down the grass median of Fairview Park. It's David Janssen, in "The Fugitive." He gives me courage, and an idea. I dart across Fairview Park and slither down a grassy slope to the bottom deck of the interchange, the roaring through-lanes of 50, where I finally cross under the Beltway itself, along 50's narrow shoulder. My relief at making it through is tempered by the knowledge that three more interchanges like this lie ahead.
Later, at the Dunn Loring Metro station, I buy a newspaper. My horoscope for the day reads as follows: "Hurrying arrangements for this evening may be regretted. Don't take shortcuts as they could backfire and become expensive."
The road sign says I'm 29 miles from Middleburg, and 63 from Winchester. Political campaign signs stud the median every few paces on Route 50. They're laid out at intervals designed to catch the eyes of commuters.
I pass an Outback Steakhouse with a flame-painted Hummer parked out front; this reminds me it's way past lunchtime. I know there's a '50s-era diner somewhere up ahead. I check my digital pedometer to see how far I've come and find that it has erased today's mileage. (Pedometers seem another sign that walking is in trouble, having gone from unremarkable daily activity to the kind of hobby or sport that requires racks of expensive gear. The turquoise cube I bought came with a fold-out manual of many pages and took more than an hour to program.)
The 29 Diner turns out to be one of those places that look their best at 45 mph. The interior is the genuine article, a bona fide greasy spoon that is a world away from the shiny aluminum nostalgia of modern diner copies. This place has peeling blue paint, cracked marble tabletops and an exhaust fan that looks like a lunar landing vehicle covered in moon dust. A big yellow-and-orange sign on the door warns "videotaping in progress." The clientele this afternoon is subdued -- a pair of immigrant African cab drivers, a suburban couple on their way home from the hardware store. But the waiter is an immensely cheerful Nigerian man named Dot, a student in business administration at Strayer University. Until recently, he walked two hours a day to work and back, on a complex route that included shortcuts through subdivisions and across roadways. Now he lives 10 minutes away from the diner. He thinks the sidewalk situation in Fairfax is quite good, especially when you compare it with Nigeria.
The signs on Route 29 near Monument Drive announce the Fairfax County Government Center, a sprawling complex set on many acres of park and parking lot, surrounded by land on which fields of townhouses are already rising. I hike across hundreds of empty parking spaces. I am in search of enlightenment.
Some of the highest-ranking officials in the county have offices on the top floor of the spectacular glass county headquarters. It's here I find the aerie of Katherine Hanley, outgoing chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, filled with zoning, water and park maps, and offering a view of treetops and hiking trails. It's a week before the November elections, and Hanley's office phone rings constantly. In her long career, she has logged thousands of miles crisscrossing the county and presided over the widening of dozens of roads and intersections. Now she is ready to retire.
So how would she rate the county's walkability, on a scale of 1 to 10?
"Where are we now, or where would I like to be?" she parries. "I'd like us to be a 10, but I don't think we're there yet."
How did it get so hard to walk?
Part of the problem, Hanley says, is that Fairfax County, unlike the state's cities and towns, does not legally own or control its roadways or roadsides. Those are the property of the Virginia Department of Transportation, or VDOT, in Richmond. (Neighboring Arlington County is one of the few counties in the entire country that chose to retain local control back when these things were being decided in the 1930s.) So time and again when a citizen petitions for a sidewalk, the request must be sent down to Richmond.
This explains the curious character of some county road projects; their scale is reminiscent of Stalinist central planning.
"It's hard to get VDOT to mark a crosswalk," Hanley says. (Local politicians can't blame it all on VDOT, an activist says later, arguing that county boards can't just let developers build and build and build and then expect the highway department to connect all the dots.) Like a lot of jurisdictions, Fairfax County has been taking steps to make things better, Hanley says. It has increased the fine for failing to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk from $100 to $500. It has appointed a pedestrian coordinator to lead policy change. It has funded safety awareness campaigns. It has rounded up some federal money to start filling in missing sections of sidewalk. Her own goal has been to fill in the gaps in pedestrian walkways between Metro stations and bus stops.
"In many ways it's a retrofit -- but it is an attack on all fronts," she says. To date in 2003, she says, there have been 60 percent fewer pedestrian fatalities than last year, down from 10 to 4, a drop she attributes to education, police vigilance and the work of activists like retired fire and rescue worker Dave Lyons, who has made pedestrian safety along the aging Route 1 corridor in the southeastern part of the county a personal campaign.
Like many Fairfax residents, Hanley drives almost everywhere. She worries about interchanges that are so huge they turn the communities around them into islands. (The Fairfax Board recently shot down a state plan to widen the Beltway in Fairfax from eight to 12 lanes, and rebuild several interchanges at a cost of $3 billion and 200 homes.) Hanley had a revelation not too long ago when her car broke down on the way to a lunch appointment. She had to walk. It was hard.
Another monster -- the intersection of Routes 29 and 28 at Centreville. It is 10 lanes above, nine lanes below, including ramps and turning lanes. I walk along Route 29 under I-66. I'm two feet from speeding traffic down here, but others have come before me. There's a black pocket comb, a glass bottleneck, a flattened tin that once held smoked oysters, a smashed side-view mirror -- all the ingredients of a Woody Guthrie song. Out from under and in the clear, I pass a culvert blossoming with goldenrod, white pine saplings, cattails and wild persimmon. And now there's another ramp, and then one more, this last one draining cars off I-66. As I scoot past there's a lot of honking. I decide to ignore it. It gets louder. I quicken my step. Now a white pickup pulls over as it passes me. A guy leans out: "Hey, you dropped your hat back there! That's why we were honking."
I knew that.
The hat sits like a pancake back in the middle of the ramp. Traffic streams off the interstate. I leave the hat.
The sun is setting now. At the old stone house at Route 234, I turn left and head uphill, on a wide mown path through tall grass to the Manassas National Battlefield Park visitors center, in search of a phone. It is closing. "Try up at the mall," says the park ranger, arms folded implacably. Where's that? "About 500 yards up the road, that way," she says, jerking her thumb vaguely leftward up 234.
It's getting dark, and 234 has no shoulder to speak of. I need to get back to my car in Fairfax, but I'm stranded. No bus, no taxi, no Metro, no phone. In the darkening parking lot, I hitch a ride with a former circuit court judge from Michigan who's been roaming the battlefield all day, and is on his way back to a motel in Tysons Corner to meet up with the wife and kids.
He talks politics as we leave the parking lot in the family van. Then he pauses. He was recently accused of sexual harassment by a female parolee, he says -- falsely, he adds. The town insisted on settling out of court, he says, even though he was innocent. "It was very upsetting," he says. And then: "It's really amazing that you agreed to accept a ride with me. I could be anybody."
Back in my car, heading toward home, I am curious to find myself exhibiting all the aggressive driver behavior I've been fuming about all day -- speeding, failing to notice crosswalks. The pedestrians are hard to see, just shadows that appear in the corner of my eye as I drive along. The posted speed is 50, but most cars are doing more than 60. My adrenaline is pumping long
before I cross the Arlington County line. In this frame of mind, my instinctive
reaction to a cyclist pedaling along a slower secondary road is intense irritation. I'm all jumped up and my internal road hog is furious. It's so hard out here already, what is this clown doing in my lane, churning along well under the speed limit, with his watery, blinking taillight, forcing everyone to slow down and wait for a chance to swerve around him?
In other words, the toxic combination of road conditions, the distance and my own fatigue have turned me into a jerk of the first order, a danger to that cyclist's well-being and to my own. This reverse commute has been a perfect illustration of the reasons for the high injury rate. The conditions are so favorable for mayhem that it's surprising more walkers aren't mowed down every year.
At a confusing but legal crossing near Target on Route 50, with a stoplight but no crosswalk, a Latina and I are imperiled by a conscientious motorist. We are in the middle of the roadway, waiting for a lull in eastbound traffic. As we wait, a light-colored sedan draws to a stop in the nearest lane. The driver, an older man, smiles at us and gestures, "Go! Go!" We hesitate. There are two additional lanes of traffic beyond this car. We have no way of knowing whether drivers in those lanes will stop. We raise our hands apologetically and wave the driver on. He isn't moving. "Go! Go!" he waves again. He's sitting stock-still in traffic in a 45 mph zone where the speed is often closer to 60. The longer he sits there, the more likely it is that some distracted driver yammering on a cell phone or tinkering with a CD player will slam into all of us. (Later I learn that Virginia law requires that motorists yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, and stop completely if they are driving under 25 mph.) We get across, eventually, but not everyone does. Most pedestrian accidents nationwide -- 59 percent -- occur in situations like ours, where a crosswalk is not available. And if cars happen to be moving at high speed, the peril is great -- the chance of surviving after being hit by a car moving 40 mph or more is only 13 percent.
At Fairview Park, the Taj Mahal of interchanges heaves into view. It is a triple-decker threat that catches me off guard, like a waterfall that suddenly confronts a distracted canoeist. In the distance are green hills and dales dappled with corporate headquarters -- Verizon, Raytheon.
On the map, the interchange is a blue spaghetti tangle where Route 50 fragments into up ramps for the Beltway and Fairview Park Drive. And in reality there is no provision at all for pedestrians. I now have two choices: I can backtrack several miles and try to cut through a subdivision, or I can continue climbing to the top of the interchange. Up there, above the Beltway, I see a man in a dark suit, carrying a briefcase, running down the grass median of Fairview Park. It's David Janssen, in "The Fugitive." He gives me courage, and an idea. I dart across Fairview Park and slither down a grassy slope to the bottom deck of the interchange, the roaring through-lanes of 50, where I finally cross under the Beltway itself, along 50's narrow shoulder. My relief at making it through is tempered by the knowledge that three more interchanges like this lie ahead.
Later, at the Dunn Loring Metro station, I buy a newspaper. My horoscope for the day reads as follows: "Hurrying arrangements for this evening may be regretted. Don't take shortcuts as they could backfire and become expensive."
The road sign says I'm 29 miles from Middleburg, and 63 from Winchester. Political campaign signs stud the median every few paces on Route 50. They're laid out at intervals designed to catch the eyes of commuters.
I pass an Outback Steakhouse with a flame-painted Hummer parked out front; this reminds me it's way past lunchtime. I know there's a '50s-era diner somewhere up ahead. I check my digital pedometer to see how far I've come and find that it has erased today's mileage. (Pedometers seem another sign that walking is in trouble, having gone from unremarkable daily activity to the kind of hobby or sport that requires racks of expensive gear. The turquoise cube I bought came with a fold-out manual of many pages and took more than an hour to program.)
The 29 Diner turns out to be one of those places that look their best at 45 mph. The interior is the genuine article, a bona fide greasy spoon that is a world away from the shiny aluminum nostalgia of modern diner copies. This place has peeling blue paint, cracked marble tabletops and an exhaust fan that looks like a lunar landing vehicle covered in moon dust. A big yellow-and-orange sign on the door warns "videotaping in progress." The clientele this afternoon is subdued -- a pair of immigrant African cab drivers, a suburban couple on their way home from the hardware store. But the waiter is an immensely cheerful Nigerian man named Dot, a student in business administration at Strayer University. Until recently, he walked two hours a day to work and back, on a complex route that included shortcuts through subdivisions and across roadways. Now he lives 10 minutes away from the diner. He thinks the sidewalk situation in Fairfax is quite good, especially when you compare it with Nigeria.
The signs on Route 29 near Monument Drive announce the Fairfax County Government Center, a sprawling complex set on many acres of park and parking lot, surrounded by land on which fields of townhouses are already rising. I hike across hundreds of empty parking spaces. I am in search of enlightenment.
Some of the highest-ranking officials in the county have offices on the top floor of the spectacular glass county headquarters. It's here I find the aerie of Katherine Hanley, outgoing chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, filled with zoning, water and park maps, and offering a view of treetops and hiking trails. It's a week before the November elections, and Hanley's office phone rings constantly. In her long career, she has logged thousands of miles crisscrossing the county and presided over the widening of dozens of roads and intersections. Now she is ready to retire.
So how would she rate the county's walkability, on a scale of 1 to 10?
"Where are we now, or where would I like to be?" she parries. "I'd like us to be a 10, but I don't think we're there yet."
How did it get so hard to walk?
Part of the problem, Hanley says, is that Fairfax County, unlike the state's cities and towns, does not legally own or control its roadways or roadsides. Those are the property of the Virginia Department of Transportation, or VDOT, in Richmond. (Neighboring Arlington County is one of the few counties in the entire country that chose to retain local control back when these things were being decided in the 1930s.) So time and again when a citizen petitions for a sidewalk, the request must be sent down to Richmond.
This explains the curious character of some county road projects; their scale is reminiscent of Stalinist central planning.
"It's hard to get VDOT to mark a crosswalk," Hanley says. (Local politicians can't blame it all on VDOT, an activist says later, arguing that county boards can't just let developers build and build and build and then expect the highway department to connect all the dots.) Like a lot of jurisdictions, Fairfax County has been taking steps to make things better, Hanley says. It has increased the fine for failing to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk from $100 to $500. It has appointed a pedestrian coordinator to lead policy change. It has funded safety awareness campaigns. It has rounded up some federal money to start filling in missing sections of sidewalk. Her own goal has been to fill in the gaps in pedestrian walkways between Metro stations and bus stops.
"In many ways it's a retrofit -- but it is an attack on all fronts," she says. To date in 2003, she says, there have been 60 percent fewer pedestrian fatalities than last year, down from 10 to 4, a drop she attributes to education, police vigilance and the work of activists like retired fire and rescue worker Dave Lyons, who has made pedestrian safety along the aging Route 1 corridor in the southeastern part of the county a personal campaign.
Like many Fairfax residents, Hanley drives almost everywhere. She worries about interchanges that are so huge they turn the communities around them into islands. (The Fairfax Board recently shot down a state plan to widen the Beltway in Fairfax from eight to 12 lanes, and rebuild several interchanges at a cost of $3 billion and 200 homes.) Hanley had a revelation not too long ago when her car broke down on the way to a lunch appointment. She had to walk. It was hard.
Another monster -- the intersection of Routes 29 and 28 at Centreville. It is 10 lanes above, nine lanes below, including ramps and turning lanes. I walk along Route 29 under I-66. I'm two feet from speeding traffic down here, but others have come before me. There's a black pocket comb, a glass bottleneck, a flattened tin that once held smoked oysters, a smashed side-view mirror -- all the ingredients of a Woody Guthrie song. Out from under and in the clear, I pass a culvert blossoming with goldenrod, white pine saplings, cattails and wild persimmon. And now there's another ramp, and then one more, this last one draining cars off I-66. As I scoot past there's a lot of honking. I decide to ignore it. It gets louder. I quicken my step. Now a white pickup pulls over as it passes me. A guy leans out: "Hey, you dropped your hat back there! That's why we were honking."
I knew that.
The hat sits like a pancake back in the middle of the ramp. Traffic streams off the interstate. I leave the hat.
The sun is setting now. At the old stone house at Route 234, I turn left and head uphill, on a wide mown path through tall grass to the Manassas National Battlefield Park visitors center, in search of a phone. It is closing. "Try up at the mall," says the park ranger, arms folded implacably. Where's that? "About 500 yards up the road, that way," she says, jerking her thumb vaguely leftward up 234.
It's getting dark, and 234 has no shoulder to speak of. I need to get back to my car in Fairfax, but I'm stranded. No bus, no taxi, no Metro, no phone. In the darkening parking lot, I hitch a ride with a former circuit court judge from Michigan who's been roaming the battlefield all day, and is on his way back to a motel in Tysons Corner to meet up with the wife and kids.
He talks politics as we leave the parking lot in the family van. Then he pauses. He was recently accused of sexual harassment by a female parolee, he says -- falsely, he adds. The town insisted on settling out of court, he says, even though he was innocent. "It was very upsetting," he says. And then: "It's really amazing that you agreed to accept a ride with me. I could be anybody."
Back in my car, heading toward home, I am curious to find myself exhibiting all the aggressive driver behavior I've been fuming about all day -- speeding, failing to notice crosswalks. The pedestrians are hard to see, just shadows that appear in the corner of my eye as I drive along. The posted speed is 50, but most cars are doing more than 60. My adrenaline is pumping long
before I cross the Arlington County line. In this frame of mind, my instinctive
reaction to a cyclist pedaling along a slower secondary road is intense irritation. I'm all jumped up and my internal road hog is furious. It's so hard out here already, what is this clown doing in my lane, churning along well under the speed limit, with his watery, blinking taillight, forcing everyone to slow down and wait for a chance to swerve around him?
In other words, the toxic combination of road conditions, the distance and my own fatigue have turned me into a jerk of the first order, a danger to that cyclist's well-being and to my own. This reverse commute has been a perfect illustration of the reasons for the high injury rate. The conditions are so favorable for mayhem that it's surprising more walkers aren't mowed down every year.