Arlington is poised to accept $18 million in funding for a pedestrian bridge connecting Crystal City to Reagan National Airport.
A funding allocation from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority is slated for consideration at an Arlington County Board meeting this Saturday. Construction on the project, dubbed the CC2DCA multimodal connection, is expected to begin in Fiscal Year 2028.
The project is expected to wrap up in Fiscal Year 2030, at a total estimated cost of $57.2 million, according to an NVTA funding update from May.
“Design-build procurement for CC2DCA is anticipated to begin in May 2025,” a county report says. “Approval of the NVTA [standard project agreement] and acceptance and appropriation of the NVTA Regional funding for the project will allow the County to access the funding for the design-build procurement.”
Approval of the $18 million would still leave a $21.1 million funding gap for the project. The NVTA is slated to decide whether to approve a county request to close this gap and fully fund the pedestrian bridge at a meeting next month.
The CC2DCA connection would be about 1,300 feet long, taking five minutes to cross on foot and providing a direct path between a planned Virginia Railway Express station at 2011 Crystal Drive and DCA’s Terminal 2.
Currently, getting from Crystal City to DCA on foot or bike involves navigating a series of trails and crossings the county has described as “circuitous.” The trek took a Washingtonian reporter about 23 minutes in 2019, and the magazine gave a “close to zero” chance of a typical pedestrian actually making the journey.
“Once completed, the new CC2DCA Multimodal Connector would make National Landing the only downtown in the country with its main street within a comfortable 5-minute walk from a major airport,” the National Landing BID said in a 2022 pamphlet.
Arlington County first identified the need for a better connection to the airport in 2010 but the project only gained traction seven years later, when the then-Crystal City BID pitched the idea and conducted a feasibility study.
In 2018, Virginia identified the bridge as one of five transportation projects it would help to fund as part of the HQ2 deal with Amazon.
