A couple weeks after a tongue-in-cheek installation called attention to safety concerns on S. Carlin Springs Road, Arlington County hosted an open house last night (Tuesday).
The theme of the event: safety along Carlin Springs.
While the county is pushing ahead with efforts to widen sidewalks, conduct automated speed enforcement and perhaps someday reduce speed limits on the road, Director of Transportation Hui Wang said she sympathizes with some residents’ frustration about the pace of progress.
“I understand why people want action today — or action yesterday,” she said.
Patricio Tanyag, who has lived near S. Carlin Springs for over a decade, attended last night’s event at Kenmore Middle School with two school-aged children. He wishes he could have more “peace of mind” when his fifth grade son walks on the narrow Carlin Springs sidewalk and crosses the road with his friends for soccer practice.
Tanyag recalls having to explain, “‘Hey, this is where you guys need to cross, because this is super dangerous. Hey, you need to watch. You need to stand this far away from the sidewalk, just in case a car comes. You boys always have to pay attention.'”
Tanyag is trying to decide where his son should go to middle school next year. Though they live in walking distance of Kenmore, he is unsure whether he’d feel comfortable with his son crossing such a busy road twice a day.
“They do have a lot of people out there, with crossing guards every morning,” he said. “But I mean, you can tell it’s so important that they have, like, two or three at every corner. This tells you, they know it’s not very safe.”
Katie Meyer, who just bought a house in the neighborhood two weeks ago, has similar concerns about her kids walking to Campbell Elementary School.
“It just feels so dangerous,” she said. “Like, ‘Walk on the other side of me, kids!’ Cars speed by. You hear squealing wheels a lot.”
Meyer, who moved to the area from the Columbia Forest neighborhood, said a group of parents walk their kids to school together to feel safer.
“I just didn’t expect it to be a problem in Arlington,” she said. “It’s such a priority in so many parts of the county, and it feels — maybe this is controversial — but, ‘OK, we’re in South Arlington.'”
The county is working to address these kinds of concerns on the stretch of Carlin Springs south of Arlington Blvd — an area that, according to a county study, saw a total of 92 crashes, including three involving severe injuries or deaths, between 2016 and 2021.
The county is currently in the process of acquiring rights to expand existing sidewalks and install “a buffer zone between pedestrians and vehicular traffic” between 3rd Street S. and 6th Road S. A county webpage suggests that improvements could wrap up by 2027, but they “are dependent on ongoing negotiations with nearby property owners.”
The county recently completed signal upgrades at 3rd Street S. and 6th Road S., in addition to installing speeding cameras in two S. Carlin Springs school zones. A S. Carlin Springs Road Corridor Study is expected to take place between 2026 and 2027.
Ultimately, Wang hopes that the county will be able to reduce the speed limit on S. Carlin Springs as well.
The road was not included on a list of five other Arlington roads that saw their speed limits reduced from 30 mph to 25 mph earlier this year. The reason for that, Wang said, is that S. Carlin Springs doesn’t create the proper “context” to make drivers slow down — no matter what the speed limit is.
“It’s not like we don’t want to reduce speeds,” she said. “We just don’t want [to] arbitrarily put a sign and say, ‘my job is done here,’ when it’s actually not doing people any good,” she said.
Given the new changes in the works, however, Wang hopes the county will soon reach a point where establishing new speed limits on S. Carlin Springs will prove genuinely effective.
ARLnow asked Wang for her thoughts on the hijinks earlier this month on the 500 block of S. Carlin Springs Road. That’s where an anonymous culprit installed a sign reading “Action Zero” (a parody of the county’s Vision Zero campaign) and a basketful of foam bricks to let pedestrians “be seen” (an apparent nod to the “see me” flags at some Arlington intersections).
For one thing, Wang said, last night’s open house had been on her calendar long before the sign appeared.
She also said, “I understand, sort of, the spirit behind it. But I do want to encourage people to, one, not damage public property. When you are drilling a hole, you are actually lowering the weight bearing, the safety… I mean, God forbid if you actually hit something!”
Wang instead encouraged concerned residents to get in touch with county staff, either at events like last night’s open house, or through the contacts on the county page for S. Carlin Springs pedestrian improvements.
“All opinions or information that’s [offered] to us are valuable… Part of the openness is benefiting the community, so they know what we’re doing, and a great part of that is benefiting staff, so we know what the community is thinking,” she said. “This is a two-way street.”
