One won’t need to be a triathlete to take the future pedestrian/bicycle link between Crystal City and Reagan National Airport.
“It’s going to have a fairly consistent slope as you work your way,” said Kyle Kling, project manager for the county government’s “CC2DCA” trail initiative.
The elevated bikeway/walkway will connect the relocated Virginia Railway Express (VRE) station in the 2100 block of Crystal Drive to the vicinity of the Reagan National Metro station adjacent to Terminal 2.
In the middle will be a on/off ramp connecting to the Mount Vernon Trail.
The connector ramp to the Mount Vernon Trail also will have a minimal fatigue level — a grade of around 3% — Kling said in a Dec. 9 presentation to the Crystal and Pentagon Cities Council.
Kling is a staff member with the county government’s Department of Environmental Services. His projections of the grade were based on the final route agreed to between all parties, most notably the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.
The 1,300-foot multi-modal connector will eliminate a bottleneck that has bedeviled residents and policymakers alike since the beginnings of Crystal City in the 1960s. While the airport is literally just minutes away, there has been no feasible, above-ground way for those walking or biking to connect to it directly.
The $58.8 million project aims to change that, and also will be helpful as the National Landing area (Crystal City and Pentagon City) works to maintain existing commercial tenants and recruit new ones.
“We see this as a massive economic-development tool,” said Robert Mandle, who represents the National Landing Business Improvement District (BID) on the council.
“We get constant feedback about the importance of this bridge,” he said.
Those representing residential interests on the panel were equally supportive.
“It’s a very good example of policy planning. I continue to be impressed,” said Ben D’Avanzo, a representative of the Aurora Highlands Civic Association on the council.
Among those presumably looking forward to its eventual arrival will be Amazon. The state government agreed to help fund the connector route as part of its incentive package luring the company to Arlington in 2018.
Current projections call for the 20-foot-wide connector to come online sometime around 2029-30. Next on the near-term agenda is an online survey that will be open Jan. 15 to Feb. 9. On Jan. 29 from 4 to 7 p.m., an in-person presentation on the project is slated at the Aurora Hills Community Center.
Funding for the project is coming through a variety of sources — federal, state, regional and local. Arlington County will have operational and maintenance responsibilities for the span, which preliminary estimates suggest could be used by up to 5,000 people per day.
Those 5,000 will represent different constituencies in the multi-modal universe, noted Michael Dowell, who chairs the Crystal and Pentagon Cities Council.
Many will be walking to and from the airport, some of them from out of town, while others will be bicyclists on their daily commutes.
“It can be a little disconcerting” for pedestrians on shared-use paths given the “intensity of our bike commuters,” Dowell noted.
Another concern, this one raised by D’Avanzo, is that those using Reagan National might opt to be dropped off or picked up on the Crystal City end of the trailway, avoiding traffic congestion at the airport but inadvertently contributing to it on Crystal Drive.
Kling said that while the new connector is not designed to be used for that purpose, it may end up doing so — at least to a degree.
“We’re not naive. We’d be hard-pressed to say there’s ways to prevent it entirely,” he said, adding that efforts would be made to reduce it “as much as possible.”
The project is known as “CC2DCA” because it will connect “CC” (Crystal City) to “DCA” (the airport designator for Reagan National). It cleared a major hurdle in late summer, when federal officials said it would not run afoul of any environmental regulations.
Other parties engaged in the planning process besides the county government and MWAA include VRE, the National Park Service, CSX and the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
