Arlington’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee plans to press local leaders on keeping crosswalks free of snow this winter.
The concern centers on plows piling snow in curb cuts where sidewalks meet crosswalks. Those mounds, if not removed immediately, can linger for weeks and make neighborhoods much harder to navigate on foot.
“We need to get ahead of this before it gets too late,” Pedestrian Advisory Committee chair Ambar Pankaj said during a snow-season preview at the body’s Nov. 4 meeting.
“The sidewalk appears to be clear right up to the edge, then there’s just a giant pile you have to get across — huge blockades of ice,” Pankaj said.
He was not alone in his concerns about impassable curbs leading to crosswalks.
“This upsets me every year,” said John Armstrong, a committee member who has chronicled the issue in photographs.
Clogged curb cuts are the unintended consequence of snow needing to go somewhere, Armstrong said, but those on foot shouldn’t be imperiled because the county government hasn’t crafted a plan to address the situation.
“I’m not going to tell the county how to solve this, but we really need to raise this,” he said. “It’s basically like ‘the pedestrian be damned.'”
The committee reports to County Manager Mark Schwartz, and since early 2025 has been raising snow-related matters with him.
After issues related to last January’s massive weather event dubbed “snowcrete,” the county government needs to come up with “a methodology for clearing the road that doesn’t create the blockages,” committee member Eric Goodman said.
Beyond a plan to address the problem at its root, provisions for follow-up efforts are also essential, Armstrong said.
“We need some sort of post-snow plan where we go around and we identify these types of areas and we clear them,” he said.
In an October report to County Board members, Schwartz said the county government had signed an agreement to use the former Key Bridge Marriott site to augment snow-dumping efforts this winter season. It will be by far the largest dumping ground that is available to the local government in the 26-square-mile county.
Curb-cut issues were just one of the winter-season concerns brought up at the Nov. 4 meeting. Committee members are working on drafting a letter outlining their views, which will be sent to Schwartz.
