Safety First

Six and a half hours after New Year’s Day in 1957, Fred Wilkins, a 57-year-old janitor at Ft. Belvoir, was killed after a southbound Route 1 automobile struck him in Gum Springs. Three years later, Gum Springs resident Giles Roster, who was 38 at the time, had his right leg amputated after he was run over by a car while trying to cross Route 1 in Gum Springs. This ritual of carnage continued apace until one spring afternoon in 1967, when more than 100 Gum Spring residents, led by Alexandria mortician Nelson Greene and my father, dragged two caskets onto Route 1, stopped traffic and finally forced the Commonwealth of Virginia to reckon with its historical neglect of highway safety in the Gum Springs community.

Shortly after the protest, the state installed a traffic signal at Route 1 and Sherwood Hall Lane.

Yet more than a half century later, the Commonwealth of Virginia again appears to be on the verge of resurrecting Route 1’s reputation as an alleyway of death. Forty-five years after a Fairfax County study found that “a person is 3 times as liable to be killed and 41/2 times as liable to have an accident along the Route 1 corridor strip as one who is traveling” the adjacent Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway (now Interstate highway 395) to the west,” the Virginia Department of Transportation has proposed a highway configuration in Gum Springs that is likely to increase that grizzly disparity: Within one mile, VDOT is proposing that Route 1 go from 12-lanes at Buckman Road to 11-lanes at Ladson Lane then to 13-lanes at Sherwood Hall Lane. The lanes then appear to revert to 11-lanes at Boswell. As my colleague Queenie Cox, president of the Gum Spring Civic Association has said: “How can such disjointed and fluctuating lane changes be safe.”

Where Route 1 traverses Gum Springs, the east side of the highway is largely populated by residential housing and the west side is mostly retail and other commercial establishments. And yet, there is currently no viable solution to permit residents on the east side of the highway to cross safely to the west side to purchase goods and services. The proposal to expand to 13 lanes and adding a difficult-to-surveil underground pedestrian tunnel, is a recipe for accidents and crime. From my office window view of Richmond Highway across from the Costco big box store I witness everyday that crossing the current seven lanes of traffic is already unsafe. And residents would likely recoil at walking through the proposed underground tunnel that would be difficult to find and a magnet for crime under the best of circumstances. Instead, they would likely continue to risk crossing multiple lanes of high speed traffic above ground on foot. Therefore, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors should delay action on the VDOT BRT’s flawed plan and allow state officials to re-think their plan with an eye toward downsizing highway lanes and building something other than a underground pedestrian tunnel so that residents can cross the highway safely.

I have expressed these concerns in a letter to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and urge like-minded community residents to do the same.

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