An SUV that careened out of control at Glebe Road and N. Woodstock Street, in Waverly Hills, ran through a yard, across a driveway and down a wooded embankment before coming to a rest in a yard at the corner of Woodstock Street and 19th Road.
At least one parked car was hit as the SUV ran off the road. The SUV, which was carted away by a flatbed tow truck before the above photo was taken, suffered heavy front end damage.
There were no reports of significant injuries.
Last month, with little fanfare, construction crews arrived in the Chain Bridge Forest neighborhood. By the time they left, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, N. River Street, had two new medians strips, two new speed humps and a trio of intersections enhanced with “nubs” that jut a few feet out into the street.
The changes, designed to slow down drivers on a wide, downhill portion of River Street, can hardly be described as “drastic.” But the two-plus year neighbor vs. neighbor vs. county battle that preceded it can be.
Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by opponents of the traffic calming measures reveal that the fight got so nasty, the acrimony even spread to county staff.
“These people have got to get a life. ‘Inherently unfair.’ Seriously? My 6 year old used the unfair complaint the other night when whining about bedtimes,” a county transportation official said of the opposition’s complaints, in an internal email to a colleague. “I’m sure the residents of extreme North Arlington are routinely disenfranchised. Perhaps they should talk to the Department of Justice about election monitoring and human rights violations.”
But Chain Bridge Forest Homeowners’ Association president Terry Dean, who filed the FOIA request, insists that her group — representing 124 households — had legitimate concerns about being left out of the voting process that cleared the way for the traffic calming. In the end, only the 35 households closest to the River Street changes were asked to vote, instead of the neighborhood at large, Dean said.
“[Arlington County] didn’t believe in participatory democracy… basically, they wanted to do what they wanted to do, and it really didn’t matter what the neighborhood thought,” said Dean, a former congressional staffer. “You see that in banana republics, but it’s not supposed to be happening four miles from the Capitol.”
(Twenty-seven of the 35 households voted in favor of the changes, though Dean says a few votes were miscounted.)
Dean insists that from the outset, nobody was opposed to the idea of speed humps on River Street — the original plan when the neighborhood asked for traffic calming measures. It’s only when the county decided to take the traffic calming further — reconfiguring the entrance to River Street from Glebe Road while adding median strips and curb extensions in an effort to “define the travel lanes, slow traffic and improve pedestrian safety” — did the opposition start to organize.
County staff argued that River Street is too steep between 38th Place and 39th Street to install additional speed humps, and said that the reconfigured entrance off of Glebe Road was necessary to convey to drivers that they were entering a residential neighborhood. Opponents, meanwhile, started to question the necessity and nearly $200,000 cost of the changes, given that the average speed on River Street was clocked at 27 miles per hour. About 15 percent of cars were clocked going more than 32 miles per hour, and attempts at speed enforcement by police yielded only four tickets in five hours on one day, and not a single ticket on another day. One county employee referred to the latter enforcement effort as a “fishing expedition” in an email
Older residents worried that the changes would actually make River Street less safe, Dean said, especially during bad weather when navigation gets trickier.
“They are more concerned about these obstacles in the middle of the street” than they are speeding cars, she said. “I have no doubt someone’s going to hit that median once we have ice and snow on the ground… We hope and pray that nobody will get hurt.”
“From an aesthetic point of view it’s ugly as the dickens… a big, ugly mess,” Dean added.
A fully-loaded dump truck came to a grinding halt at the intersection of N. Glebe Road and Randolph Street this morning after its left front wheel detached from the axle.
Nobody was hurt, but the accident did block Randolph Street for at least a half hour, as a heavy wrecker truck was brought in to move the disabled dump truck. A large gash was visible in the pavement, showing where the truck started grinding into the street after the wheel fell off.
The incident happened as the truck was turning from northbound Glebe onto Randolph, across from the Harris Teeter and the Ballston mall parking garage.
Arlington County is planning improvements designed to make three N. Glebe Road intersections safer for pedestrians. The improvements are expected to be implemented by the end of next year.
The intersections — Glebe and Carlin Springs Road, Glebe and Wilson Boulevard, and Glebe and Fairfax Drive — involve long crosswalks across numerous lanes of fast-moving traffic, as well as the occasional slip lane. The improvements are intended to make crossing the intersections safer by reducing crosswalk distances and “conflict points.”
At Glebe and Fairfax, crews will “regularize intersection geometry” — i.e. convert “suburban” slip lanes into “urban” 90-degree turns controlled by the stop light. Crews will also widen the mid-intersection pedestrian refuge.
At Glebe and Wilson, the plan is to eliminate and square up the existing slip lane at the southwest corner of the intersection, as well as to widen the median refuge, reduce crosswalk distances and to install a speed table on the northwest slip lane.
At Glebe and Carlin Springs, intersection corners will be rebuilt, median refuges will be enhanced, higher-visibility crosswalks will be installed and the driveway to and from the Ballston parking garage will be modified for safety.
The changes are being paid for primarily with federal funds, according to Arlington County Director of Transportation Dennis Leach. Even though Glebe Road is a state route, Virginia is not chipping in for the changes.
“They view this as an Arlington-requested betterment,” Leach said.
Leach expects bids for the project to come in this fall, with construction to start in the spring and to wrap up by the end of next year.
No, you weren’t imagining things on your commute that morning. Those were, in fact, two horses grazing near the off-ramp from northbound I-395 to Glebe Road.
It’s unclear why exactly the horses were there — some sort of accident or mechanical mishap involving the tow vehicle, perhaps — but those tending to the horses apparently decided that they needed to munch on some grass while waiting to continue on with their journey.
Finally, around 10:00 this morning, the horses loaded back into the trailer, following the arrival of an SUV. Minutes later, the SUV towed the trailer away and everything was back to normal.
Photo (right) courtesy Matt Coyne
Arlington residents are nothing if not generous. The county is home to one of the highest-performing Goodwill donation centers in the country.
The nonprofit’s Glebe Road donation center at 10 S. Glebe Road was ranked 6th out of 2,657 donation centers nationwide in 2010.
The center, which often has a line of cars waiting to donate snaking through its parking lot, racked up 121,254 donations in 2010, according to Goodwill spokesman Brendan Hurley. The location’s retail store, meanwhile, recorded 119,946 transactions.
All told, donations at the Glebe Road center kept 4,850,160 pounds of materials — including 370,000 pounds of computer equipment — out of landfills.
Construction blocked the sole northbound lane of N. Randolph Street at the Glebe Road intersection around lunchtime today.
A dump truck and a backhoe made travel on both northbound Randolph Street and northbound Glebe Road a bit tricky for drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. A lone worker with a florescent vest tried to get southbound traffic on Randolph to stay out of the turn lane so northbound traffic could get around the construction. Meanwhile, a lane was also blocked on northbound Glebe Road.
Crews appeared to be doing some sort of work on the sidewalk.
Drivers heading across the Glebe Road/Route 50 bridge are now encountering lane closures and heavier traffic during the day.
The bridge that carries Glebe Road traffic over Route 50 is being replaced over the next 15 months. Initially, we had been told that “any lane closures or shifts… will occur between 9:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.” and that there would be “no major construction impacts… during the day.”
The lane closures, construction activity and traffic backups we saw on either side of the bridge today seem to dispute those initial statements.
Update at 11:50 a.m. — We’re hearing on Twitter that VDOT told attendees at a public meeting that the work underway now — removing the medians leading to the bridge — would possibly take place during the day.
VDOT will be holding a meeting two weeks from now to tell residents about their $6 million plan to replace the crumbling Glebe Road Bridge over Route 50.
The agency says construction on the new bridge will begin this summer and will wrap up in fall 2012 — a bit later than originally anticipated. The entire 100-foot-long bridge deck will be replaced with pre-cast concrete panels, and will be 27 feet wider than the existing bridge. The extra width will be used to install a 10-foot wide sidewalk, a 17-foot wide shared-use path and a new northbound turn lane. There will also be new traffic signals, “decorative wrought-iron picket fencing” and LED lighting.
On Thursday, June 2, at 7:00 p.m., VDOT will hold a ‘pardon our dust’ meeting for community members at Thomas Jefferson Middle School (125 S. Old Glebe Road).
The agency says traffic impacts for Glebe Road drivers should be minimal, with virtually no impacts during the day and lane closures at night. There will, however, be “intermittent detours” on Route 50 beginning in August. Traffic will be diverted to George Mason Drive and Washington Boulevard during the detours, which will be announced in advanced.
The Glebe Road bridge over Route 50 carries about 35,000 vehicles a day, according to VDOT. There have been several reported incidents of concrete chunks falling from the bridge over the past two years.
Friday was not a great day for Arlington Transit buses. As multiple people told us via Twitter and email, an ART bus was involved in a second accident on Glebe Road, just minutes after another ART-involved accident was cleared three blocks away.
The first accident occurred around 11:30 a.m. at Glebe Road and 4th Street N. A minivan rear-ended a bus stopped at a bus stop, sending two people to the hospital.
The second accident happened three blocks away on Glebe Road and 7th Street N., according to Arlington Transit Services Manager Steve Yaffe.
The ART bus was driving slowly behind a trash truck in the right-hand lane when a box truck belonging to an electrical contractor rear-ended the bus, Yaffe said.
Approximately 10 people were on board the bus, but no one — including the truck driver — was reported to be injured.
There was “some damage to the left side of the rear of the bus, including some broken signal lights,” Yaffe said.
Update at 3:00 p.m. — The driver of the van has been charged with reckless driving, according to Arlington County police spokeswoman Det. Crystal Nosal. A passenger from the bus and the van driver were both taken to the hospital after the accident, Nosal said.
A minivan slammed into the back of an Arlington Transit (ART) bus at the intersection of N. Glebe Road and 4th Street, near Ballston, just after 11:30 this morning.
The accident happened while the bus was stopped at a bus stop, with at least a dozen passengers on board. The driver of the van has been taken to the hospital, but is expected to be okay. Several bus passengers were evaluated by paramedics on the scene for minor injuries.
Northbound Glebe Road was completely blocked at 3rd Street for more than 45 minutes, but has since reopened. The bus suffered only minor damage and was driven away.
