Rural Arterials Network

The award-winning Route 50 Traffic Calming Project began with a grassroots search for a different approach to VDOT’s proposed multilane highway expansion.  Following multiple local community meetings, citizens presented an articulated vision, engaged a designer, and the innovative was awarded funds for a federal demonstration project. In 2019 Loudoun County removed an endorsement of this low-cost, effective road improvements approach in its Comprehensive Plan update. [Image courtesy Google Maps]

This committee is monitoring the issues arising from Loudoun’s arterial roads studies and subsequent road projects, and the county’s emphasis on expanding capacity to facilitate more interstate traffic, induced demand, and sprawl development. That approach threatens Loudoun’s tourism economy, local small businesses that serve it and is at odds with citizen’s clearly articulated desires for low growth and preservation of historic and scenic assets.

A balanced, comprehensive approach will instead focus on county adoption of the regional Transportation Planning Board’s Visualize 2045 aspirational goals, exchanging its current level-of-service metrics for vehicle-miles-traveled metrics, better addressing cut-through traffic on rural roads and through historic villages, and improving safety using flexibility in highway design standards that mitigate or remove negative impacts to heritage and environmental assets. Those assets are vital to the county’s vital tourism economy. Loudoun’s rural transportation planning must begin  with citizen’s vision for their communities’ futures.