Reply to APS: Elementary Walk Zone surveys out

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The "draft" map for Drew is a little baffling. I know it's for discussion purposes, but what is and is not walkable to Drew isn't really a matter for debate; anything within the triangle formed by Glebe, Four Mile Run, and Walter Reed is walkable. Anything beyond it is not. Those are very busy roads with few traffic signals.

The legend of the draft map makes clear that elementary students are not allowed to cross Four Mile Run or Walter Reed Dr. I sure wouldn't let mine do so. Yet there is no such designation for South Glebe Road at the intersection of 395! Is that a joke? There is absolutely no way a child can safely go from Arna Valley/Long Branch Creek (which is within the Oakridge walk zone) to Drew on foot. You literally have to cross two highway exit ramps and then Glebe road itself, which is five lanes wide at that point. In rush hour traffic. I guess APS REALLY wants to move Arna Valley and Long Branch Creek from Oakridge to Drew. [/quote]

I am the PP who posted earlier who attended last night's meeting. That is not the way that APS wants you to read the maps. The maps reflect the walk zone that exists today, which they admitted is based on assumptions that were put in place years ago that no longer reflect reality in many places. What you state above is exactly the kind of feedback they want to collect so they can UPDATE the maps. The goal of this exercise is to draw walk zones around each school that reflect today's reality and to identify where walk zones could be *easily* expanded with the placement of a crossing guard (or possibly a new traffic signal, although APS said that was out of their control but they would provide feedback to Arl Co Transportation). [/quote]

Agreed. The county is erring on the side of getting feedback on everything rather than making assumptions so they can try to make the best possible decisions about school locations. There are going to be areas where it's pretty obvious what's walkable and what's not, but there may also be areas where the answer seems obvious to someone who doesn't live there but the answer is different for the people who do.

In my neighborhood, there are two PUs at one elementary school that are also largely within a half mile of another elementary school, and on paper it looks like it should be easy to move those to the other school's walk zone because there's only one major neighborhood intersection to cross and it has a traffic light with walk signals. In reality, that intersection gets tons of traffic during morning rush from people cutting through the neighborhood to major commuter routes, and drivers are really bad about respecting the walk signals and letting pedestrians cross, making crossing dangerous at times. Unless they add a crossing guard, I suspect far fewer families would walk than you might expect based on how the map looks (so I gave that feedback in the survey).[/quote]

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