City Council Work Session

Chloe RitterstaffAnd the Old Town Small Area Plan, of course, looks to have improvements to walkability and connectivity and improves traffic circulation in Old Town. What these plans don't provide is specific project priorities. And so that's what we're doing with this project is to take these long-term plans and move them to the next step of identifying our priorities for how to implement those goals and visions for improvements of safety and pedestrian improvements so as I said the purpose of this project is to develop these three plans and so we have an umbrella project called move Fairfax City and that project is going to develop a citywide safety action plan to identify priorities for safety improvements across the city a citywide pedestrian master plan to prioritize

And so now we're going to talk about the Old Town Circulation Study, but first I'm going to give a little bit more background. So this is a quote from the Old Town Small Area Plan, and I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'll just read the first sentence. The long-term plan vision is to create a pedestrian-friendly precinct in the downtown core. And then the plan goes on to talk about some different strategies to do that. And so I put this up here because we want to talk about what the goal is of the Old Town circulation study And this is kind of our guiding vision for how we're going to start looking at Improvements to Old Town the Old Town small area plan and think about what kind of

And you know this is I'll just say and mention also that this is one of the other key ideas from the Old Town small area plan Is to have a multimodal spine through Old Town on University Drive from George Mason University to North Vax on University Drive and again So as we look at the Old Town small area plan and the Old Town circulation study How do we balance our priorities and how do we balance the different trade-offs that are required to achieve the vision? That's laid out in the small area plan and so two of the other preliminary alternatives that we're thinking about for this study are to reevaluate the one-way couplet so as I mentioned the the streets used to be one way in 2006 and then we changed to two-way traffic

Anthony Amosso this presentation really spoke to me I've been hinting at July 1st for a little while now when when looking at the Old Town small area plan I love the idea of focusing and emphasizing the pedestrian precinct part of it I walk in Old Town all the time with my fiance and we're just kind of wandering around waiting at the lights and we're wondering this place would be perfect for a plaza type idea why has that never happened turns out they did look at it back in 2017 but it just didn't move anywhere so I feel like tonight would be a good opportunity and I've kind of brought this up with my colleagues individually to look at bringing back that applause idea for some type of pilot program to form a pedestrian plaza many other communities