Jennie Dean Park ped bridge: a safety solution for comfy communities…but what about the plebs? 

An intense month so far has kept me from the usual pace of blog articles, and a forthcoming 10-day period of travel will further impede me.  But, at the end of the journey, I hope to have some amazing fodder in some states that have received little or no representation so far.  Until then, I offer a very simple, almost crude exploration on the best example in recent years I can find of fulsome municipal spending that, if more carefully conceived, could have offered tremendous public benefit.  But, no matter how many angles one might approach this specific improvement, it seems like an indulgence.  Maybe even an outright boondoggle.  Allow me to introduce everyone to the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge.

There it is on the left side of the photo: a $1.6 million dollar initiative from Arlington County, Virginia, a county with a political climate more typical of a city: 240,000 people crammed into a mere 26 square miles, significantly smaller than the typical US county.  This pedestrian bridge, spanning Four Mile Run creek in the Shirlington neighborhood of Arlington, is the culmination of decades of planning and a critical cherry atop a $15 million dollar sundae of a renovation of this community park, named after a freed slave who opened an industrial school in the late 1800s.  Construction of the pedestrian bridge occurred separately, beginning in the spring of 2024 and ending in the fall, in no small part because it’s less of a feature of the park than a means of cutting through it.  This new Jennie Dean Park ped bridge looks great and appears built to last.  But a nagging question remains: was it really necessary?  Does it add value?

A capsule map helps illustrate the street and trail network surrounding Jennie Dean Park and Four Mile Run.

To the north of the bisecting east-west creek is the Green Valley neighborhood, which is light industrial near the creek and single-family residential a bit north.  To the south of the creek is the busy mixed-use neighborhood of Shirlington, characterized by offices, residential towers, and a thriving two-block commercial main street (Campbell Avenue) filled with restaurants, bars, specialty shops, a grocery store, and a movie theater.  Jennie Dean Park sits squarely in the middle, with its baseball diamonds, tennis courts, basketball, and playground.  Most importantly for the purposes of pedestrianism, the park also rests at the juncture of prominent recreational trails, more clearly visible with my colored chicken scratches in the new version of the map, seen below.

[Jennie Dean map with markings]

At the top of the map, circled in red, is the trailhead of the W&OD Trail, a long-standing popular conversion of the old Washington & Old Dominion railway, a thriving rail-trail conversion with an eastern terminus right here on the map, at Shirlington Road.  It stretches into the distant suburbs and countryside 44 miles to the west.  Also indicated on the map, on either side of Shirlington Road, is the Four Mile Run Trail, which parallels the creek after which it is named.  As the map indicates, the side of the trail east of Shirlington Road is north of the creek (the brown rectangle); at Shirlington Road, bicyclists and runners must cross Shirlington Road using a crosswalk to get to the portion where the trail is on the south side of the creek (the brown arc).  This crosswalk at Shirlington Road, which mandates vehicles to stop for pedestrians through user-activated blinking lights, is just to the left of the margin in the photo below.

Having a surface-level crosswalk right between two stop lights (one at South Four Mile Run Drive and one at South Arlington Mill Drive) is not ideal, since many impatient motorists on Shirlington Road don’t want to stop again.  But the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge, indicated by the thick pink dashed line in my map, doesn’t rectify this.

The ped bridge reflects a long-standing community engagement process to ameliorate bike/ped safety on the tiny fragment of Shirlington Road crossing Four Mile Run, where the sidewalk is narrow for walkers, runners, and bicyclists to share.  And indeed, the sidewalk is narrow to accommodate the convergence of two trails, which in turn link two busy neighborhoods, where all traffic gets funneled into the limited spatial nexus at a bridge.  This new 15-foot-wide prefab bridge is vastly more comfortable than the long-standing sidewalk solution, built right up against Shirlington Road (no grassy buffer) and no wider than the conventional suburban sidewalk: approximately 4 feet.  

But the solution doesn’t eliminate the conflict point between bikes, pedestrians, and cars, as the former two entities cross Shirlington Road to get from one segment of Four Mile Run Trail to the other, or to link up with the W&OD Trailhead just a bit to the north.  Various new improvements—including a blinking beacon in the road’s median—make the road crossing safer for non-motorized trail users, but it doesn’t eliminate the conflict the way an underpass would.   Incidentally, Arlington engineers and bike/ped planners deployed underpasses at other point where the Four Mile Run Trail intersects a busy cross street, but this area is already too spatially constrained.

The only achievement of the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge is to give users added comfort by putting a tiny little bit of distance between them and the motorists on Shirlington Road.  Another view from the south (the Shirlington side) looking northwards shows the redundancy of these two paths.

Barely ten feet separate the sidewalk and the pedestrian bridge.  I fully recognize that the act of  widening a sidewalk on a bridge is vastly more expensive than a normal sidewalk widening, which is probably the same reasoning that has prohibited the Arlington County Public Works Department from widening Shirlington Drive at this point anyway.  But the appearance of this improvement remains troubling when it comes to government efficiency: adding a pedestrian bridge at essentially the exact location where a sidewalk exists, with the exclusive purpose of improving pedestrian comfort, even though the sidewalk is a perfectly conventional design, neither wider nor narrower than typical.  The contract, awarded to a DC construction company, totaled $1.38 million and a $277,000 set-aside for addition costs…pretty nice for a duplication of an existing path in an area that, while busy and popular with bicyclists and runners, never achieves Copenhagen or Amsterdam levels of traffic, so bottlenecking conditions on the Shirlington Road sidewalk were always rare or non-existent.

The above photo shows the southern end of the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge looking out on the asphalt path of Three Mile Run Trail as it continues westward along the edge of Shirlington, eventually morphing into a more pleasant creekside greenway trail once again.  I don’t question the viability of this trail as an amenity, but could the County have dedicated smaller amount of money to better use?  Here are a few alternatives:

• Install stanchions or bollards into the curb at the sidewalk on Shirlington Road that reinforce a protective barrier between pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists for the approximately 150-foot distance of the bridge where the Three Mile Run Trail crosses from the northeast side of the creek to the southwest side.

• Find a new location for the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge that is less redundant with the sidewalk.  Check my markings on the aerial photograph above, which, incidentally is recent enough to show the completed Jennie Dean Park ped bridge.  My green dashed line shows a point later downstream where the path could continue on the north side of Three Mile Run, then cross at a point where it links directly with South Arlington Mill Drive’s intersection with South Quincy Street, the latter of which leads directly into the heart of Shirlington’s popular commercial district.  A bridge here would connect pedestrians enjoying the restaurants of Shirlington with a direct visual/physical path to the amenities of Jennie Dean Park.
• Dispense with any new bridges or pedestrian safety measures and simply extend a sidewalk directly along the north side of Three Mile Run, as my orange dashed line recommends in the aerial above.  The Three Mile Run trail could continue south of the park amenities but north of the creek, then link with an existing pedestrian bridge a bit further to the west, which, though nowhere near as wide or fancy as the shiny new Jennie Dean Park ped bridge, is serviceable enough and works in a less cluttered, high-traffic area.  (I circled this second ped bridge in orange in the second featured map.)  In fact, this South Nelson Street ped bridge recently underwent repairs and aesthetic upgrades, concurrent with the construction of the Jennie Dean Park ped bridge.

All these initiatives demonstrate is the decadence of an extremely affluent, small, densely populated county, already jam-packed with interconnected parks and bike/ped amenities that outshine those in 99% of the country’s land area.  Who am I to begrudge Arlingtonians of their fun?  They clearly use them, and with such income density, it’s no surprise that they can indulge in creature comforts when most jurisdictions would have no choice but to pursue one of my more cost-efficient solutions.  Or, if they’re really eager to save a buck, just use Deadwood, South Dakota’s libertarian approach to safety at a busy junction: loan pedestrians a flag so they can become their own crossing guard!  Betcha those flags didn’t cost $1.6 million.