Dear Mr. Van Houten (head of the Livability Study):

Thank you for your efforts to create more livable infrastructure for our communities in Kent and Spring Valley. While some of your draft recommendations will likely make improvements, we are deeply concerned about your recommendations for Dalecarlia Parkway.

We each sign this petition to urge you to keep four vehicle lanes on Dalecarlia Parkway rather than reducing it to two lanes as proposed in the Livability Study Final Recommendations (https://rockcreekfarwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/KAI_Boards_Revised_2019_08_26.pdf), and we further urge you to abandon the plan to waste taxpayer resources to study the lane reduction.

Residents of Kent Corner worked with DDOT for three-plus years to get traffic calming measures put in place to deal with the onslaught of traffic speeding through our residential streets, guided by navigation apps responding to the traffic congestion on MacArthur and Loughboro. The Rock Creek Far West Livability Study threatens to undo these improvements by changing Dalecarlia from a 4-lane road to a 2-lane road. We are deeply concerned this will once again create unsafe conditions on our neighborhood streets in both Kent and Spring Valley.

While few bicyclists who are willing to endure the steep hills of Dalecarlia will benefit from your proposed measure, the majority of neighborhood residents will suffer from the undoing of the traffic calming benefits we fought so hard to implement. We feel there are plenty of other options to support bicycle and pedestrian facilities in the neighborhood without constricting Dalecarlia from four to two lanes, and know that closing the southbound lanes on Dalecarlia, even if done on a “pilot” basis to study the impact, is not a sensible policy approach nor a good use of taxpayer resources. DDOT’s data for Foxhall Road, a two-lane road which is terribly congested at 14,806 cars/day, demonstrates that Dalecarlia with its 14,402 cars/day would be equally congested. No further study is needed. We urge DDOT to abandon the proposal to restrict Dalecarlia, and focus instead on developing other approaches to improving bicycle access in our area.

As you know, the residents of Kent Corner worked with DDOT for over three years because traffic volumes on Manning Place and Palisade Lane were over 2000 vehicles daily according to DDOT traffic counts and 76% of these vehicles were commuters from VA and MD cutting through residential streets to avoid the congested arterials of MacArthur, Loughboro, and Dalecarlia.

The pollution, noise, personal property damage, depressed home values, and physical injury endured by neighbors were intolerable. Director Marootian met with Kent Block Captains and ANC Commissioners to propose a compromise which has greatly reduced cut-through traffic and mostly restored the safety, health, and sanity of our neighborhood. Please do not set us back by once again by creating a bottleneck due to reduced lanes on Dalecarlia.