The Connection

Around August last year, a car went speeding down 1st Street in the wrong direction. When resident Alec Strong and a few other neighbors came out to tell the driver he was going the wrong way, the driver picked up speed and began careening into other nearby cars, racing towards the exit at the far end of the street. Residents chased the car down and stood in front of it, holding the driver there until police could arrive to take his information.

But this isn't that unusual at 1st Street. Residents on the one-way road say speeders and drivers going the wrong direction are a daily occurrence. After complaining to the county and being told photographic evidence of the traffic violations would be required, Brian Meenaghan established “BadDRiversOf1stRdS,” a Twitter account that collects the neighbors’ pictures of the daily cases of drivers violating traffic laws on their street. And yet, Meenaghan says they only catch one in five. Some of the encounters have included a WMATA bus going the wrong way down the street and a school bus in a standoff with a wrong-direction car.

“We were told years ago that school buses wouldn’t use our street, that it wasn’t on our route,” said Meenaghan. “But we see school buses on here four or five times a day. Now, there’s a school bus going up the block and one person going down the block the wrong way. It’s a recipe for disaster and it perfectly encapsulates what the problem is.”

Strong, Meenaghan’s neighbor, said at one point a woman speeding in a car full of children nearly hit him as he crossed the street. He told her to slow down and she started honking at him.

“[The street has] 22 houses with 15 children under age 8,” said Strong. “It’s a dense street with a lot of character, but we’re concerned about our children. That’s what this boils down to.”

Meenaghan says the ideal solution would be more signs informing drivers entering in the wrong direction and to have the entrance narrowed to be less inviting. Meenaghan also said speed bumps along the street would help immensely with the speeding problem.

But Larry Marcus, Bureau Chief for Arlington Transportation Engineering and Operations, says that measures like speed bumps and street adjustments are not in 1st Road S.’s immediate future. Marcus said that the county relies on collected data from traffic studies, not anecdotal evidence, to make decisions about traffic calming.

“We keep trying to help, but, as the county, we have standards across the board,” said Marcus. “We have guidelines on how to assess this. On this case, pretty consistently, the average speed is 19 miles per hour.”

But Marcus says that the county is currently working to make the signage on the street more visible.

“We want the signs and markings to be as clear as possible, and we’re revisiting that now,” said Marcus. “We want to help, but we want to be fair and do what addresses the situation.”

But Marcus did say, if the issue was brought up and gained support in the Neighborhood Conservation Program, a community-based prioritization system, that there would be resources to fund those traffic-calming measures.

But Strong said the county’s approach to speeding and wrong-way traffic on their street is indicative of a broader problem. Strong says when it comes to street cleaning, enforcement, and snow plowing, the residents have to constantly beg the county not to skip over them.

“[We] want basic services,” said Strong. “We hear a lot about capital investments, but if you talk to a lot of Arlington residents, we just want basic services. You see time and time again, whether it’s snow plowing after storms or sidewalks falling apart, potholes with the construction in Ballston and near Courthouse. It’s basic services that are overlooked because they’re not sexy. We just want to make our street safe.”