CONNECTION BETWEEN CRYSTAL CITY, AIRPORT MOVES FORWARD: The plan to connect Crystal City with Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport via a pedestrian/bicyclist bridge took a major procedural step forward July 24, when the Federal Highway Administration removed a key hurdle.
The federal agency announced its determination that the project would have “no significant impact” on the environment, allowing it to move forward without further environmental review. The determination was announced by Edward Ofori, a division administrator for the agency.
The finding allows Arlington officials, the Virginia government and a host of regional and federal partners to continue moving toward planning for a connection between the future Virginia Railway Express (VRE) Crystal City station at 2011 Crystal Drive and the airport, traveling above the George Washington Memorial Parkway on its way.
Arlington County Board members in 2023 endorsed the location, but their authority effectively stops at the airport’s property line. A specific alignment across Reagan National, presumably to connect with the Metro station at the airport, remains to be defined.
The total point-to-point length is expected to be about 1,200 feet.
Arlington leaders have long coveted a direct, non-vehicular connection between Crystal City and the airport, which sit tantalizingly close to one another. In 2018, as part of efforts to woo Amazon to the local area, the state government signed on, as well.
Other key participants in the process – in addition to the state and federal governments and Federal Highway Administration – include the National Park Service, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration.
The July 24 determination is known as a FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact). To celebrate, the Arlington Department of Environmental Services went to social media to say the federal government had given the project “two thumbs up,” presumably paying homage to Fonzie (Henry Winkler) on “Happy Days.”
Because no planning effort in Arlington has really arrived unless it has an acronym attached, this project is known to the cognoscenti as CC2DCA – “CC” for “Crystal City,” “2” for “to” and “DCA” for the International Air Transport Association code for Reagan National Airport.
For more on the project, see the Website at www.cc2dca.us.
METROBUS SERVICE SURPASSING PRE-PANDEMIC LEVELS: Its sibling, the rail system, still has ground to make up, but Metrobus service is now running above pre-pandemic levels in terms of passenger counts, officials with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) recently announced.
Passengers totals are now 101 percent of 2019 levels in the latest monthly data, the agency said.
Average weekday ridership in June was 398,966, up from 394,351 in June 2019, according to new data. That is the second highest ridership total since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020; the highest was the average of 411,611 in May 2024.
The bus network hit bottom in June 2020, falling to an average of 108,304 passengers, according to WMATA data, before beginning a rebound.
The rail rebound remains a work in progress, with the 401,125 average weekday entries into the system in June 2024 still down significantly from 661,529 in June 2019, according to WMATA figures.