Park Service holding second meeting on GW Parkway safety study

The National Park Service will be holding its second public meeting about safety improvements the George Washington Memorial Parkway between Old Town Alexandria and Mount Vernon on Tuesday, Dec. 3.

The meeting will include the Park Service’s response to public input given at the first public meeting, which was held in July.

The first meeting was an open house that allowed members of the public to give direct feedback to traffic engineers and Park Police working at a dozen different displays. Members of the public were also invited to give feedback online, and Tuesday’s meeting will be the Park Service’s first presentation on what the public said.

The agency said it will make recommendations based on that input at the meeting, and will continue to gather feedback on options including:

• Educating parkway visitors about safe travel through the parkway’s historic landscape by hosting educational events
• Enforcing speed limits and address distracted driving through focused policing
• Engineering improvements including new traffic patterns and additional lighting

The meetings are part of an ongoing safety study that the Park Service is conducting in the aftermath of a number of serious crashes on the roadway in the past decade. Two people have been killed in Parkway wrecks in 2019 alone, one in a head-on collision in April and the other in a single-car crash in September.

The Park Police have not released the names of either victim in those wrecks. They have also not announced any charges or tickets related to the first crash, which left three people critically injured.

Tuesday’s meeting will run from 6-8 p.m. at Walt Whitman Middle School, located at 2500 Parkers Lane (see map). More information about the George Washington Parkway Safety Study can be found here.