Road Rules, Reston style

Lots of awesome news about roads in and around Reston:

First, Rt. 7 will be widened from somewhere beyond Reston Avenue west to Loudoun County. Of course, no public project even tangentially involving Reston (cough cough schools cough cough Metro) can get underway without some nearby, usually overentitled community crying foul. Oakton's currently otherwise occupied, so who's this week's winner? Survey says.... Great Falls!

What is particularly irritating to Great Falls residents is the perception that most of the users of the new turn lanes on Route 7 will be Loudoun County residents using the Georgetown Pike as a cut-through commuter route.

"You are providing cut-through routes for people from Loudoun County," one Great Falls resident said.

"We are here working with facts. We can't say here are 300 people on the Georgetown Pike; let's build an exclusive left-turn lane for them," said Salahshoor.

Funny, we thought being exclusive is what Great Falls is all about. Of course, we can't blame them. If we wanted to sit in traffic surrounded by minivans driven by Sterling soccer moms, we'd go to Costco.

Meanwhile in Reston proper, they've added a stop sign near Lake Anne. But not just any stop sign -- one of them new-fangled three-way stop signs! All thanks to a rumor that a summer car-vs-pedestrian accident at the intersection of North Shore Drive and Village Road almost took out Reston's founder:

In the hours following the accident, rumors swirled that the victim had been 94-year-old Reston founder Robert Simon, himself a resident of Lake Anne and a frequent walker.

Simon was unharmed and out of town and the victim was treated and released from the hospital, but the accident cemented the need for changes at the intersection.

As a result of the outcry from residents and efforts of Supervisor Cathy Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill), VDOT reviewed the intersection and agreed changes should be made.

Simon said he was involved in requests to VDOT for rumble strips in the area even before the accident, which he said probably contributed to the VDOT response.

“It should have because it created a bit of a stir. Actually I nearly was smacked there once, it's a bad place,” he said.

Speaking of bad places, things could always be worse. Here's a woman who took a new job in Reston because it shaved 30 minutes off a commute so bad that a newspaper in Canada wrote about it. No one tell the folks in Great Falls that she uses Rt. 7!