Arlington Alexandria Projects Community Advisory Group Meeting 1 Recording   6/3/2025

for our first community advisory group meeting for Arlington and Alexandria.

We can go to the next slide, please.

Today we will give you an overview of who we are, Virginia Passenger Rail Authority and Virginia Railway Express.

We'll talk with you a little bit about the rail projects, rail construction projects that we have upcoming in Arlington and Alexandria that include the Long Bridge Project, the Alexandria Fourth Track Project, and several smaller projects within the bounds of those corridors.

and we will introduce you to our team members and talk a little bit about what we mean by the Community Advisory Group.

Next slide.

Let's start by having a chance for you to meet the members of our team that will be presenting to you today and here to answer questions.

As I mentioned, I'm Meredith Judy.

I'm the Community Affairs Manager with Virginia Passenger Rail Authority.

I'm not sure that Charlene is able to make it.

Charlene is our Senior Director for Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, Long Bridge Project.

Good afternoon.

Jason Bortz, VRE.

Good afternoon.

My name is Naomi Klein and I am a senior planning manager.

Okay, great.

Let's go to the next slide.

So we've invited you here today to be a part of our community advisory group for Arlington and Alexandria.

The idea with these community advisory groups, we're actually, as Virginia Passenger Rail Authority, we're launching several of these right now for all of our projects in Northern Virginia and DC.

The idea is to bring members of the community to the table on a regular basis.

So we'll continue to have our standard public outreach meetings,

engagement on social media, but we want to cultivate a core group of members of the community that are consistently informed about our projects, well connected to help share information about our projects with the communities that you represent, and can bring to us any concerns or questions that you're hearing in your community.

So it's one of many methods that we hope to use to stay connected

to the community and to the stakeholders that will be impacted by the projects and benefit from them long term.

So on the call today, we have representatives from resident groups, homeowners associations, residential buildings throughout the corridor, business representatives.

We have members of the boating community.

We have special interest groups represented here from bicycle community to pedestrian advocacy groups and others.

We have a variety of agencies in Northern Virginia.

We have elected officials on our call and their staff members and others.

The idea is that we'll meet on a quarterly basis to give you the latest updates on these projects and to hear from you about opportunities for outreach and feedback on our projects.

The meetings will be virtually.

We will meet virtually primarily.

However, we do hope to host some site tours during the course of our work.

Before we move to the next slide, I want to ask everyone who did not have a chance to register for this meeting to drop your name and your email address in the chat.

We ask you to do that so that we can include you in future invitations for meetings.

All right, ready for the next slide.

Great, thank you, Meredith.

So to begin, we're talking about who are we?

Who is the Virginia Passenger Rail Authority?

So we are an independent government authority.

We were created in 2020 by the General Assembly, and what it means to be an independent authority means that rather than reporting to the Governor of Virginia, we report to a 15-member board.

Our responsibility is to expand and promote passenger and commuter rail.

So we are not rail operators.

VRE, who's here with us today, is a rail operator, but rather we own the tracks that those rail operators run on.

And our job as VPRA is to essentially expand that capacity by building projects that will add tracks

so that we can run more trains and have better, more reliable service.

And we partner with those rail operators, Amtrak, Norfolk Southern, CSX Transportation, and VRE, Virginia Railway Express, to operate passenger and commuter rail service.

Next slide, please.

This shows you a map of our rail network throughout the state.

We had a landmark deal with CSX in 2019.

CSX as you can see owns a large amount of the rail line between Washington DC

Richmond and beyond to the southern edge of the state to acquire the right-of-way along CSX's existing tracks that would allow the state of Virginia to build their own tracks and be able to separate passenger rail from freight rail so that more freight can get off of trucks and the highways and onto trains and so that more passenger trains can run more frequently.

So the benefit of the Transforming Rail in Virginia program, which I think I may not have provided the name for it, but that landmark deal I was referring to with CSX, that's known as Transforming Rail in Virginia, which allowed us to get the land and then create this program of projects that will increase the tracks between DC and Richmond so that we can provide more and better service.

So increased capacity to accommodate more passenger rail service.

That even includes VRE being able to run trains at night and on the weekends, improve efficiency of passenger commuter and freight rail services, reducing bottlenecks and improving reliabilities, not just running more trains, but having existing trains be able to be on time more often.

And this shows you our portfolio of projects between Washington, DC and Richmond, Virginia.

And today we're here talking about the Long Bridge project and the Alexandria fourth track project.

Those are the two projects that will impact residents in Alexandria and Arlington.

But you can see that we have a slate of projects that are being built.

And when these projects are completed, that's what will unlock new rail service.

As you can see in the text, we have 11 projects that unlock new passenger rail service and then future capacity as well as new service that's already planned.

Next slide, please.

So I'm here today to talk about the Long Bridge project that I'm going to hand it off to some of my colleagues to talk about other projects in the community.

So the Long Bridge project is, you can see the project limit on this map and I think we're going to get into some more detail on that.

but this is an existing two-track bridge that crosses the Potomac River.

It is not only a bottleneck for DCM for Virginia but for all of the East Coast.

Even your orange juice coming from Florida typically has to go over this two-track rail bridge.

Why it is such a bottleneck is because south of here you have three tracks

North of the bridge starting at Union Station going up the east coast.

You have four tracks but right at this point at the river you have only two tracks and that has to serve CSX freight rail, VRA commuter rail, and Amtrak

Intercity Passenger Rail.

So all three of those rail modes are sharing this two-track bridge.

And when this project was first proposed years ago, the tracks were already operating at 98% capacity.

So

The purpose of the project is that we will be constructing a new separate two-track bridge, leaving the existing bridge in place to continue to be owned by CSX.

So then you will have four tracks, two that are owned by VPRA, two that continue to be owned by CSX, which will double the rail capacity and allow us to run passenger trains separate from freight trains and remove this bottleneck.

And then there's a bunch of other bridges and infrastructure that are associated with what I just described, which I think we'll get into in a little more detail.

Next slide, please.

Yes.

So I talked a little bit about the two-track bridge across the Potomac River, but this entire project is really five rail bridges and two pedestrian bridges.

So while we call it the Long Bridge, it is much more than just a singular bridge.

So this shows you the project limits in a little more detail.

It begins in Arlington at what we call RO interlocking.

Interlocking is just a railroad term for where the tracks

where various tracks all change over so that trains can move between them.

So it allows trains to move from one track over to other tracks and switch.

So that's the term interlocking.

So it begins just south of the Long Bridge Aquatic Center.

The project then builds the two tracks over and across the George Washington Memorial Parkway and Mount Vernon Trail, then over the Potomac River,

and then in East Potomac Park over Ohio Drive, then over I-395.

Once it crosses over the I-395 bridge, the amount of space that we have to work in narrows so much that we cannot build a separate two track structure.

So what we have to do on the other side of I-395 is actually take down the existing two track structure and rebuild a four track structure.

and that new four-track structure will continue through East Potomac Park, over the Washington Channel, over Main Avenue in Southwest Washington, DC, through the Maryland Avenue overbuild, and then end where you're looking on the screen on the right side at L.E.

Interlocking, which is just south of L'Enfant Station.

So what we're really here to talk about today are the parts that are in Virginia and across the Potomac River.

I think we're going to get into that in the next slide.

So that describes the rail bridge.

In addition to the rail bridge, the project is also building a dedicated bicycle pedestrian bridge that will be in between the Wamata Yellow Line Bridge and the new rail bridge.

Next slide, please.

So this is a rendering that shows you that there are a lot of structures in this very confined space.

On the left-hand side, you see the 14th Street Highway Bridge.

To the right of that's the Wamata Yellow Line Bridge.

To the right of that are two new structures, the new separate bike pedestrian bridge and the new two-track rail bridge, the new Long Bridge.

And then on the far right is the existing Long Bridge, which as we said, will remain in place and continue to be owned by CSX.

I will add that while the two bridges are separate, the two rail bridges, all four tracks are interoperable.

So should there be an issue on the freight tracks or an issue on the passenger tracks, trains would be able to use either structure if that was necessary.

Obviously, that's not the preference.

Next slide, please.

So because of the size and scope of this project it has been separated into two packages, a north package and a south package.

Today we're really going to be focused on the south package because that's what's going to affect Alexandria and Arlington residents the most.

The south package starts at RO Interlocking which is just south of the Long Bridge Aquatic Center and builds

All of the rail infrastructure that goes across the Potomac River and lands in East Potomac Park closest to the water.

Additionally, the south package is going to construct the bike pedestrian bridge.

And that south package is a design-build contract and our design-builder started with us at the beginning of this year, so about six months ago.

and construction is estimated to begin in the middle of next year.

Currently we're in a scope validation phase.

The north package picks up in East Potomac Park in DC just on the other side of the river and constructs everything in East Potomac Park and then into DC to Ellie Interlocking just south of Lawn Fawn.

and that is a progressive design-build contract.

That contractor started with us about a year and a half ago, so early 2024.

We are currently starting on early works packages, so nothing that is full construction of these structures, but prep work that will, things like utility relocation or tree removal, that will allow us to get ready to start building those structures.

And so those early works construction packages are happening now, as you can see in that bullet, Spring-Summer 2025, with full construction starting in about a year.

Next slide, please.

This is an illustration of the timeline of where we've been and where are we going.

So 2022 was when we had 15% design, which is essentially called the concept design.

That was developed to a preliminary engineering phase at 30% design in 2023.

And then last year we began

or at the end of 2023, early 2024, we began final design and we are now today advancing final design for both the north and the south package with construction estimated to start mid next year and be completed in 2030, so about a five-year construction timeline.

Next slide please.

This is just another slide illustrating that we have a lot of things in a very confined space as before with the renderings.

So it just shows you from left to right the existing La Motta Bridge, the bike pedestrian bridge, which also includes a ramp down to the Mount Vernon Trail.

Something I may have missed saying a couple slides ago is that the Bike Pedestrian Bridge connects the Long Bridge, the trail that brings you to Long Bridge Park at the Long Bridge Aquatic Center with the bike lanes in East Potomac Park and then also on the Virginia side with the Mount Vernon Trail.

So there are two connections, the Bike Ped Bridge on the Virginia side, one connection to the

to the DC side in East Potomac Park.

So that bike pedestrian bridge includes an ADA accessible ramp down to the Mount Vernon Trail, and then our new proposed two-track rail bridge, and then the existing Long Bridge.

So yeah, everything that we're fitting is pretty constrained by space.

Also leaving space for us to be able to do maintenance on these structures is critical.

So next slide, please.

and these are some renderings.

On the top is the existing Long Bridge owned by CSX.

We just got a message that they're not seeing our slides, so is that ...

I'm not sure what ...

Okay, great.

Okay, so whoever messaged that, I think it might be your computer situation.

You may have to tap on a button that says Chris Stokes's screen in the upper left corner of your screen.

Okay, so this is just a slide with a little bit more information about the bike pedestrian bridge.

On the top left, you can see the bike pedestrian bridge.

It's in between the yellow line bridge and the new bridge.

It's the gray one.

And they're perfect.

I'm glad that worked.

And you can see the ramp down to the Mount Vernon Trail on the bottom is the connection to the

pedestrian path at the Long Bridge Aquatic Center, and then you can see the bridge continuing over the Potomac River.

The bottom picture is a rendering of the view from on the bike pedestrian bridge.

That bridge is going to be 16 feet wide.

The current path across the Potomac River is about seven and a half feet wide, so more than double what the existing connection is.

The existing connection will remain in place.

but also the existing bike ped path is part of the 14th Street Bridge.

So you're also riding, while it does have a fence, you're riding on a structure that's also shared with cars.

This is going to be dedicated for bikes and pedestrians.

So I think it will be a much nicer user experience.

Next slide, please.

This is a depiction of the bike pedestrian network between DC and Virginia.

This just shows you zoomed in the various landings of the bike ped bridge.

This is the one at the Long Bridge Aquatic Center that drops you in at the Long Bridge Park Trail.

Those of you who have been following this project may remember that earlier Design had switchback lanes, which we got a lot of feedback from cyclists that that was not user friendly or preferred by cyclists and

We heard you and we updated the design so it now lands directly into the path.

This shows you the landing at the Mount Vernon Trail on one side.

As I've said a couple times, there's an ADA ramp that comes down.

And then on the other side, there is a staircase for pedestrians or users who want a quicker connection than the ramp.

And I believe that those stairs also have a bike rental attached.

Next slide please.

So what is happening now?

So I referred to some early works packages and I also talked about the fact that Long Bridge South is doing their scope validation, so essentially collecting data that will help inform the final design of their project.

and so we're doing borings, test piles, tree and brush clearing, and we're working on maintenance of traffic plans, basically getting permits and working with our partner stakeholder agencies to make sure that the traffic impacts are thoughtful, comprehensive, and safe.

And we're going to talk more about, are we talking about that in this meeting?

No.

I don't think we are talking about that today.

But we will be.

And so the borings and test piles are work that we're doing to essentially understand what is happening in the ground so that when we build the bridge, we're building a structure that we know can be supported by what is underneath.

Next slide, please.

Oh great.

Thanks.

Okay, so boating community travel impacts.

So in the Potomac River this summer we'll be doing test piles and geotechnical borings which I just talked about.

Briefly, the navigation channel is going to remain open throughout construction.

Where you can navigate under the bridge may shift for short periods of time, but there will be announcements and we're in coordination with the US Coast Guard on that work.

There will be minor encroachments, navigation channels, and buoys that will guide boaters on where to go.

No work planned in spring and summer.

And then the Washington Marine and the parking lot will remain operational during construction.

That's actually on the DC side in the north package.

So I don't know that that's, I guess that might be relevant to boaters, but not necessarily to residents of Alexandria and Arlington.

And then one quick note that I just want to revisit when I talked about maintenance of traffic is that most of the traffic impacts that we're going to have for the Long Bridge Project are really going to be on the DC side for the north package.

The south package, the anticipation is that most of the job of the bridges is actually going to be built from the water, from floating the job.

So while there will be traffic impacts to the George Washington Memorial Parkway, as much of the job as we can is going to be built from the water.

Next slide, please.

and stakeholder coordination.

So this is just to inform everyone here that we are engaged and we do a lot of work in coordinating with our project partners on both sides, both the DC and the Virginia side.

So this just shows you that we have regular coordination meetings

with VDOT, with the District Department of Transportation.

We meet regularly with Arlington and Alexandria, the National Park Service.

We have weekly meetings with them, private property owners, and obviously our rail operators, CSX, VRE, and Amtrak.

On a number of topics, they're listed here in the bullets.

I'm not going to read all of them, but

Needless to say, we are in constant communication with all of the various agencies of those jurisdictions and everyone who is involved in permitting or has some kind of a stake in the project.

So with that, I believe I am turning it over to Adil to talk about the Alexandria four track project question.

Meredith, do you want me to take questions now for Long Bridge?

Or do you want those questions to be held?

Sure, we can take some questions now if there are any questions about Long Bridge.

I had one quick question.

Yeah, that's a really good question.

So I think it comes, there's a few things.

I think one is regarding safety and security.

So there was, we did a safety and security analysis and the preference was to have the bicycles and pedestrians at least, I believe it was 20 feet away from the rail bridge so that people cannot throw things onto the rail bridge or

So I think part of it was a safety issue.

I think also talking back to a point I made earlier, it's also just about separating those modes

When the trains go across the tracks, that can cause some vibration.

And so putting pedestrians and cyclists on that same structure, it also would require larger piers in the water.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Are there any other questions for Long Bridge?

Yeah, thanks.

I heard recently that the the I think the what I heard the the original plan was to build the rail bridge first and then come back and build the bike head bridge kind of setting the you know, obviously timeline would be would be a little bit delayed on that.

I heard a rumor that perhaps the contractor is actually would prefer to build those simultaneously and just sort of move from one end to the other and operate off the same boat and build both sets of pilings.

And if that's the case, I'm very excited because that surely means we will be looking at a little bit of a faster completion time.

That's a great question, and you are absolutely right.

So the original proposal was that we would be building a trestle across the water to build the rail bridge, but then in order to build that trestle was going to be where the pedestrian bridge needs to go in that location.

So you then would have had to go back and remove the trestle to build the pedestrian bridge, which was why there was a lagging time.

the means and methods proposed by our design builder are to float the project essentially on barges and so that eliminates the need to construct that trestle and was one of the reasons that we selected this design builder was the appeal of that because they described the trestle as building a bridge to build a bridge which seemed duplicative and unnecessary so with the option to be able to float the job

and you eliminate the need of having to go back and remove that trestle in order to build the pedestrian bridge.

So my understanding is that the schedule as it stands now is that both structures would be completed by 2030.

And I believe that I saw Aaron Cheskis on this.

Yes, we're going to have both bridges open by 2030 and that

We're going to be building the pedestrian bridge by utilizing the rail bridge itself.

So we're going to have the crane station on the rail bridge to build the pedestrian bridge.

So it's possible that the pedestrian bridge will actually be completed prior to the rail bridge being opened for rail traffic.

Thanks, Aaron.

And I

I caught him off guard, I'm sure, by calling him out, but Aaron is our stakeholder manager for our Long Bridge South design build team.

So great question.

Any other questions for Long Bridge?

Okay, and I thought I saw one in the chat, so hold on one moment.

Yeah, let's dive into the fourth track.

There'll be a chance at the end to ask more questions.

I just want to make sure we get through all the material.

Thank you Meredith and Naomi.

So the Alexandria four track project is a six mile, a four track being added from Long Bridge down to just past what we call the AF interlocking, which is

just south of Telegraph Road or what we've called Business Center Drive area here.

There's a few related sub-projects that reside in this project as well and we're going to talk more about that.

So Jason with VRA is going to talk about the Crystal City Station, the King Street area projects which include the Alexandria Station, the King and Commonwealth Bridges,

and then the city also is working on some streetscape improvements under these bridges that basically encompass the King Street area projects.

And then we are also have some improvements in the Telegraph Tunnel area.

There's a pedestrian mitigation improvement that Mark Schnaufer is going to talk to you about a little bit after my presentation.

So if you can go to the next slide, please.

So the project, like basically what we're doing is we have four tracks now that Long Bridge is going to build, so we need to continue those down south till where VRE splits into, you know, the Manassas Line and the CSX, Fredericksburg corridor.

So four tracks basically conclude at that point where VRE splits into those two areas.

It's approximately six miles of new track, like I mentioned before.

As four track, you know, it stays within the existing right of way.

So we're not impacting a lot of adjacent property owners.

There's some minor acquisitions that we're working on right now.

And the goal is to increase rail capacity and address the bottleneck that we have right now.

So we're addressing it at Long Bridge and addressing it in Alexandria.

With construction expected to begin late this year, early next year, you'll probably see more crews out there next year than this year.

So this shows a view of the existing tracks with three tracks and then, yep, and that's the four track that's going to be proposed.

This is just a view looking towards Braddock Metro Station and pretty much the entire corridor is going to be like that.

We're adding just, you know, track with some minor structures that are needed for this, some signal infrastructure, etc.

So it's not

It's not going to be heavy construction in this area, primarily for this project.

Next slide, please.

So, just the project timeline.

Our design's complete.

Permitting was completed earlier this year.

We're in property acquisition phase right now, and then construction to begin very soon.

I just want to step in for one second before Jason starts and just emphasize the fact that VPRA and Virginia Railway Express are working together very closely on all these projects.

So we'll be partners for each of these community advisory group meetings to present material and updates on all of these related projects.

Yeah, appreciate that, Meredith.

Good afternoon, I am Jason Bortz, Project Manager for a couple of projects that overlap within the footprint of these larger footprint VPRA projects.

I'm going to start here with the Crystal City Station project.

We have an existing station in Crystal City.

It is along the west side of the corridor, just kind of off the right-hand side of this image.

For folks familiar with the Crystal City Water Park, that's at the very right-hand edge of this image.

That station will actually be

relocated and closed.

This new one will be just immediately on the south side of the Crystal City Water Park instead of being immediately to the north of it.

The green path here is the proposed pedestrian underpass.

It will come out underneath the CSX track, then ramp up towards the platform, which is shown in pink.

and there will be a second south entrance which is shown here in green traversing through JBG's property.

It'll land out here on the plaza in front of their building.

There's a lot of coordination going on both with VPRA and CSX as far as track work, but there are also other projects happening in the immediate vicinity.

Shown here in orange going off the bottom is the CC to DCA project.

That's a pedestrian bridge over to the airport that is led by Arlington County.

To the south and off the left hand side of the image is a high level platform being coordinated by Amtrak.

Our VRE platforms are low level, so eight inches above top of rail.

Amtrak platforms are high level with level boarding, so there's no steps when you get out of the railcar.

So we just have different equipment necessitating different platform types.

And across Crystal Drive is the new second entrance to the Crystal City Metro Station.

Next slide, please.

So overall, we're driving two main things here, which is about efficiency of our operations.

The new platform will be longer than our existing platform.

So we have eight car train sets, but the existing platform is not long enough to open the doors on all the cars.

So people have to walk to a different rail car just to get off the train.

So we'll be addressing that problem.

We'll also be going from having one boarding edge to two boarding edges.

That will allow us to be more efficient and consistent with our timelines and keep everybody moving on time.

With the relocation, we'll also be closer to the Mount Vernon Trail Connector, closer to the new Metro entrance,

and with the connectivity to the airport, there's just going to be a significant enhancement to the intermodal transit connectivity.

Next slide, please.

So here's our current timeline.

We just got 90% design in March.

We are not targeting 100% design until early next year.

And that's really driven by our construction timeline.

So when we can physically start work is out in the middle of the middle of the CSX right of way in the middle of a deals Alexandria fourth track project.

So they need to get a substantial amount of that work done to create the physical space where

the new station will be constructed.

So that's really kind of driving the timeline.

So we're looking at construction starting in early 2027 with about a year and a half to two year construction timeline.

Next slide please.

So the Alexandria Station Project and King and Commonwealth Avenue Bridge Replacement Project started as two separate projects and we are delivering them as one.

So on this slide you actually can see both.

On the right hand side in the bright green are the rail structures over King Street and Commonwealth Avenue.

On the left hand side are in the kind of blue and purple predominantly are the improvements to the existing station.

Those are the approximate footprints of the platforms that we will be rehabilitating.

Noteworthy that the station project does not make modifications to the existing historic station.

Changes are predominantly to the platforms and off the side of the platforms.

And I'll show a little bit more on that in the next slide.

Next slide, please.

So we have three main things that we are looking to make improvements at.

First and foremost is removing the existing Acre crossing between the platforms.

It's a safety issue.

and we're actually using Federal Highway crossing safety funds related to that specifically for the removal of it.

As we do that, we'll also be replacing both platforms.

If you have been out to the station, you see yellow step boxes strewn about the platforms and those are to help people get on and off the trains and that is driven by the fact that the

The platforms are not vertically as high as they should be next to the track.

So we'll be fixing that as we go.

And we'll also be establishing boarding along track one, which is the easternmost track.

The existing island platform is, even though there's a track on either side of it, you can actually only board on the track on the west side.

will be resolving that.

You can actually see in one of the photos there's a fence between the edge of the platform and the track.

That fence will come out.

We'll be making some changes to both the platform and the track to allow it so we can board on that side.

Next slide, please.

The King and Commonwealth Bridge Replacement Project, the

VPRA under the fourth track project initially did an evaluation of these structures and found them to be in need of repair.

Ultimately, as they did an evaluation of the appropriate types of repair, it was determined that the most effective means was to repair by replacement.

This will ultimately reduce the need for maintenance and service disruptions.

and will ultimately enhance safety for both pedestrians and motorists traveling underneath the bridge as well as the crews operating upon the bridge.

Next slide, please.

This is just a little bit of a snapshot of what the bridge replacement will look like.

Ultimately, the King Street Bridge will be raised vertically, so there's a history of this

This bridge getting struck by box trucks and the like, so that we will have an improved clearance underneath it, as well as it will ultimately be a longer bridge or from the perspective of someone driving on King Street, a wider bridge, so it'd be more space on either side.

Commonwealth, one of the abutments, the northern abutment, stays in place.

There is a large utility right behind it, so we can't move that.

but the southern abutment will ultimately be moved back in a similar style to what's happening at King Street.

We are in close coordination with the city as they are looking to take advantage of the additional space beneath the bridge, so we're in coordination with them to make sure that

We deliver the area underneath the bridge in a way that's compatible with their vision for what would be kind of the approaches on either side of the bridge along both King Street and Commonwealth Avenue.

Next slide, please.

So we've been going through a lot of coordination over the last few months to take what were previously two separate projects and merge them into a single design set.

Those plan sheets are due imminently.

and we have recently completed permitting with the city and are working through property acquisition right now.

We are looking to advertise this one for construction in the next couple of weeks, hopefully with construction to start by the end of the calendar year, really kind of kicking off in the beginning of 2026 with approximately a two-year construction duration.

That's to you, Mark.

Yep, thank you, Jason.

So we went from these huge projects, the multi-billion dollar projects, to the smallest piece of our presentation today, which is the removal of the existing Telegraph Road bike pedestrian tunnel.

That's a stretch of called a bike tunnel, but you can see many of you might not even know that this exists.

It's a small tunnel that goes underneath the existing Wamata and CSX rail infrastructure.

Located, it ties into the development south of the tracks.

Wegmans is kind of the highlighted feature over there and ties into Woodard Park on the north side.

Next slide, please.

So here's the location of the existing tunnel and the two entrances in yellow that get you to the tunnel.

Again, Wooderfield off to the right-hand side of the screen and Mill Road and the Shopping Center and neighborhoods over there on the left-hand side.

Next, please.

So why are we going to have...

How did this come about today?

So as you saw, it's underneath a lot of rail infrastructure and we looked at ways of enhancing it, preserving it, and we ended up landing after a lot of discussion with both the city and CSX.

It's really going to have to be removed.

And you can see some of the pictures.

It's not in great condition.

It's been there since 1947.

It does not meet any of today's design standards.

And you can see the flooding in there on the bottom picture needs significant repair.

There's safety and visibility concerns.

You can't see from one end of the tunnel to the other as you're entering it.

So you don't know what's waiting on the other side of there for you.

It's definitely not ADA accessible and people who retrofit to make it accessible is precluded because of the small footprint that's on either side of the bridge of the tunnel.

It's not accessible to bikes just for starters with the stairs and then if you see the picture that's me measuring the roof of that.

If you're on a bike, you have a chance of actually hitting your head on the top of the tunnel.

And last but not least, it is extremely cost prohibitive, just very back of the napkin cost analysis.

It was cost prohibitive to do this for a very lightly used, as a generous term, access point.

But we didn't want to just close it and leave it and have people fend off on trying to find a way over between those two neighborhoods.

So we wanted to look at an option that we can make at least some improvements to the existing condition, assuming the tunnel was not going to be there.

So there's an open sidewalk up on Telegraph Road as a temporary alternative.

We're also going to build a new pedestrian access

Later this fall, I'm going to get a little more detailed on the Winterfield side of things.

We'll actually cut that trip down from using the existing Telegraph Road stations quite significantly.

And we'll show you how that works in just a second.

This includes the new shared path that we're going to be constructing on the south side at Winterfield, which I'll show you next slide.

So at Winterfield, on the far right blue arrow,

That's the existing sidewalk that's underneath the telegraph tunnel on the north side of the road.

We're going to use that loop road.

Right now you have to walk all the way up back towards the former Range Rover site to get to Witter Field.

We're actually going to poke a hole through the existing chain line fence there and construct a

probably a concrete path along the outfield of the existing baseball stadium, which will really cut that trip down from, it's approximately 20 minutes using Telegraph and Duke Street.

You'll be able to utilize the existing sidewalk underneath the bridge and takes about a 10-minute walk to get to the water field by the simple construction of this about 400-foot path at the south side of the stopwatch.

Next slide, please.

I believe that's actually it for us.

So again, we'll be answering any questions on the whole fork truck area projects at the end of the presentation.

All right, well, many thanks to our speakers.

I want to make sure we have time for Q&A, so I'll just briefly go through this portion, but we just want to highlight the fact that we have been doing quite a lot of community and stakeholder outreach and we can plan to continue.

Some of the methods that we use are we will be establishing a project hotline,

for our Northern Virginia and DC projects.

We have a digital newsletter that we send out periodically, so we encourage you to sign up for that on our website.

Our website is filled with project fact sheets, transportation advisories.

We will be posting physical signage on site to help guide people and provide information about what's happening.

And we will continue to hold community events and set up tables at events throughout your neighborhoods.

And we want to hear from you.

One of the key roles that we see for the Community Advisory Group is for you to help guide us in

Identifying places where we should be going to talk to people who will be impacted by these projects and benefit from them long-term.

Next slide.

And just to highlight that we will soon have on our website a construction disruptions map that will allow you to enter a specific location, place you live, place you work, an area that you travel in so that you can stay up to date over time with any disruptions that may be occurring as a result of our work.

in DC, Arlington, and Alexandria.

And this will actually be live for all of our projects across the state of Virginia.

All right, and these are the places to sign up for our newsletter and to keep in touch with us and to reach us if you have any questions outside of these meetings.

We do our best to respond promptly and personally to all those requests.

And of course, social media is a great way to keep up with us as well.

Let's move into Q&A.

I just want to make sure we have plenty of time for people to ask questions.

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention we also have links and information for the VRE projects that you've heard about today.

All right, Erin, I'll hand it to you.

Great.

Well, we just wanted to let you know that if you'd like to ask a question, you can put in the chat.

So if you hover over your screen, there's some buttons at the bottom.

One says Chat.

One says React.

And once you press React, it opens up that thing where you can raise your hand.

Feel free to come off mute and put yourself on video if you feel like it.

And we will start with the raised hand.

which I'm looking for the name.

Feel free to jump off.

Hi, a couple things.

Meredith, you directed me to Joe Schwartz about, I guess, six months, nine months ago.

Are you now the person to get in touch with questions?

Obviously, I'll try to use your

If you don't know who to reach out to, it's always fine to reach out to me or to the VPRA, contact us at VPRA email address or phone number.

If you're interested, if you know that you're interested in a VRE project, then Joe Schwartz is a great place to start.

Okay.

I will do that because unfortunately I'm a little tech challenged and trying to figure out how to get stuff out of the chat and otherwise getting information.

I don't know, for instance, where your web, what the URL for your website is.

Yep.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Jason, there's a question in the chat about expected reductions or temporary cuts in service at the Alexandria Station when construction begins.

Yeah, sure, I can address that.

So no, there are no plans to make any cuts to service.

We might see some modifications in terms of maybe running trains marginally earlier or marginally later.

Marginally later you can imagine if we moved all the AM trains say 15 minutes earlier and all the PM trains 15 minutes later, that creates an extra 30 minutes in the middle of the day for contractor work.

That's not the definitive schedule there, that's just an example.

Thank you.

There's a question in the chat about sharing the presentation that Meredith has responded to that the PowerPoint will be posted as well as the video on the website longbridgeproject.com.

Yes, and that will link you.

If you go to longbridgeproject.com, that will take you to the VPRA website.

I can put that

This is just a more direct way to get to the information.

Okay.

John, did we get to all of your questions?

I see your hand is still up, which is not a problem.

Don't worry about the tech side.

Okay, yeah, thank you.

I actually neglected to ask the second question that I had, which is that, as I understand it, for the bridge replacement, I live in Rosemont, which is the neighborhood on one side of both of the bridges.

So that's why we're particularly interested in the bridge replacement in Alexandria over Commonwealth Avenue and King Street.

My understanding is that the

All of the work to take place in 2026 will be off roadway so it will not disrupt traffic for us.

That's correct.

Yeah, the way the bridges are designed, as you were able to see in the exhibit that I had up previously, the new abutments are further back away.

Yeah, what I have is in the first quarter of 2027, there'll be a one month roadway closure during the replacement of the east spans over King Street and Commonwealth.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's a, I would say that's a reasonable placeholder, if you will.

So timeline wise, that's when we anticipate

doing the replacement, right?

The exact duration, we anticipate it to be less than one month.

But we put one month to be you know, to make sure that we were didn't we didn't want to over promise and you know, not not achieve it.

But ultimately the details on that, we're looking to go get a contractor here in the immediate future, have them on by the end of the year.

And then also in the third quarter of 2027, I showed that that would be the, there would be your rough estimate as a third month roadway closure to replace the Westmans over King Street and Commonwealth.

And basically, I just wanted to get a confirmation that that's your current estimate of what it is.

That should not be the case.

I might have misheard you.

So in both the first quarter and the third quarter, we should anticipate approximately one month

a one-month outage in each of those quarters.

The east span is a little bit more intricate just because you're wedged between the active CSX tracks and the active WMATA corridor.

The west side is a little bit different because it's not bounded in that way.

It does leave it open for actually kind of constructing in place or things like that less accelerated techniques, but ultimately we'll be looking to keep that as short as possible, but there are some trade-offs that we have to work through with both with the city in terms of, you know, we can

If we take both roads out at the same time, we can replace them both simultaneously in a shorter duration.

So more pain, shorter duration.

Or we can do one than the other, but that drags things out and makes it take longer.

So I misunderstood then when I thought it was, I had heard three months for the replacement of the west spans.

Is that correct?

Correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

No.

There might be, um,

I realize all this is as best you know.

Yes, yes, right.

Nothing of any sustained nature, right?

So, for example, there might be some, we might need to do some repaving along the edge of the roadway, right, if areas are disturbed when we take the abutments out, things like that.

Okay, thank you very much.

I appreciate all the information.

Hi, this is Morgan.

I did send a question, but I might have missed it because I'm trying to do too many things.

So we will be posting it on our website.

We'll be posting it on the Long Bridge Project website, which is part of the VPRA website.

It's www.longbridgeproject.com.

The website in my email?

We can also, you know what?

I will email all the attendees with a link to the slide.

No, no, no.

It's so good.

Everyone's been asking.

So I think the best thing to do is to email a link to everyone.

Okay.

So we'll make sure it's easier.

If for some reason you don't get it, just reach out to me.

I'm happy.

Thank you.

Many thanks, Meredith.

Okay.

Good.

Okay.

We'll do that.

All right.

It looks like we've answered everyone's questions.

I know we've come up on time.

We had a lot of material to present today.

Thank you very much for joining.

We plan to hold these quarterly.

So in about three months, we'll be back in touch with the next meeting date and agenda.

And we hope that you'll join us again.

In the meantime, please join our social media feeds.

Please join our newsletters.

Link up on our website or you can always just email me directly with any questions.

Thank you.