Connecting Rosslyn - Transportation Update (PUDOs)
NEW - 2026-07-20 - Read county board candidate responses to our PUDO points HERE before you vote!
You've seen it: a delivery van idling in a travel lane with its hazards on, an Uber stopped mid-block while a passenger digs for the door handle, a moving truck straddling the bike lane on a Saturday morning. Behind them, a bus, a cyclist, and a fire engine all wait for the same few feet of pavement.
This is daily life in Rosslyn, and it isn't an accident. It's the predictable result of building tomorrow's neighborhoods with yesterday's rules.
Rules written before the apps
Arlington's Site Plan 4.1 standards, the framework shaping how major developments get designed, were largely written before Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Amazon, and same-day-everything reshaped how we move and receive goods. No one planned for the constant stream of rideshares, couriers, and package deliveries now pulling up to every building, all day, every day.
So that activity went where it was never meant to go: the public street. Loading, drop-offs, and pickups spill into travel lanes, creating congestion and genuine safety conflicts among pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, drivers, and emergency responders. These aren't simply enforcement failures—they're structural, the byproduct of how a dense neighborhood now receives goods, rides, and services.
The North Rosslyn Civic Association isn't anti-growth. We support density, walkability, and transit-oriented development. We simply want new buildings designed for how people actually live in 2026.
What we're asking for
Our policy briefing makes four straightforward recommendations:
Modernize Site Plan 4.1 within the year. New residential and mixed-use buildings should handle rideshare, drop-offs, deliveries, moving trucks, sanitation, and service operations on-site.
Make developers prove it. Before approval, applicants should show that delivery trucks, garbage trucks, and emergency vehicles can all operate without blocking the street.
Use designs that already work. Porte-cochères, internal loading docks, circular drives, dedicated rideshare staging, and package-locker rooms already exist in Arlington. Let's make them the norm, not the exception.
Stop treating public streets as loading docks. When building operations get pushed into travel lanes, the whole community absorbs the congestion and the risk.
Why now?
The window is closing fast. Rosslyn, Ballston, Clarendon, Pentagon City, and Crystal City are all seeing record development. Once a building is approved and built, fixing its loading and curb problems becomes enormously expensive, or impossible. Every project approved under the old rules locks in avoidable problems for decades.
Smaller fixes can also ease today's conditions: smarter curb management, clearer pick-up/drop-off signage, dedicated loading zones, and closer coordination with building operators. Arlington should also revisit pre-COVID commercial-space assumptions that no longer match how we shop, work, and order in.
The bottom line
Arlington's congestion isn't a growth problem: it's a standards problem. Updating Site Plan 4.1 is one of the most practical, cost-effective steps the County can take to improve safety, ease congestion, protect emergency access, and ensure the next generation of buildings works for the people who live around them.
The way we live has changed. Our planning standards should too.
A special thanks to Robert Moss, President of the Pierce Condominium Homeowner Association for his suggestions and review.
Read NRCA’s full policy brief, here.