Falls Church and Fairfax County to partner on shared-use path for Shreve Road

Design work is slated to begin this spring on a new shared-use path on Shreve Road just outside Falls Church City’s boundaries.

The Falls Church City Council approved an agreement on Monday (Feb. 12) to work with Fairfax County and provide funds for the project, which will add a 10-foot-wide path for bicyclists and pedestrians from the Route 7 (Leesburg Pike/West Broad Street) intersection to the Washington & Old Dominion Trail.

Other improvements will include a 6-foot-wide planting strip along Shreve Road, a crosswalk near the intersection of Shreve and Gordon Road intersection, benches near the W&OD Trail entrance, and stormwater management and drainage, Falls Church staff said in a report to the council.

Because the site is outside city limits, the county will be responsible for the project’s design and construction under the agreement.

“The concept is pretty simple and it’s pretty well-defined in the grant agreement, so we don’t think there’s going to be some curveball,” City Manager Wyatt Shields said at a Feb. 5 council work session. “…We’ve been working quite well with Fairfax County staff on this, so we feel very confident that we’re going to get what we want.”

The “West Falls Church Access to Transit and Multimodal Connectivity” project, as it’s formally known, is part of a larger effort by both the county and the city to add pedestrian and bicycle facilities connecting the W&OD Trail, the West Falls Church Metro station and Falls Church’s West End.

This component also “addresses a safety need” after a pedestrian was killed by a truck driver at the Shreve Road and Hickory Street intersection in 2019, according to a summary from the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority, which awarded $6.9 million to the city in 2020 to fund the project.

According to the staff report, Falls Church is also coordinating with the county and the Virginia Department of Transportation on the design of planned improvements around the Haycock Road side of the West Broad Street intersection.

Farther east on Haycock Road, a shared-use trail will be built over I-66 by developers in conjunction with a transformation of the West Falls Church Metro station’s parking lots into a mixed-use neighborhood.

Development has also been approved at Virginia Tech’s West Falls Church campus and is under construction on the city’s former high school site.

The Shreve Road project agreement still needs to be approved by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to take action on April 16, according to Falls Church staff.

Per the staff report, the project is expected to be in design from this spring into fall 2025, putting it on track to begin construction in the fall of 2026 and finish in spring or summer 2027.