The Town of Herndon is considering a number of changes to Bennett Street intended to make walking and cycling around the local high school safer.
Mike Shindledecker, the town’s transportation engineer, unveiled a preferred concept at a community meeting in the Herndon High School cafeteria on Wednesday (May 13) that would narrow the four-lane road to one travel lane in each direction.
Bennett Street, an approximately 0.2-mile-long road that extends from Dranesville Road to Kingstream Circle, would be reconfigured with a central two-way left-turn lane, a designated left-turn lane for eastbound drivers going into the school’s west entrance, and a pull-out area for Fairfax Connector buses.
The proposal also incorporates concrete pedestrian refuges into three crosswalks, including one at Dranesville Road, one that would be added across Bennett at the west entrance and an existing crosswalk near the east entrance that Shindledecker said “needs to be fixed” after getting altered during a renovation of Herndon High completed in 2021.
“We don’t love midblock crosswalks, but we know students cross there,” Shindledecker said of the west driveway. That is the “most popular spot” for students to cross, even though there’s currently no marked crossing, as well as the point that sees the most conflict between drivers and pedestrians.
Other changes under consideration include new signage to draw attention to the pedestrian crossings, formal restrictions on parking, plastic bollards to create sharper turns that force drivers to slow down, and timing adjustments to the Dranesville Road traffic signal that the town hopes will enable all school buses to exit Bennett Street at dismissal in one round.
Several community members, many of them residents of the Kingstream homes that encircle the school property, stressed the importance of improving the signal timing. They worried that the lane removals will exacerbate traffic backups, leading to more drivers traveling through their neighborhood instead of taking Dranesville Road.
While acknowledging that the queues that build up when students are arriving and leaving can be painful to navigate, Shindledecker noted that those periods of congestion are typically “very brief,” and through most of the day, Bennett Street actually has “excess capacity.”
Over 40% of the 3,500 vehicles that travel on Bennett Street per day are present during Herndon High’s arrival and dismissal times, according to an analysis conducted by the town with support from a Virginia Department of Transportation consultant. In comparison, Dranesville Road carries an estimated 16,000 vehicles per day.
Because the backups are mostly the result of people waiting to turn into or out of the school, the analysis indicates that the proposed road reconfiguration should improve pedestrian safety and slow drivers down, reducing crashes, without worsening traffic conditions, Shindledecker said.
“I understand taking away a lane seems like it’ll make things worse, but there’s only one lane turning left anyway,” he said. “… The intersection controls congestion, not the number of lanes.”
When asked why the town can’t just change signal timing without removing lanes, Shindledecker noted that altering the traffic signal won’t by itself improve safety, which is the primary goal of the project.
“That’s our number one priority,” he emphasized.
According to the Town of Herndon, there were 12 crashes in the Herndon High School area, including four on Bennett Street, between 2019 and 2024. Two crashes resulted in serious injuries to pedestrians — a student and a crossing guard — while in a third, a cyclist sustained visible injuries.
Those three crashes all involved school-related traffic, the VDOT consultant confirmed.
Herndon staff began meeting with Fairfax County personnel and the high school’s administrators in fall 2024 to discuss possible safety improvements.
The study team also met with the town’s Youth Advisory Committee that December. Among other comments, students on the committee reported feeling so unsafe using the eastern crosswalk near Kingstream Circle — which no longer directly connects to the curb and is near a curve in the road — that they would “prefer to run across four lanes of traffic,” Shindledecker said.
The concept presented at Wednesday’s meeting was developed based on that feedback.
Aiming to eliminate crash-related fatalities and serious injuries in the next 12 years under a Roadway Safety Action Plan adopted by the town council on April 28, Herndon is planning a second phase of the study that would evaluate Dranesville Road from the high school property to Herndon Parkway.
For now, though, staff hope to implement short-term improvements on Bennett Street before the next school year begins in August. Despite that tight time frame, the proposed concept isn’t set in stone, Shindledecker told community members.
In addition to incorporating feedback from the meeting, the town and VDOT will consider comments sent by email to publicworks@herndon-va.gov and phone to 703-435-6853 until May 31.
“We need to do something to improve pedestrian safety,” Shindledecker said. “What that looks like can change.”
