Exploring Inroads for Tysons Foot Traffic

It calls for new buildings to be set closer to one another and to the sidewalks, as in a traditional city.

The county is also studying a raft of developer proposals to permit denser, more urban building. Opponents say this will choke the area with traffic; advocates say Tysons is the most logical place in Northern Virginia's economy to accommodate growth.

"Workers and residents will be able to do everyday errands, or meet a friend for dinner and a movie, without getting into an auto," the county plan for Tysons says. "Out-of-town visitors will be able to take rapid rail from Dulles International or Reagan National Airport to Tysons Corner, stay in a hotel, and attend a convention in a trade center: they should be able to take clients to dinner or relax at the local health club, all without renting a car."

But in the view of many planners -- and anyone who has ever navigated Route 7 on foot -- that evolution won't be easy.

"It's good to make big plans, but the challenge is formidable," said Gerrit Knaap, director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland. "I don't know of any other place in the country that has achieved that kind of metamorphosis in a place of that size."

When it comes to building cities, he said, "it is better to get things right the first time. It's much more difficult to retrofit."

Including its frontage roads, Route 7 is wider than some of the best-known streets in the world's biggest cities, and that alone spells trouble.

"The problem with having it so wide is that it becomes an inhuman fast-paced thing that no one would ever want to walk along," said Allan B. Jacobs, an urban planning professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has spent much of his career studying streets and is the author of Great Streets.

Narrowing Route 7 might make pedestrians more comfortable, and VDOT planners are studying new configurations to accomplish this, though they are loath to make changes that would create more tie-ups on already jammed roads.

The issue of walkers vs. drivers on Route 7 has come up before.

In response to neighborhood advocates who asked for more pedestrian signals, which cost roughly $25,000 to install, VDOT planners performed a study and they concluded that adding other signals would create unacceptable traffic delays.

Assuming that the average adult walks four feet per second, a pedestrian crossing the central portion of Route 7 -- not including the frontage roads -- blocks the thoroughfare's traffic for about 30 seconds. Tysons Corner traffic backups are already notorious without taking a half-minute of green time away whenever a pedestrian punches a button.

"We studied the effects of putting pedestrian lights at other locations," said Claudia Llana, a VDOT engineer. "The delays would have been higher."

Some of the few who dared to cross the roadway last week had little but scorn for what they interpret as a careless attitude toward pedestrians.

"Yeah, 'People: Who cares?' " said Geoffrey Lindstrom, 54, a garden designer from Arlington who was walking around after dropping off his car for service at a nearby dealer. "I wouldn't be out here on foot unless I had to be."