Could Scott Circle be the next Dupont Circle?

Scott Circle is the worst of downtown’s five main roundabouts. The roads are a hostile mess that pedestrians avoid at all costs, and the green spaces are chopped into such small and disconnected fragments that there’s not a useful park among them. There isn’t even a single marked crosswalk leading in to the circle itself.

In it’s current form Scott Circle is essentially a piece of highway infrastructure plopped in the middle of a walking city. It’s got to go. Luckily, there’s a workable model for what to do with it just half a mile down the street.

Mount Vernon Square offers a potential solution. Rather than allowing all the converging streets to cut through the park, auto traffic is routed around the square, as if the whole thing were a rectangular-shaped roundabout.

Theoretically, the same could be accomplished at Scott Circle like so:

[Continue reading this piece by Dan Malouff at BeyondDC.com.]

Dan Malouff is an Arlington County transportation planner who blogs independently at BeyondDC.com. The Local Blog Network is a group of bloggers from around the D.C. region who have agreed to make regular contributions to All Opinions Are Local.