Here’s a video taken Tuesday by a biker on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail in Northern Virginia who encountered a car with a California license plate using it as a road. This is not legal.
(Skip to the 50-second mark in the video to see the biker encounter the car.)
This is at least the fourth time since June that a car has driven down the trail, Vienna Patch reports. This includes a McLean woman who was allegedly drunk and a Florida man who let his GPS override his common sense.
A black SUV was also spotted leaving the trail in Vienna, Va. Sunday, according to Patch.
This raises the obvious question: What can be done to prevent driving on what’s clearly a bike and pedestrian path? The obvious solution would be to put up gates, like the one recently placed at the entrance of the Capital Crescent Trail.
But as Patch pointed out, erecting gates doesn’t sound like a great idea to the head of Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling. “Let’s hope no one suggests gates on the W&OD Trail crossings which we think would be extremely dangerous for cyclists, not to mention inconvenient for riders of unconventional bikes such as trikes, long wheelbase recumbents, tandems, and others,” FABB chairman Bruce Wright wrote in a blog post after the Florida-GPS incident.
Request for comment from Karl Mohle, W&OD Trail park manager, about possible solutions has not been returned.