The narrow but popular Mount Vernon Trail could be widened as soon as 2026.

The seven-foot-wide trail was built in the 1970s when few standards existed for building paved multiuse trails. Fifty years later, it’s exploded in popularity with more than a million users a year. The crush of crowds leaves it too cramped for two people to walk side by side with others passing the other way. A study on whether to expand the trail noted 225 bike and pedestrian crashes between 2006 and 2010.

Now officials are looking to widen the trail another four feet for a five-mile stretch from Rosslyn to Old Town Alexandria. The Virginia Commonwealth Transportation Board was briefed on the project Tuesday. The project will also rebuild and widen three trail bridges, realign four intersections and realign a tight “s” curve at Dangerfield Island.

Virginia is paying $29 million of the project’s estimated $33 million price tag. The rest will be paid for by the National Park Service for the portion of the trail on Columbia Island – the area with the traffic circle outside of Arlington Cemetery – which is technically inside the District of Columbia.

The comment period on NPS’ environmental assessment for the project is open through Wednesday night.

At the board meeting, some commissioners complained that Virginia shouldn’t be paying for a trail on federal park property.

Laura Sellers, who represents the Fredericksburg district said that she doesn’t believe that people aren’t using the trail as part of their daily commutes to the extent that the NPS has described. She said the money, which was in a designated fund for Northern Virginia, could be better used elsewhere.

Northern Virginia’s board member Mary Hynes noted that the trail is one of the highest used trails in the area for both recreation and commuting and is a good return on investment. She noted Amazon’s second headquarters and a new Virginia Tech campus are opening along the trail and that trail counter data shows a distinct commuting pattern.

“We make choices about these layers of opportunity – these options for people to move – and we’ve been making them for 50 years… making it possible for Northern Virginia’s economy to thrive,” she said. “But if we did not have commuting paths for bikes, if we did not have that robust transit system, this whole Commonwealth would grind to a halt.

“And so our region needs to be able to put these things on the table and get state support for them.”

Transportation Secretary Shep Miller, from Hampton Roads, said he was concerned about recreation “working its way more deeply into transportation dollars” but noted that this trail is not as recreational compared with other trail facilities in the state. 

Judd Isbell, director of the Friends of the Mount Vernon Trail group, welcomes the expansion and has been advocating for 14-feet wide in high-use areas.

“We’re really excited about the work that (NPS) is doing to rebuild and widen the Mount Vernon Trail,” he said. “The original segment was built by volunteers nearly 51 years ago before trail design standards existed.

“I don’t think anyone could have imagined at the time that the trail would have over a million users a year.”

The volunteer group does regular repair work and also tries to reclaim some of the trail, cutting back weeds that grow onto the narrow trail.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board is set to vote on the funding next month and set up an agreement with the Park Service, Arlington County, and VDOT.

This story was updated to reflect the timeline of the project.