Earlier this year, we wrote about how WABA and community partners—supported by grassroots advocates like you—helped turn the tide against Dominion Energy’s destructive clear-cutting plans along the W&OD Trail. Our persistent and highly visible agitation effectively altered the political and economic calculus, and Dominion quietly but distinctly changed course and returned to the negotiating table with NOVA Parks to hammer out a deal.
Public pressure campaigns are probably the most well-known tools available to organizations like WABA. We rouse our supporters to make noise—at a rally, a ride, via an avalanche of emails, or a block of testimony. But it’s not the only tool in our toolbox, and not the only way WABA is able to effectively marshall support. Below is an advocacy success story that played out more quietly but no less consequentially—the passage of Fairfax County’s Active Transportation & Trails Plan.
The background
Way back in the summer of 2020, Fairfax County began work to update its long-in-the-tooth Countywide Bicycle Master Plan and Countywide Trails Plan. Over the course of the next four years, FCDOT staff developed a strategic vision for active transportation, completed a thorough inventory of existing and planned infrastructure, and spun out important related initiatives like a Safe Streets for All Program (adopted in 2022, but as yet unfunded) and updated Bicycle Parking Guidelines (adopted in 2024).
In 2024, a first draft of the newly consolidated Active Transportation & Trails Plan (ATTP) was readied, including a new combined network map and comprehensive toolkit to guide future trail and bike lane development. Staff took these elements on a robust public outreach tour across the County, taking in all your questions, comments, and suggestions. We of course celebrated the initiative from the start, evidence that Fairfax was truly preparing to turn the corner on decades of car-centric planning. We encouraged advocates like you to ask for—and FCDOT staff to deliver—more connectivity and world-class standards.
By 2025, the network map and toolkit had been sufficiently vetted, edited, and refined. The final step: incorporating the new Active Transportation & Trails Plan and its elements via an amendment to the County’s Comprehensive Plan. Cue another round of public engagement, more narrowly focused on esoteric amendment language and final tweaks to the map. By December, final edits were in, the comment portal closed, and ATTP seemed on a clear path to endorsement by the Planning Commission and finally the Board of Supervisors.
A speedbump
In addition to continuing to monitor ATTP as it progressed through the final rounds of public engagement, WABA spent much of 2025 working closely with environmental, bicycling, and smart growth community partners on the aforementioned campaign to halt Dominion’s destructive actions along the W&OD. Together, our organizations rekindled a dormant trails working group within the larger Fairfax Healthy Communities (FHC) network to better coordinate our actions. As our W&OD campaign began to ebb in the fall, the group’s attention turned to other trail-related happenings, namely, the impending adoption of the ATTP. And it was then that concern emerged among some of our heretofore allies. More bicycling and walking connectivity are important goals…but how will the new plan impact the development of trails through open and green spaces?
Now, concern about the impact of trails and trail development on the environment wasn’t new (or limited to Fairfax). Such concerns had notably flared around the Cinder Bed Road Bikeway; the earlier iteration of FHC’s trails working group was launched in fact to specifically open dialogue, ease tensions, and seek common ground around trail development in open spaces. While we made some progress, Cinder Bed remains a sticking point to this day. Still, we hoped that our newfound camaraderie—infused with the sweet taste of our shared victory on the W&OD—might offer a path to mutual agreement, the ultimate goal of FHC.
Building consensus
So we began meeting to discuss our individual and shared priorities, what was (or wasn’t) included in the ATTP draft, and core concerns. On one side: active transportation-focused groups like WABA, Fairfax Alliance for Better Bicycling, and the Coalition for Smarter Growth with a principal desire to see the new plan adopted without further delay or additional bureaucratic hurdles within the trail development process. On the other: environmental-focused groups like Nature Forward, Friends of Holmes Run, Sierra Club Great Falls Group, and the Northern Virginia Bird Alliance with a principal desire to avert siting of trails through green spaces without first understanding the scope of environmental impacts as with Cinder Bed (wherein a globally rare species was discovered only after the project was designed, funded, and ultimately too far along to change course).
While FCDOT staff had done a high-level environmental review during the development of the consolidated trail network map—removing a number of planned segments with anticipated routing challenges—environmental advocates felt more thorough review was warranted. And while more context-sensitive design is specifically prioritized for Park Authority and stream-valley trails (a unique Fairfax County designation), design priorities for trails through other open spaces appeared murky. Environmentalists simply couldn’t fully endorse the plan draft as-is and were prepared to say as much in testimony to the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors.
Concerned with how Commissioners and Supervisors might interpret dissonant testimonies from our usually-unified coalition and the risk our division might pose to passage, we tentatively landed on a compromise: a shared but contingent statement of support. Our organizations would agree to individually testify in favor of ATTP in broad strokes while making good-faith calls for limited but meaningful tweaks to the environmental review process. We wouldn’t look to rework the entirety of the proposed comprehensive plan text, but instead seek ways to underscore the principle—shared by all—that environmental impacts should be identified earlier in the process and final routing and design of trails through green spaces should be context-sensitive.
Our thoughtful, nuanced testimonies—loosely coordinated at the eleventh hour—seemed to resonate with Planning Commissioners, who made an unusual decision to delay endorsement by one week so that they and FCDOT staff could convene and discuss the feasibility of addressing our concerns. By keeping those asks limited and constructive—and by speaking with one voice—we presented as reasonable problem-solvers rather than rabble-rousers, contrarians, or insatiable cranks. The result: a delayed but unanimous vote in favor of slightly amended text by the Planning Commission on March 18th.
Final sprint
Having put so much time and effort into achieving our mutual understanding, our coalition certainly wasn’t going to be content sitting back and letting final consideration by the Board of Supervisors play out as it may—we wanted to make sure Fairfax leaders clearly understood the stakes and the context. So we took our story directly to them. WABA (representing the active transportation contingent) and Nature Forward (representing environmentalists) invited each Supervisor and their staffs to meet and discuss ATTP, quietly arranging sitdowns with seven of ten offices during the brief window ahead of the Board’s May meeting.
With Supervisors Herrity, Sizemore Heizer, Smith, Palchik, Jimenez, Bierman, and Chairman McKay, we discussed ATTP’s importance to our broad coalition and its potential limitations; the history of our contention and our framework for eventual agreement; the direct connection between our advocacy and the Planning Commission’s decision to delay but ultimately approve; and why the Board should now feel confident in wholeheartedly endorsing the plan.
We didn’t hold a rally, make signs, or flood their inboxes. We simply showed up honestly and demonstrated what compromise and problem solving can look like in action. If Supervisors had any lingering questions or concerns, we strove to address them and offer a path to assuagement, to peace of mind that the plan was a decidedly good one.
When WABA, Nature Forward and the rest of our coalition testified—all in favor—one last time before the full Board, we could be certain that the majority of Supervisors knew how much work had gone into it and they could be certain of the broader community’s enthusiastic support for ATTP. That the bulk of clarifying questions at the hearing originated from those Supervisors we hadn’t been able to meet with underscored that our quiet conversations with the rest had hit the mark.
On May 5th, 2026, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to amend the Fairfax County Comprehensive Plan to incorporate the Active Transportation & Trails Plan.