Greening Jefferson Avenue, Richmond, Virginia

In 2014, the city of Richmond, Virginia, applied to EPA's Greening America's Capitals Program to create a plan for Jefferson Avenue that would help remedy confusing and unsafe traffic patterns caused by the street's alignment. The primary goal is to improve the safety of pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit users, but the city also wants to improve stormwater management and spur economic revitalization.

EPA's team of federal agency staff and consultants engaged city stakeholders and residents in developing design options that could help meet the city's goals. The design options include: 

• Adding bicycle lanes and narrowing travel lanes. 
• Incorporating roundabouts and traffic circles to calm traffic. 
• Creating curb extensions and perpendicular crosswalks to shorten crosswalk length. 
• Adding rain gardens throughout the corridor to reduce stormwater runoff. 
• Reconfiguring some intersections to make pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle traffic patterns more clear. 
• Creating a new gateway to the neighborhood at Jefferson Park. 
• Engaging the community and property owners in developing a vision for redevelopment of a vacant and underused parcel of land. 
• Creating new green spaces for community use. 
• Providing porous pavements in parking lanes and some minor streets. 

These strategies are part of an overall design concept that could improve safety, convenience, and comfort for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, and drivers in the neighborhood. These improvements, along with additional green space and redevelopment of vacant land, could prime the neighborhood for new investment and economic growth.

• Greening America's Capitals, Richmond, VA (PDF)(45 pp, 6 MB, 2015)