Photo by Cliff on Flickr.

Arlington County board member Christopher Zimmerman will step down early next year to join Smart Growth America. During his 18 years in office, Zimmerman was an outspoken board advocate for public transportation and smart growth.

Zimmerman will become Vice President for Economic Development at Smart Growth America, a national advocacy group for sustainable transportation and development practices. In a press release, the organization said that Zimmerman will “focus on the relationships between smart growth strategies and the economic and fiscal health of communities.”

A board member since 1996, Zimmerman also served on many regional planning boards, such as the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, the WMATA Board of Directors, the VRE board, and the regional Transportation Planning Board. Arlington will hold a special election to fill his seat next spring.

In a statement yesterday, Zimmerman noted that when he was first elected in 1996, now-common ideas in Arlington like traffic calming, bike lanes, and transit-oriented development didn’t exist. Two of Zimmerman’s signature accomplishments were helping to create the ART bus, which now has 13 routes in the county, and the Neighborhood Conservation Program, which provides money to individual neighborhoods to fund improvements and has brought sidewalks and streetlights to many Arlington neighborhoods.

More recently, Zimmerman has been an ardent proponent of the Columbia Pike Streetcar, part of a the larger Columbia Pike Initiative. That effort established a form-based code to turn the formerly suburban strip into a compact, walkable urban neighborhood, and set greater standards for preserving affordable housing in the area. These helped make Arlington an example for Smart Growth across the region and nationwide.

During his 13 years on the WMATA Board, Zimmerman relentlessly pushed for better service and for more rider-friendly policies. He was the strongest advocate for open data at Metro, which utimately helped convince the agency to publish its schedules, routes, and real-time vehicle locations in open, public formats. He also fought widening I-66 and I-395 and other efforts by the state to push more commuter traffic through Arlington against the county’s wishes.

Zimmerman’s departure means that’s there will be a special election to replace Zimmerman this spring. It’s likely that the Columbia Pike streetcar and issues relating to transportation and land use will play a big part in the campaign as they have in previous board races. Whoever hopes to replace them will have big shoes to fill as Mr. Zimmerman’s influence will loom large in Arlington and greater Washington for years. Smart growth or public transportation advocates have their work cut out for them if they want to support a candidate in Arlington who is dedicated to those issues as much as Zimmerman has for the past 18 years.

Chris Zimmerman is one of the reasons why these debates happen in Arlington today. Now, we will see if his work at Smart Growth America will make this conversation more prominent on a national level.