Advocates are trying to make walking safer in the area around the White Flint Metro Station in North Bethesda by posting safety tips in highly trafficked areas such as sidewalks and crosswalks.

Walking in the area, called the Pike District, is relatively new, said Amy Ginsburg, executive director of the Friends of White Flint. “Even as close as a year and a half ago, you’d rarely see people walking. Now you see people walking all the time,” Ginsburg said Wednesday. “Because of that change, we decided we needed an emphasis on pedestrian safety.”

Since 2010, planners envisioned that White Flint one day would be more walkable, where transit, residential units, services and jobs would be centralized.

Pete Tomao, Montgomery County Advocacy Manager for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, called it “suburban retrofitting.”Because of the transition, the Friends of White Flint wants to make the area as walkable as possible as quickly as possible, Ginsburg said.

“The easier we can make it for people to walk here, the more vibrant this area will become,” she said.

The dozens of signs on utility poles around Rockville Pike are the most visible part of the Pike District Pedestrian Safety Campaign, launched this week by Ginsburg’s group and the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Tomao said the signs have 10 different slogans. One near a pedestrian signal takes a spin off Salt-N-Pepa: “You have to push the button, push it real good.”

One for wider streets says, “There’s no crosswalk here. We wish there was.”

The campaign aims to highlight pedestrian-friendly improvements, educate pedestrians on the safest way to navigate the neighborhood, and invite people to share their own suggestions for making the Pike District more pedestrian-friendly.

A community meeting is planned for at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 25 in the White Flint area around Metro (the location hasn’t been set yet) to discuss options. In the meantime, Ginsburg offered several possible solutions.

She said bushes need to be trimmed along sidewalks. And crosswalks need to be more visible.

“Cars aren’t expecting pedestrians,” Ginsburg said. “That’s not the habit everybody has in the White Flint area.”

There needs to be sufficient lighting for sidewalks as well as for streets, she said. Because the blocks through the Pike District are long, mid-block crossings are needed.

“This isn’t a car versus pedestrian issue. I think oftentimes it is seen as a win-lose argument. And it’s not. Everyone wins on this one,” she said.

To learn more about the campaign or to get involved, visit pikedistrictpeds.org.

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A political, civic and business coalition launched a campaign Monday to build support for what one leader described as “transformative” change along traffic-choked Interstate 270 in Maryland.

For their campaign kickoff, the group was savvy about picking a backdrop: They positioned themselves atop a slope in Germantown leading down to the highway. Through the wrap-up of their news conference about 9:15 a.m., the southbound traffic remained heavy and slow heading to the Capital Beltway, 16 miles away.

The coalition wants to revive dormant state studies that could lead to the addition of express toll lanes, which could manage traffic and also provide lane space and financial support for a regional rapid bus system. The regional buses would provide a limited stop service between Frederick and Rock Spring Park in the North Bethesda area, offering connections along the way to other transit and bus services. The coalition also supports construction of a local rapid bus system, known as the Corridor Cities Transitway, to link centers of activity between Shady Grove and Clarksburg.

Also part of this long-range plan for the corridor are a variety of other transit, cycling, pedestrian and road upgrades.

The costs of this long-range program would be in the billions of dollars. Supporters are looking to the express lane tolling as a key source of revenue. Several advocates pointed to Virginia’s network of high-occupancy toll lanes, partly financed by enlisting private partners to build the HOT lanes in exchange for the right to collect the toll revenue.

“It’s time for us to think of this situation in a transformative manner,” said Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.), the honorary chairman of Fix270NOW. Incremental fixes won’t work for such a big people-moving problem, he said. “We’ve been thinking small-ball for too long.”

Richard Parsons, vice chairman of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance, a business and civic advocacy group with parallel interests, said the new coalition welcomes the plan presented by Gov. Larry Hogan (R) to award $100 million for innovative congestion management programs on I-270. The coalition’s theme is that I-270, the main stem of the suburban technology corridor as well as the key route for thousands of commuters headed to and from the region’s core, needs much more help than that.

In Maryland’s transportation planning system, local government support for projects is a prominent element in state financing decisions. So the Fix270NOW group wants to get a clear statement from the Montgomery and Frederick County governments that the improvement of I-270 is a top transportation priority. Once that status is clear, the group wants the Maryland Department of Transportation to revive work on two studies, now many years old, that looked into travel solutions for I-270 and the west side of the Capital Beltway in Maryland.

“It’s time to finish those studies,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who also spoke in support of the new group.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board, Virginia’s top policymaking panel on transportation, has expressed interest in engaging Maryland in a discussion of cross-Potomac transportation improvements. Some advocates for congestion relief say it would be logical to extend Virginia’s Capital Beltway HOT lanes from the Tysons area across the Legion Bridge and north to I-270.

But the Hogan administration has been cool to this idea. During an online discussion with Dr. Gridlock readers in July, state Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn noted that “in Virginia and Maryland, these express toll lanes require substantial upfront state investment into the projects that will typically not be recovered.”

“Congestion-busting solutions” — a term Rahn applied to multi-billion-dollar programs that take many years to complete — can’t be supported by the financial resources available in Maryland, he said.

Maryland has built several express tolling systems in recent years. The Intercounty Connector in Montgomery and Prince George’s features all-electronic tolling at rates that vary with the time of day. Last year, the state opened the I-95 Express Toll Lanes in the middle of I-95 north of Baltimore, using a tolling system similar to that on the ICC.

But Maryland has nothing quite like the Virginia HOT lanes, which vary the tolls based on the level of traffic to maintain steady speeds and offer a free ride to carpoolers using a specialized type of E-ZPass called the Flex.

Parsons said that once the state studies were revived, transportation planners could review what type of express lanes might work best on I-270.

Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, was skeptical of the express lanes approach for I-270. “Widened highways in metropolitan areas can fill up again in as little as five years,” he said in a statement Monday.

Instead, Schwartz recommended extending the I-270 HOV lane to the Legion Bridge, expanding MARC commuter train service from Frederick, enhancing commuter bus service in the I-270 corridor and encouraging development around transit centers.

Image courtesy of Robert Thomson.

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Yes, the McMillan Sand Filtration Site is one mile (from either end of the site) to the Red Line. It’s even 0.6 miles to the nearest express bus route (Georgia Avenue’s 79), and key network improvements are still in the planning stages. Yet from the point of view of someone who wants to reduce auto dependence (and the concomitant pollution, injury, and sprawl), what matters most is that MSFS is close to downtown, rather than close to Metro.

Transportation planning research has consistently shown that location relative to downtown and to other land uses is far more closely associated with the amount of driving than location relative to transit. Ewing and Cervero’s definitive 2010 meta-analysis (cited by 679 other scholarly articles) examined over 200 other studies, then combined the correlations found by 62 different studies:

Yes, it turns out that the number of miles that people drive is four-and-a-half times as closely correlated with the distance to downtown than with the distance to a transit stop. This strong relationship between driving and distance to downtown is borne out in local survey research by MWCOG/TPB. Note that whether an area has Metro access (like Largo or White Flint, vs. the Purple Line corridor) doesn’t actually seem to impact the number of drive-alone (SOV) trips.

Some suggest that development proposed for this site should instead go elsewhere. If the development is denied, those residents and employees and shoppers won’t just disappear, they’ll just go somewhere else. They won’t go to superior locations even closer to downtown and Metro (because those are so very plentiful!), but rather to far inferior locations. For instance, the life-sciences employers might choose an alternative location within our region that has already approved a similar mix of uses — such as Viva White Oak, Inova Fairfax, Great Seneca Science Corridor, and University Center in Ashburn, all of which are much further from both downtown and Metro.

This isn’t just the suburbs’ fault. Within the District, even more intensive development than what’s proposed at MSFS has already been given the go-ahead at locations such as the Armed Forces Retirement Home, Hecht Warehouse, and Buzzard Point. All of those sites are also inferior to MSFS from the standpoint of not just transit accessibility and distance to Metro Center, but also on all of the other factors shown to reduce VMT.

If the “Reasonable Development” types truly do care about reducing driving, I must have missed their years of caterwauling over the approval of all these other sites — not to mention the countless suburban developments that together pave over 100 acres of open space every single day in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. That’s why I give more credence to the people who do actually care about paving over the region, like the Piedmont Environmental Council — a/k/a the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

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