Several residents faulted Tuesday night the density and potential traffic that could follow the Montgomery County Council’s passage of the Greater Lyttonsville Sector Plan, a land-use guide for a Silver Spring neighborhood founded by a freed slave in the 1850s.

“I know all this development will stifle my neighborhood’s life,” resident Patricia Tyson told the council during a hearing on the proposed plan, which has been in the works since 2012. The number of new homes proposed for the neighborhood would be far too much for the community to absorb, she said.

“I believe this plan will add intolerable traffic congestion, make the area unaffordable to lower and middle-class residents, and destroy the current character of Lyttonsville,” added Erwin Rose, who has lived in the community since 2001.

The area covered by the plan currently has 499 single-family homes and townhouses planner Melissa Williams told the council in a morning briefing. Under the plan, the maximum number of units would increase to 1,334. Multifamily units would grow from 2,864 to a maximum of 5,577.

However, Williams said the maximum numbers are rarely achieved and a “crude calculation” of looking at acreage and applying zoning. For example, under current zoning, the plan area could have 1,290 single-family and townhouse units, and 3,912 multifamily units, she said.

“The proposed level of development is beyond what my little community can handle,” Rosemary Hills resident Lynn Amano said.

The hearing at the County Council Building also drew many supporters of the sector plan. The community will have two Purple Line stops—on Lyttonsville Road and at Woodside/16th Street—which drew support from representatives from Purple Line Now, the Action Committee for Transit and the Coalition for Smarter Growth, which all support the light-rail line to be built from Bethesda to New Carrollton.

Several people said they supported that the plan maintained a light industrial area north of the Purple Line, the only light industrial area in Montgomery County that remains inside the Beltway. Leonor Chaves, a resident, noted the light industrial area has 475 businesses that employ 2,500.

Others supported the planned walkability of the envisioned community, added parklands, small retail area, and bike lanes. The sector plan also drew support from local developers EYA and Federal Realty Investment Trust. EYA is trying to redevelop three parcels in the community into transit-oriented development. Federal Realty owns an apartment complex on the west side of the plan area.

A second hearing is planned for Thursday night at the Council Office Building, and 17 people have signed up to testify. The council will tour the area Oct. 7.

Since its founding, Lyttonsville has suffered from neglect from the public and private sectors. It lacked paved streets and running water until the 1970s. The county once had a trash heap and incinerator in the neighborhood.

Work on the sector plan began in 2012, and Montgomery County Planning Board Chairman Casey Anderson said the fits and starts of the Purple Line, now planned to start construction later this year, were one reason why the plan took so long to complete.

As the sector plan progressed, the board engaged in an intensive community outreach, including holding numerous meetings with residents and creating a hot line for those who had questions.

Anderson told the council he believed the criticisms of the plan would be directed toward specific details and not the framework that was built on consensus.

Resident Mark Mendez seemed to agree. “No one gets what they want in a master plan. This list checks a lot of boxes for me,” he said.

But resident Abe Schuchman criticized the lack of a full-service grocery store in the plan, which would mean people would still have to get in their cars to shop, despite the plan’s walkability. And Jonathan Foley of the Gwendolyn Coffield Community Center Advisory Board said the plan needed to address specifically how the center on Lyttonsville Road would handle the new residents.

Council President Nancy Floreen said committees are scheduled to take up the plan in November, which could lead to a full committee vote by the end of the year.

Image credit: Montgomery County Planning Board

Click here for the original story. 

People were streaming along the sidewalks and biking down the street – parents with children, couples, retirees, and the full ethnic diversity of our region. Where were they all going? We were leading one of our tours of walkable urban places and were amazed. Our group had just reached Park Avenue after having come up from the East Falls Church Metro. It felt like market day, and in fact it was – with the weekly Farmers Market, the Taste of Falls Church and the Fall Festival all taking place last Saturday.

Mayor Tarter, Vice Mayor Connelly, and Councilmember Hardi were there to meet us and tell us about the Little City. The Mayor talked about the community’s efforts to become an even better place for walking and bicycling, including adding Capital Bikeshare. We learned about the effort to bring new amenities like the Harris Teeter, and investment that will diversify the tax base to reduce pressure on residential property taxes. We learned about the city’s commitment to environmental sustainability and quality of life.

With the help of Falls Church’s planning department, our guides for the morning, we looked at old and new development along Washington and Broad Streets, talking about urban design, sidewalk widths, best designs for ground-floor retail and more. It was easy to feel the difference between walking along a narrow sidewalk next to high-speed traffic and the new wider sidewalks with street trees.

At the Northgate development, we talked about the benefits of redevelopment for dealing with long-standing stormwater problems. Old parking lots fuel torrents of floodwater into creeks like Four Mile Run. New development must meet current stormwater control standards and significantly reduce runoff. The sidewalk retention basins are one tool, although the big clunky ones at Northgate will have to be chalked up as a learning experience!

The Harris Teeter is the big new addition and lies within reach of most city residents, generating a significant number of walking trips to the store. Later, we learned from developer Bob Young about the sustainability features of his Flower Building and the affordable apartments for teachers in the Read Building. Parking needs are being reduced through shared parking at the Hilton Garden Inn. So many people arrive by shuttle from Metro, that they don’t need as much parking as they have.

The two Metro stations that bear the Falls Church name became a big topic of conversation, particularly because neither is as accessible as it could be. The long walk from East Falls Church Metro demonstrated, without a doubt, the need for a western entrance to the Metro at Washington Street. The western entrance would place the Metro much closer to many Falls Church and Arlington residents.

Metro studies show that attracting more riders who walk and bike to the stations is far more cost-effective than building very expensive parking structures. Almost all of Falls Church lies within one mile of one of the two Metro stations. So it’s easy to see why good sidewalks, bike lanes and bikeshare are great ways to connect the community to the two Metro stations.

East Falls Church Metro is already a champion in attracting bike commuters, but the demand is such that a bike station is in progress, designed by the same folks who created that amazing glass bike station at Union Station in DC. Bikeshare will add a whole new level of convenience for the commute to Metro, because you’ll be able to ditch the heavy bike lock. But the city almost didn’t win the funding in the face of opposition from outer suburban legislators and highway lobbyists. So we jumped into the fray, sending an alert to our Falls Church members, who responded in record numbers to send letters of support that helped to win the funding.

We didn’t have time to go to Tinner Hill or the West Falls Church Metro, but we learned about both and plan to come back. West Falls Church Metro is a disjointed place today and many talk about how the big parking lots feel unsafe at night. So it would be a real win to create a walkable urban place, with a new high school, mixed-use development, and a more vibrant Virginia Tech campus.

We wrapped up our tour in the pocket park at the Spectrum development, but people wanted to keep talking, so we adjourned for a great lunch at the Mad Fox.

Falls Church is a wonderful place, and in demand because of its walkability, convenient access to jobs and services, and nearby Metro stations. Carefully planned development in the commercial corridors will provide needed housing, convenient new services, help the tax base, and contribute to a walking and biking friendly community. We look forward to returning to see the next stages in the evolution of the Little City.”

Click here to read the original story.

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 coalition’s leaders outlined a four-part plan for easing travel through Frederick and Montgomery counties. (Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance)

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.

Click here to view the original article.

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.

Click here to read the original article

Suburban Maryland residents counting on the Purple Line to create a much-needed rail link between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties suffered a loss Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that the project’s planners revise their ridership expectations before proceeding with construction. The crux in Judge Richard Leon‘s order? Metro, its infrastructural woes, and its sagging ridership.

Leon’s ruling came in a case brought by Chevy Chase, Maryland, residents opposed to the Purple Line—which is supposed to run between Bethesda and New Carrollton—and orders the Maryland Transit Administration to undergo another environmental impact statement, potentially delaying the start of construction this fall. A few hours after Leon’s order, the Federal Transit Administration announced it would delay an event, originally scheduled for Monday, at which the Purple Line would have received $900 million in federal funding, nearly half its $2 billion projected construction cost. With Leon’s ruling, the Purple Line is currently ineligible to receive federal funds.

While transit advocates are sensitive to anything that might set back one of their favored projects—especially one that became more politically tenuous after the election of Republican GovernorLarry Hogan—Leon’s rationale in ordering a new environmental review has them especially cheesed.

“I find that defendants’ failure to adequately consider WMATA’s ridership and safety issues was arbitrary and capricious, and that these conditions create the ‘seriously different picture’ that warrant a [secondary environmental impact statement],” Leon wrote in his nine-page order.

The Purple Line’s planners expect that when service begins, 27 percent of its estimated 70,000 daily riders will be transfers from Metro. The current troubles at WMATA—including poor employee performances, diminishing revenue, dated equipment, and a heavy maintenance program lasting through mid-2017—make it convenient for anyone, federal judges included, to speculate Metro won’t be as robust six years from now. But it’s that same speculation that makes Leon’s decision so objectionable, says Stewart Schwartz, the executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, which advocates for public-transit projects.

“He’s finding that the current challenges at Metro will be permanent and affect ridership in 2040,” Schwartz says. “I can’t imagine anyone thinking our region can survive without Metro.”

Its the region’s continued growth that makes projects like the Purple Line, which has been discussed since 2001, much more necessary. The entire Washington metropolitan area’s population is expected to pass 7 million by the early 2040s; Montgomery County and Prince George’s counties are projected to have a combined population of more than 2.1 million, about 300,000 more than today.

But what really irks Schwartz is Leon’s mixing environmental case law—which is usually very procedural—with substance that sounds like casual grumbling on a Red Line platform.

“The [National Environmental Policy Act],” the law under which the Purple Line was scrutinized, “has become over time an essentially procedural statute,” Schwartz says. “Judges will throw things back if they’ve failed to comply with procedural requirements. The judge in this case seemed to mix substance and procedure, but it leans very heavily on substance. He even quotes that the arbitrary and capricious standard is narrow, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

This is not to say Metro should be given the assumption that it’ll work perfectly a decade from now. Even if its SafeTrack plan achieves the improvements its designed to, WMATA still faces severe structural problems with revenue, labor costs, and long-term financing. But using Metro as a cudgel to set back a separate, albeit symbiotic, commuter line in the guise of additional environmental review, as Leon’s ruling does, reeks of NIMBYism.

That’s not a shock, really. The case was brought by a group of Chevy Chase, Maryland, residents who call themselves the Friends of the Capital Crescent Trail. The Purple Line’s construction will move part of the trail, which runs between Georgetown and Chevy nChase to a less-densely forested area, but will also result in finally completing the trail’s connection to Silver Spring. The Friends, who have made arguments against the Purple Line ranging fromunfounded concerns over local amphipod populations to the train’s route passing by a few schools, want to replace the planned railway with inter-county buses—which would not run through Chevy Chase at all.

These concerns do not really connect to Metro. “It’s quite the leap the judge is making,” Schwartz says. “Nothing has changed about the environmental effects of the project. It’s a wealthy community fighting project that’ll bring significant [development] interest.”

Even nonpartisan observers were struck by Leon’s rationale. “Can’t recall a group of NIMBYs so successfully f-ing over everyone else as these Chevy Chase folks are. My god,” the Washington Post‘sJonathan O’Connell tweeted.

So what’s next for the Purple Line? Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn is asking the FTA to appeal Leon’s ruling, but with Monday’s $900 million award delayed, the project’s future seems as fragile as ever. Leon has also created a very strange alliance: transit backers who have waited years for the Purple Line are now counting on Hogan and Rahn, who were at best ambivalent on the project’s viability when they took office, to save it. Never doubt the ability of dissatisfaction with Metro to seep into other things.

Rendering courtesy Maryland Transit Administration

Click here to read the original article