Posts by Ben Ross

Formulas for Bethesda and Silver Spring won't work countywide

Parking minimums like these did not impede the county's first wave of transit-oriented development, centered on the expensive downtowns of Bethesda and Friendship Heights. Rents and condo prices there are high enough to cover the cost of underground parking even if it goes unused.

In Silver Spring, where rents are lower, the county lifted the parking burden off developers' shoulders by building massive garages at taxpayer expense.

But the county can't afford to endlessly replicate the vast subsidies that went into downtown Silver Spring. Nor can the Bethesda model of luxury housing and expensive retail be copied everywhere. It would drive out current residents, and in any case there are only so many places where the market would support it.

The county needs a new model of revitalization, one that upgrades existing neighbor­hoods without displacing their population. This will not happen as long as off-street parking requirements make anything but luxury residences too expensive to build.

Decaying strip malls illustrate the problem. Planners hope that the strip malls can be rebuilt in a more urban style, with stores that open onto the sidewalk, a few floors of apartments above, and a parking garage behind the buildings. A row of duplexes, facing the single-family homes across the street, could complete the back side of such a development. Duplex housing, now very rare in the county, is more affordable for both the tenant and the owner (the rent helps pay the mortgage).

But under the zoning code, a developer cannot sell a duplex unless it has 4 parking spaces of its own. The cost of building 4 spaces in a parking garage is over $100,000—enough to put an otherwise affordable home far out of reach for a middle-class buyer.

Parking minimums serve a different purpose in single-family neighborhoods

Regardless of whether parking minimums are good policy, planners have sound political reasons for keeping them in Montgomery's single-family zones. They preserve the bargain that underlies the county's land use policy: keep single-family neighborhoods the way they are while promoting smart growth near transit.

Parking requirements serve a different purpose in suburban neighborhoods than in cities like DC. While the District's debate over minimums revolves around "spillover" that deprives residents of places to park, Montgomery homeowners would have space to put their cars with or without minimums because of two other laws.

The minimum lot sizes in the zoning code guarantee that every house has at least 60 feet of curb space. That is more than enough room for two cars, if there were no driveway. The resident parking permit program ensures that outsiders cannot park in those spaces.

Instead of guaranteeing space for cars, the rules effectively ensure that on-street spaces will usually be empty. Except in a few older neighborhoods where houses don't have driveways, mostly around Takoma Park, that's what housing subdivisions have always looked like in Montgomery. For many homeowners, car-free curbs are an essential element of their neighborhoods' suburban character, and the county has promised to preserve that for single-family zones as it becomes more urban elsewhere.

But minimum parking rules apply to commercial and apartment zones as well. There, off-street parking requirements are counterproductive. Left to its own devices, the real estate building and lending market will provide all the parking that is needed and more. The planning department should abolish parking minimums for mixed-use and multifamily residential zones, as DC is doing.

After 25 years, Montgomery's APFO has not delivered the traffic relief it promised. Over the years, it has been revised again and again to fix the most obvious defects. But because the underlying error is never corrected, it keeps getting more complicated—to the point that now almost no one can understand it.

The law is now up for renewal once again, and the Planning Board will hold a hearing today. A 179-page staff report proposes dropping the development moratoriums. Instead, staff recommend taxing developers to build more roads in high-traffic areas and run buses more frequently.

Band-aids don't cure the disease

Such tinkering does not fix the fundamental flaw in the concept of APFOs. It's like keeping the leeches and putting band-aids on the bite marks.

The Montgomery planners started out, the first page of their report tells us, by asking how more "needed transportation infrastructure" can be built. In the back is a long list of "needed" roads, copied out of plans drawn up years ago. That puts the cart before the horse—what is a transportation planner's job, if not to figure out what transportation infrastructure is really needed?

That's also not the question concurrency promised to answer. The concept was sold to the public as an answer to "How do we get rid of traffic jams?" That is surely a better question than "how can we build more roads," though still not the right question to ask.

There's only one way to actually reduce congestion: price it, with a congestion charge. Cities like London and Stockholm charge a daily fee to each car that drives into the congested district during times of heavy traffic. (People who live inside the congested zone are usually exempt.) Montgomery could ensure its roads flow smoothly by assessing a fee on drivers who enter any of its 33 "policy areas" which fail the annual traffic test.

But this is not the cure for what ails Montgomery County. Congestion charges make sense in places where the fee is voluntary, because you don't need a car to get around. That's not the case in the cul-de-sac subdivisions of American suburbs, where you are stuck at home if you can't afford to drive.

Smooth flowing traffic is not the goal; mobility and livability is

Instead of asking how to get rid of traffic, we should really be asking, "How can we make it easier to get where we need to go to live our lives?" After a century of sprawl, it is clear that this question has no answer in suburbs that were designed for automobile-dependence. Only where people can accomplish their everyday needs without being forced to drive can people be free of traffic. That requires mixed land uses, closely spaced grid streets, rail transit, and roadways shared by drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Today's suburbanites are trapped in a vicious circle. Development requires more roads and the roads create more sprawl. Each time around, the highways get more expensive to build and the traffic is worse. Transit requires ever larger subsidies to compete with subsidized car trips to low-density destinations. And APFOs only dig us in deeper.

There is no way out of this morass until we recognize that the old suburban model has failed. Montgomery County understood the need for a new direction when it adopted the visionary White Flint master plan two years ago. To make that plan work, planners had to junk their old APFO mindset in one section of the county. All leaders should take that lesson to heart, not just in Montgomery, but in suburbs everywhere.

A genuinely educational campaign could feature messages like "Never cross mid-block between two traffic lights" or "Come to full stop before turning right on red." The slogan "Stop for pedestrians at marked and unmarked crosswalks" would stimulate the public's curiosity, since few know about unmarked crosswalks (places where the pavement has none of the familiar crosswalk lines, but a crosswalk still legally exists, and drivers still must yield to pedestrians crossing the street).

Highway agencies recognize that education about pedestrian safety must accompany engineering and enforcement. But our region, especially outside the District and Arlington, has a spotty record in engineering and enforcement. That makes educating the public about pedestrian safety all that more important.

So many things are wrong with this deal that it's hard to list them all. It's an unnecessary giveaway to a prosperous private company that has already received millions from the county. 300 parking spaces currently open to the public will be fenced off and unavailable to others. And everyone will suffer from the traffic and pollution that subsidized employee parking creates.

Meanwhile, neighbors who park in the Kennett Street garage are upset because they will soon be charged double what Discovery would pay.

Public parking is out of control in Montgomery County. It's heavily subsidized by taxpayers; the bonds sold to build garages in Silver Spring are paid off out of the county's general fund. Yet the county went to the expense of building a new parking garage when an existing garage one block away is full of empty spaces.

When Montgomery can't find anything better to do with its garages than give them away, it's a strong signal that it's time to stop building new ones. In a county desperately short of affordable housing for people, affordable housing for automobiles does not deserve to be a priority. Parking should pay for itself in Bethesda and Silver Spring.

Randolph Road has room for a wide, grassy median that gives drivers a pleasant view. Yet its sidewalks are too narrow and dangerously close to the road. Pedestrians, sometimes with heavy loads of groceries, face constant danger as they walk inches away from high-speed traffic.

At Randolph Road and Viers Mill Road, there is a strip mall with an entrance in the middle of a 1000-foot-long superblock, directly across from an entrance to a McDonald's. There is no entrance directly to the strip mall from the corner, near the existing crosswalk.

Many pedestrians crossing from one to the other naturally take the direct route between them (the blue arrow above), rather than walking to the end of the block. This is far quicker, does not require walking on the dangerous sidewalks, offers a refuge in the middle of the highway that is lacking at the intersections, and avoids the risk of getting hit by a turning driver.

But Montgomery traffic engineers prioritize moving as many cars as possible through the road as fast as possible. Pedestrians crossing in the middle of the block interfere with this. Rather than provide a safe and convenient crosswalk, add a traffic signal to move toward more urban block sizes, or address the sidewalk safety problem, Montgomery's Orwellian-named Pedestrian Safety Program has built a fence to keep people from crossing the street.

This is only one example of how Montgomery's disproportionate focus on automobiles harms other road users. Until the county realizes that it needs to plan to meet the needs of all users, pedestrians will continue to suffer from unsafe and inconvenient conditions.

The campaign against Stanley uses language more politic than Mrs. Crenca's, but the hostility to urbanism is the same. The county's Civic Federation, in its letter demanding Stanley's resignation, said that the county is "comprised of suburban communities, more densely developed transit centers, and rural areas." Aren't downtown Bethesda and Silver Spring, which have long since turned urban, part of the county too?

Councilmember Marc Elrich charges (in the article that triggered the controversy) that Stanley wants to "make roads so bad people only use transit." This is the language of the "war on cars" that we hear whenever motorists are asked to make the slightest concessions to pedestrians and bicyclists.

The county benefits from open debate over land use, planning, and transportation. Land use policies affect income groups differently. For example, limits on the supply of new housing are more popular among owners who bought long ago than among renters and those trying to save up a down payment.

Focusing on the substance of policy rather than personalities can bring the entire population into discussions that too often include only developers and long-time homeowners. This gives newer and less affluent members of the community a chance to challenge policies that put them at a disadvantage.

Despite the wishes of Stanley's critics, the county is already changing, and it will continue to evolve. The question is, how should the county adapt? Should we embrace demographic and cultural trends that allow us to build more livable communities, or should we stand firm against change until we are overwhelmed by it?

Rollin Stanley's resignation would slow the effort to plan for a better future. But it will not stop change itself.

Even before the vote, they had hired transportation consultants to study how to build the transitway on the cheap. Within days of the council vote, the developers pulled the plan out of their back pockets and began lobbying county and state officials for it.

The public has not been allowed to see the developers' plan. But reports are that it would delete overpasses from the transitway. Buses would get their own lanes only where the price is low. At intersections—the places where congestion is worst—the "rapid" buses would have to travel in regular traffic lanes.

Why would anyone want to spend tens of millions of dollars to build bus lanes where they won't do much good? The reason is that sprawl development in "Science City," on the west side of Gaithersburg, can't move forward until the CCT, or at least some version of the CCT, gets built. Johns Hopkins is the biggest landowner in the area.

Under a Master Plan approved in 2010, there can be no more development in Science City until certain requirements are fulfilled. The key hurdle is a requirement to "fully fund construction of the CCT from the Shady Grove Metro station to Metropolitan Grove within the first six years of the county's CIP or the state CIP." A transitway with overpasses left out wouldn't seem to be "fully funded," but Hopkins and its allies may have enough political pull to convince the county that it is.

Sometime in the future, after the dumbed-down transitway is built, the missing bridges could show up. But there's little chance of that happening if Hopkins can get a go-ahead for its real estate schemes. The developers are the main force pushing this transitway forward, and they are sure to lose interest once they have their approvals.

Meanwhile, the county Bus Rapid Transit task force has found itself in a pickle. Unless it abandons its commitment to "gold standard" BRT, it has discovered, it must choose between taking lanes away from cars and road widenings that would involve wholesale demolition of homes and churches. If Hopkins gets away with its bait-and-switch on the Corridor Cities Transitway, we can expect bus projects to suffer the same fate in the rest of the county.

Maryland's gas tax goes into the state's Transportation Trust Fund, along with the sales tax on car sales, fares paid on MARC trains and MTA buses, and revenues from BWI Marshall Airport and the Port of Baltimore. When the gas tax was last raised in 1992, the 23½¢ state tax was 33% of the pretax price of gasoline. The sales tax on other pur­chases was 5%. The heavy tax on gas could be described as a user fee paid by drivers.

Today, though, the state gas tax is a little more than 7% of the price of gasoline. When drivers buy gas, they pay 7% into the transportation trust fund and get 6% back from the state's general fund through the exemption of gasoline from the sales tax.

Ending the exemption would convert the gas tax back into a true user fee. Drivers would then pay a share of the cost of maintaining roads, just as transit riders pay a share of the cost of transit operations through their fares.

Many myths surround the subject of transportation funding, in Maryland as in other states. Transit advocates need to be vigilant as the legislature debates this issue to make sure that new funding builds transit lines and walkable grid streets rather than repeating the mistakes of the past. The better the public understands the realities of the state budget, the easier this will be.

BRT could move far more people more quickly using the existing roadway space. The simple fact is that a bus-only lane can carry far more people than a general traffic lane, as long as bus service on that lane is fairly frequent. In the built-up business and residential districts along the county's busiest bus corridors, the only way to make room for BRT is to convert existing travel lanes into bus-only lanes.

Elsewhere, BRT will stop along major 6-lane arterials, at intersections which often have multiple turn lanes. There too, it's best to put the busway on existing lanes. Widening these roadways to add new lanes could defeat the intent of the transit plan to create walkable spaces, since 10-lane suburban highways are rarely welcoming to people on foot.

Converting lanes will not be easy. Traffic planners will need to use some trial and error to find the best configuration. If there is to be any hope of meeting the ambitious schedule that BRT proponents have laid out, the county needs to start quickly.

The learning process can start now. Montgomery can benefit now by designating a few short sections of bus lane right away. Even if full BRT is not running yet, there are many existing buses, often running at high frequency. WMATA's Priority Corridor Network Plan has already identified some good locations.

The County Council recognizes this need. Last April, then-Council President Valerie Ervin and all three Transportation and Environment Committee members (Roger Berliner, Hans Riemer, and Nancy Floreen) asked for immediate action to give buses higher priority at intersections. They also requested—"separately," they emphasized—a longer-range study of passenger throughput on the roads.

Unfortunately, MCDOT, which trumpets its support for BRT sometime in the future, expressed no interest in doing anything now. In an August reply, MCDOT Director Art Holmes said that nothing could be done to speed up buses until the passenger throughput study was complete. Nine months after the County Council letter, that study still has yet to begin.

While MCDOT stonewalled, the county Planning Board began its own work on the BRT plan. Staffer Larry Cole looked at the throughput issue and found that converting a car lane to BRT adds almost as much passenger capacity as building expensive new lanes.

MCDOT planning chief Edgar Gonzalez then emailed Cole insisting that he redo the calculation with the assumption that each car carries 4 people. Cole found, of course, that roads would carry a lot more people if each car had a driver and three passengers.

Four people per private car is clearly an absurd assumption. If the county could impose an HOV-4 rule on all its highways, there would be no need for BRT nor any other road project because traffic congestion would disappear instantly.

This is not an isolated incident. Gonzalez has a long and disappointing track record on transit matters. He tried to pass off a highway interchange as a pedestrian underpass. His consultants claimed that it will take 7 years to design a new Metro entrance in Bethesda. His department asserted that adding bus lanes and bike lanes would make Rockville Pike less friendly to pedestrians than it is now.

These current and past actions from MCDOT officials make it hard to avoid the conclusion that MCDOT is interested in moving cars, not people. While DC and Arlington have taken significant steps to treat pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders more equally, MCDOT zealously hews to a cars-only mindset for its roads.

It's long past time for the department to change its approach to issues and follow the examples of sound transportation planning set by its counterparts in the District and Arlington.

White Flint didn't always look like this. In 1988, four years after Metro arrived in the area, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission opened across the street from the station. The Planning Board required a "traffic mitigation" program. As part of this program, the sidewalk in front of the NRC building was set back from Rockville Pike so that it led directly to the Metro. A marked crosswalk connected the sidewalk to the station entrance.

The Metro station, the crosswalk, and the NRC building in 2002. Image from Google Earth.

The traffic mitigation program worked very well. Today, 36% of NRC employees commute by transit. As a result, the crosswalk was heavily used. But the Planning Board requirement expired in 2004, and just one year later, MCDOT removed the crosswalk and built a wall to stop pedestrians from making their way across the road at that location.

Now, pedestrians are forced to detour 40 feet to the left, where they must wait at a very slow traffic light. The county claims that the crosswalk was eliminated in the interest of pedestrian safety.

Unfortunately, this claim does not stand up to scrutiny. The only hazard to pedestrians in the crosswalk was that of drivers who violated the law by failing to yield. But this hazard exists at all crosswalks in the county; at crossings without traffic lights, drivers rarely yield to pedestrians.

In fact, the White Flint crosswalk was often full of people, so drivers obeyed the law and stopped more often than elsewhere. From the pedestrian's point of view, this was likely one of the safest unsignalized crosswalks (given the amount of car traffic) in the county.

The White Flint crosswalk was not removed because it was in the best interests of the pedestrians, but rather, because it was in the best interest of the drivers. Throughout the county, MCDOT encourages drivers to violate the law by leaving crosswalks unmarked, even where there is heavy pedestrian traffic.

Sadly, this is not a unique situation. Another wall was built with a similar goal in mind at New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard. In both locations, MCDOT could have made it safer to cross the street by redesigning the road to slow traffic and ticketing drivers who failed to yield. But it appears that this is not the approach the department has embraced. Instead, pedestrians take a backseat to the county's drivers.