Roads

MoCoCo agrees with Planning Board on Road Code

by David Alpert   •   October 7, 2008 4:15 pm

The Montgomery County Council thinks the Planning Board—and the GGW community—are right about the flaws in the Road Code. Six of them sent a letter to the MoCo DOT concurring with the Planning Board's objections. From the letter:

Beating up on the MoCo Road Code/Mojo Jojo. Image from mojo-jojo.org.

We are very concerned about the target speed, lane width and other cross-section dimensions, and street tree provisions in DOT's proposed regulation. ... We strongly urge that you propose a regulation to us that incorporates the Planning Board's and it's staff's revisions. By doing so the regulation will lead to the best opportunity to improve automobile, bicycle and pedestrian safety.

Marc Elrich sent a separate, concurring letter which specifically says, "the target speed for streets in the Business District classification should be 25mph," but that "we should provide the flexibility to design roads with greater target speeds on some of our roads in Arterial classifications." Elrich is with the rest on road width and street trees.

Neither letter specifically mentions bicycle facilities.

And from their silence, we must assume Phil Andrews and George Leventhal think the original anti-tree, pro-high-speed-traffic Road Code is just peachy.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.