For Montgomery's future, look to Arlington

Development

For Montgomery's future, look to Arlington

by Cavan Wilk • May 6, 2009 11:33 am

Montgomery County Councilmember Roger Berliner (D-District 1) has proposed adding an additional Metro station near the existing White Flint station. Mr. Berliner proposed the station to enhance the pedestrian-oriented infrastructure for the upcoming suburban-to-urban retrofits in the new White Flint Sector Plan and to address the expected traffic from BRAC. He noted that a new station would cost much less than all the road widening SHA plans around the National Naval Medical Center.

Photo by Oğuz Demirkapı.

"To the extent to which we have an existing infrastructure that we could advance that would be of the highest quality, I think that's worth a good look," Berliner told the Gazette. The amount of land that is within walking distance of transit almost doubles when two stations are within walking distance of each other compared to when they are farther apart. In the specific case of the White Flint Sector Plan, that would double the amount of residents and amenities that the infrastructure could support.

While it would be wonderful to establish a corridor similar to Rosslyn-Ballston, this proposal also represents a shift in thinking about how to plan for BRAC. While hosting the National Institutes of Health and the Navy Medical Center create planning challenges for the county, they also provide large numbers of jobs. More new residents will move to to Montgomery County as those facilities grow. In previous decades, planners would widen the existing roads, build more roads at the rural fringes of the county, then approve more subdivisions. More undeveloped land gets paid over, more impermeable surfaces are created, more animals lose their habitat, and our nation spends even more money on gasoline.

Berliner's vision represents a break from previous decades. Rather than building more roads, a Metro station would support more housing within walking distance of a Metro station just a few stops from Medical Center. While more tax-paying residents help the County financially, the vision also helps the environment by avoiding paving over acres of undeveloped land. It also won't require the new residents to spend income purchasing, maintaining, and fueling up personal automobiles.

Montgomery County facing similar challenges to those Arlington County faced forty years ago. Arlington fought so hard to use the Orange Line as a planning tool because it was running out of undeveloped land within its borders. If an urbanized jurisdiction can't grow, it can't expand its tax base. If it can't expand its tax base, it faces insolvency in the long term. Since Arlington County couldn't grow out anymore, it had to grow up in selected places.

Currently, over 30% of the county's tax base comes from the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, 8% of the county's land area. Montgomery is much larger, which delayed this process by decades, but it's now approaching on the horizon. Tysons, too, is hitting a wall in how much economic activity it can support, which is why Fairfax leaders are so eager to build the Silver Line.

Not only would Councilmember Berliner's vision provide conditions for a more environmentally sustainable living arrangement for thousands of future Montgomery County residents, it will improve the county's fiscal situation in the short term. By establishing a corridor and planting the seeds for achieving an economically self-sustaining critical mass in a new human-scale walkable urban place, it will also create another place for the county to focus its long-term growth. By having environmentally and economically sustainable long-term growth, the county will be fiscally solvent in the long-term.

In other words, Berliner's vision is just plain Smart.

15 comments

Tags: Arlington, BRAC, Maryland, Montgomery, Roger Berliner, Smart Growth, White Flint, WMATA

Hans Riemer discusses White Flint, Wheaton, and eastern Montgomery County (Apr 30, 2010)
Transit is more economically efficient than freeway lanes (Aug 6, 2009)
White Flint master plan: it's all about incentives (Mar 24, 2009)
With White Flint, Montgomery gets another Bethesda (Mar 24, 2010)
Montgomery County: America in microcosm (Dec 22, 2008)

Cavan Wilk became interested in the physical layout and economic systems of modern human settlements while working on his Master's in Financial Economics. His writing often focuses on the interactions between a place's form, its economic systems, and the experiences of those who live in them. He lives in downtown Silver Spring.

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As it is, taking Metro from that part of the red line to anywhere else is a long, long ride. Adding more stations (stations, plural, because the linked article suggests that Berliner really wants more than one) would just make it longer. Is that really such a good thing?

Instead, why not increase service on Ride On route 46 (the "red line with a view")? I know that bus service lacks the permanence of a rail station and is less likely to spur as much development, but it has the advantages of not inconveniencing other riders, probably costing less, and being more likely to happen.

(I should note that I neither live nor work in that area, and although I go there often for shopping and dining, it's almost always on weekends. So perhaps my view of what's needed is skewed.)

by Johanna on May 6, 2009 12:25 pm • link • report

So any indication as to where specifically they plan on putting this station (or stations)?

by Steven on May 6, 2009 12:56 pm • link • report

Johanna - The Friends of White Flint, a coalition of landowners with many surrounding communities, wants to redesign Rockville Pike with a transitway in the middle. It would most likely carry an upgraded version of Route 46, but could be a streetcar.

ACT has endorsed that design.

by Ben Ross on May 6, 2009 1:11 pm • link • report

Johanna, that's a good point. On the one hand, you've got the far-out commuters who we want to encourage to park at Shady Grove and not drive in to DC. On the other hand, you've got this dream of a R-B-corridor-like region in Montgomery County, where people live, work, shop, eat, and play all somewhere between, say, Grosvenor and Rockville. Currently the Red line attempts to resolve those two types of uses to some paltry extent by not running every train to the end of the line. Maybe this is another instance where that "skip-stop" idea that's been floating around could come in, or where a corridor could get "local" train service that goes neither all the way in to DC nor all the way out to Shady Grove (I'm not sure how that could actually be done without adding another track), while the remaining trains don't stop at all the stations. Using bus service to connect existing demand and development (including BRAC) is a great idea, but using it as a planning tool akin to the orange line through Arlington is probably not.

by Lucre on May 6, 2009 1:16 pm • link • report

...or what Ben said.

by Lucre on May 6, 2009 1:21 pm • link • report

Lucre, just for the record, the situation on the Red Line during Rush hour where half of the trains go from Grosvenor to Silver Spring rather than all the way from Shady Grove to Glenmont is because WMATA just doesn't own enough train cars to run every train to the very end.

by Cavan on May 6, 2009 1:46 pm • link • report

I would think having a second parallel transit line (i.e. something along Rockville Pike), with more frequent stops but also serving as a "capacity reliever" for the Red Line, would work better than simply building a new Red Line station.

'Course, I use the same argument down at Potomac Yards...:o)

by Froggie on May 6, 2009 3:04 pm • link • report

Curious but has Montgomery even considered building a new heavy rail line; to fill in the gaps of where the red line doesn't go such as the far north, west and east portions of the county.

Adding more stations to one set of tracks will only do so much and at some point there will need to be a plan b they could add 10 stations between friendship heights and shady grove and it still wouldn't make a big dent in the traffic that is in the county since not all the traffic in the county is on Rockville pike/Wisconsin ave/Frederick rd.

by Kk on May 6, 2009 4:45 pm • link • report

Cavan, it's not just a question of Metro having enough railcars to run service to Shady Grove, it's also a question of matching cars to where the ridership is, which is more heavily in the center of the system.

by jnb on May 6, 2009 6:16 pm • link • report

Rockville Pike is, unfortunately unlike the Wilson-Clarendon corridor of the early 1990s. Lots of different property owners, large & small and a place where vacancies are rare. No tired old Sears stores and the car lots don't really start until after downtown Rockville. Despite all the big boxes and horrendous traffic, it as a vitality that the Wilson-Clarendon corridor often lacks, with many great hole-in-the-wall restaurants. I'm not sure where the mythical new housing would go or the traffic. There are some alternatives to the "Pike", but they are far from perfect substitutes and some (like Executive Blvd) are heavily used in rush hour already. The distance between Twinbrook & White Flint is maybe a mile and I can't imagine the value of another station between the two, not to mention what it might displace.

Montgy County has already screwed-up with the recent development near White Flint--long blocks, no trees--a really uninviting and unusable pedestrian environment. Anything that increases the density E of the Pike will threaten the warrens of car repair places, tile places, and the like on Nebel and similar locations--the kinds of businesses that are difficult to find relatively close to DC in areas that don't absolutely require a car. These are the kinds of businesses being driven out of Silver Spring--unglamorous, unloved, but providing relative necessities.

The Pike has continued to reinvent itself in its current form despite horrible traffic and the land would be very expensive to acquire and reshape. The area does generate a small but not insignificant amount of pedestrian traffic and a step in the right direction would be to improve the current pedestrian environment with removal of the fencing at Mid-Pike Plaza and reconfiguring the confusing and dangerous traffic patterns at the shopping center with Giant & Sports Authority, which serve no useful purpose for drivers or pedestrians.

Better candidates for pedestrian environments and new development than Rockville Pike would be some of the roads that run somewhat parallel to the Pike, such as Jefferson, which could be connected to Old Old Georgetown to the office complexes on Executive Blvd. The road behind the Hilton would be another candidate and it could hook through the shopping centers to its South. These routes are already better scaled for pedestrians and encouraging walking/biking could take advantage of existing apartment & office complexes as sources of foot traffic, while encouraging walking, biking and further exploitation of many existing commercial properties. these same routes would be less workable as alternative driving routes, although they would bear that burden if the Pike was redone.

by Richard A. Jenkins on May 6, 2009 8:44 pm • link • report

Richard, I invite you to read my previous posts about the plans to turn the car-dependent Rockville Pike into a place like Bethesda or Ballston.

I also invite you to look at The Friends of White Flint, a grassroots advocacy group for retrofitting that section of Rockville Pike into a traditional town environment.

The commercial landowners around the White Flint Metro are in favor of this plan. Their properties and contracts are coming up for renewal soon. They would love to have more rentable floor space, less surface parking to maintain, and do good for the environment too.

by Cavan on May 7, 2009 9:49 am • link • report

You can see a lot more of what the land owners envision for the White Flint area at this site: www.whiteflintpartnership.com. A lot of what has been discussed in the comments here are addressed on that site.

by CAS on May 7, 2009 11:16 am • link • report

Long rides....

(a) Express Trains - long over due

(b) It's kind of the point isnt it. You have long rides bc your trains dont take you anywhere local. In Arlington, I can take a short train ride to another part of Arlington where there are restaurants or movies or a game or theater.... You have long rides because your transportation system assumes you are leaving Montgomery County / Bethesda to go somewhere else. Change that assumption, like Arlington Did, keep people local, and get the cars off the road.

by bobArlington on May 7, 2009 12:17 pm • link • report

Also, use this as an opportunity to beef up MARC service from Rockville/Shady Grove areas. If you want express service, take that train. If it were running faster and more frequently, with easy fare integration, we'd have a hell of a system.

by Alex B. on May 8, 2009 3:53 pm • link • report

"The amount of land that is within walking distance of transit almost doubles when two stations are within walking distance of each other compared to when they are farther apart."

I didn't understand this part -- just sketching some overlapping and non-overlapping circles, this didn't seem correct.

by anon on May 9, 2009 3:27 pm • link • report