Pedestrians
Defunding Pike conversion threatens Montgomery's growth
Recently, the Montgomery County Executive submitted a funding plan for White Flint that omits converting Rockville Pike into an urban boulevard. Such a plan would cripple the new White Flint town and its potential to create economic growth for Montgomery County.
Can you imagine trying to cross this on foot every day? Photo by Bossi on Flickr.
Rockville Pike is currently hostile and dangerous to pedestrians, with too few crosswalks, too-fast automobile traffic, and too many large surface parking lots. This will deter new pedestrian, cycling, and transit oriented residents and offices.
Two young men, who responsibly enjoyed nightlife in DC by taking the Metro rather than drinking and driving, were killed in a crosswalk while crossing Rockville Pike. This terrible tragedy is also a painful example of why Rockville Pike in its present form will be a deterrent to new residents and offices moving into White Flint, preventing the area from reaching its economic potential.
Cross section of a rebuilt pedestrian-friendly Rockville Pike. Image from Friends of White Flint.
One cost-effective funding mechanism is Tax Increment Financing (TIF). The strategy would be fully paid for by a portion of the new tax revenues generated within White Flint. Arlington County has recently approved a TIF as part of its revitalization plans for Crystal City so there is precedent for that strategy in our region.
Another proven funding strategy is General Obligation (GO) bonds from the Capital Improvement Budget. They represent the cheapest possible alternative to fund the necessary conversion of Rockville Pike into a pedestrian-friendly urban boulevard with a dedicated bus/streetcar right-of-way in its median. The GO bond of $100 million amortized over 30 years represents less than 1% of the county's debt cap.
Image from Friends of White Flint.
Because of White Flint's high land value, new economic investment in the area is projected to return positive tax revenues to the county in the short term. The increased tax revenues could then be reinvested in Sector Plans that are projected to take longer to generate positive tax revenue like White Oak, Wheaton, and the Great Seneca Science Corridor. However, the perpetual positive tax revenues are currently in jeopardy on account of not funding the reconfiguration of Rockville Pike.
The Montgomery County Council is having a hearing on the funding plan for White Flint tonight, October 26, at 7 pm.
 | 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.  |
Comments
@ggwash
- Bikeshare is a gateway to private biking, not competition
- Short-term Washingtonians deserve a voice, too
- Judge denies injunction against closing schools
- Public land deals have both benefits and pitfalls
- Long-term closures: A solution to single-tracking?
- DC Council makes major policy changes overnight
- PG planners propose bold new smart growth future
As a Rockville expatriate, I'm disappointed. I can't say I'm surprised, though. So very hard for suburban municipalities to do the smart thing.
Good for urban housing prices, though...
by oboe on Oct 26, 2010 11:23 am • link • report
by Matt on Oct 26, 2010 12:24 pm • link • report
cue the broken record -- it's important that we integrate bicycles into road (re)designs from the very beginning, and that means we need to see real bicycle infrastructure showing up in the design drawings, the 'potential drawings', the 'ideal drawings', the 'imagineering drawings', the 'wouldnt it be nice if drawings', etc.
if you're going to tear apart a street, and protect a whole bunch of trees from cars, then at least give some thought to protecting cyclists from cars, too.
by Peter Smith on Oct 26, 2010 2:48 pm • link • report
by Ben Ross on Oct 26, 2010 3:32 pm • link • report
Sure, it's nice to think about Montgomery County and Rockville redeveloping the entire stretch of the Pike between Rockville Town Center and White Flint, but that's certainly not going to happen anytime soon.
The other thing I wonder about is to what extent can the Pike really be transformed into a pedestrian friendly road? No matter what you do its going to remain an important conduit between suburban neighborhoods in Rockville/Gaithersburg (and their 'friendly' neighborhood strip malls) and Bethesda/DC. So, it will always be a wide road with a lot of traffic. I suspect the big thing that can be improved is reducing the speed of the traffic. It would be interesting to see what impact that would have on the already awful traffic a bit further north on the Pike (say, near Congressional Plaza), given the lack of alternative routes.
by Andy R on Oct 26, 2010 3:39 pm • link • report
Yes, yes it can be transformed into a pedestrian-friendly urban boulevard. You can find out more at the Sector Plan website. The link is in the first sentence of the post.
by Cavan on Oct 26, 2010 3:58 pm • link • report
I didn't mean to question whether you could physically change Rockville Pike into a boulevard. I'm questioning how effective those changes would be at really making Rockville Pike pedestrian friendly. No matter what its still going to be a wide, busy road. I really don't understand how dedicated bus lanes would help, given they'd only be built for a 1-mile stretch of road, yet presumably they'd be pretty costly.
I'm not really sure what changes to Rockville Pike are/were included in the boulevard plan, and what is just part of the overall development of the area, but it seems like many important changes would still occur. Presumably we'll still get a grid street layout with more crosswalks on the Pike. Presumably we'll get wider sidewalks. Presumably we'll still get lower traffic speeds on the Pike as a result of lower speed limits and more controlled intersections.
So, I guess pedestrians mainly lose a buffer zone between traffic and the sidewalk, medians that can act as safe havens when crossing the road, and general aesthetics. What else?
Do you have a link to Leggett's plan? I also can't find any reference to tonight's meeting on the County Council page.
by Andy R on Oct 26, 2010 8:11 pm • link • report
dedicating ten 10-foot+ lanes to motorized traffic and two 15-foot lanes to trees with only two 5-foot bike lanes is not good enough. it's not worth the money, it's not worth the disruption.
if you throw away cyclists, you throw away your most vocal constituency.
NYC is doing stuff right. they build the protected lanes, have signed-on thousands (tens of thousands?) of new advocates, and they're using this political capital to continue to make big changes for the better. the lesson? if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.
take care of walkers. take care of bikers. then take care of everything else, including trees if you want, but don't short-change the walkers and bikers.
and i'd argue smaller changes are often better -- another area NYC has done extremely well. in this case, just lop-off the outside travel lanes, throw up some jersey barriers, and let the bikes have at it. if bike travel goes up by 1000% or more in six months, then the new bike lane stays (this will be easy, as an increase from zero to even just one rider is an infinite percentage increase).
by doing this, you:
a) save gazillions of dollars and drama,
b) come off looking like frugal tax-paying citizens,
c) address the problem with the urgency that it deserves,
d) save countless injuries, and potentially some lives,
e) garner support quickly for new and better, more impactful projects,
f) etc. etc. etc.
just the numbers alone will have a huge impact:
Cost of full redesign with skimpy bike lanes: $8 Gazillion
Cost of limited redesign with full bike lanes: $300k
An end to car domination, gradually achieved.
by Peter Smith on Oct 26, 2010 8:51 pm • link • report
g) jeopardize future bike improvements in the area as you'd anger *A LOT* of area drivers/residents/businesses by creating a gridlock situation as Rockville Pike cannot handle the traffic load with just 4 lanes.
Which, in addition, means your (A) is half-wrong. You'd save gazillions of dollars. But you'd have all-new drama. And your (E) is completely wrong.
A rebuild which maintains 6 lanes but adds all the other stuff (bike lanes, transitway, etc) is the realistic way to go here.
As a side note, that exact same cross-section graphic was used recently in a CSG forum on Route 1 in Fairfax County.
by Froggie on Oct 27, 2010 7:57 am • link • report
The plan exists. The time to argue was 5 years ago! It would be politically infeasible if it called for a reduction in the number of automobile lanes. We'd have no White Flint. Just bike obsessives like yourself complaining about the lack of bike infrastructure on a plan that never even made it to the county council because you made it too politically radioactive.
by Cavan on Oct 27, 2010 10:44 am • link • report
by Andy R on Oct 27, 2010 11:39 am • link • report
i'd actually be curious to know if a gridlock situation has ever occurred anywhere in the world at any time for any reason after installing appropriate bicycle infrastructure on some road/highway. this is an honest question -- my intuition says it's highly unlikely/impossible, but i'm open to being wrong. as far as i can tell, street gridlock only happens a) to cars, and b) when the only choice for people is cars. fine -- so, let's avoid either or both of those conditions, and we'll never see gridlock again.
and that's where real bike infrastructure comes in. you can't just stripe a bike lane and say, "See guys - go - have at it," and people will just magically show up on bikes -- it has to be real/high-quality bike infrastructure. the riders you want to attract are the people who never before even gave a serious thought of going by bike. there's a massive constituency out there, but you have to create it by allowing people to get out of their cars.
i _do_ know a lot of gridlock occurred in at least some areas of India when they turned over some auto lanes to bus lanes -- that caused lots of pedestrian deaths and massive gridlock.
as far as drivers getting upset, it comes with the territory. extraordinarily privileged people are great at doing the victimhood thing. it's nothing to bother about. most of the haters will become lovers when they start riding the real bicycle infrastructure themselves, and their kids start riding it, and the quiet sets in, and their neighbors start riding it, and some of the pundits start allowing people to accept bikes, etc.
Peter, perhaps your idea is some sort of cyclist fantasy.
no, my fantasy would shut the Pike down to cars and buses and all motorized traffic completely. i could potentially be convinced to add a streetcar/light rail line, but it would take a _lot_ of convincing. just give it over to walkers and bikers. instead of 33% of Pike-area people having diabetes in the future, it could be more like 3% -- with the myriad knock-on health care savings, productivity, etc.
While cyclists are vocal, they are a tiny, tiny minority.
this is definitely true, but so were African-American voters up until things started to change in 1965, when we started allowing African Americans to vote. and now there are a whole bunch of African American voters. similarly, if you allow people to ride bikes to get around, they will, so that 'tiny, tiny minority' number is going to continue to change -- just look at NYC, DC, Portland, SF, etc. some of these cities are talking real numbers of bike commuters -- 20% or so -- by 2020. it's very possible, even likely.
I'll be honest. I could care less about bike lanes personally. I don't own a bike and have no interest in it.
this would put you in the same category as about 99% of Americans. but, people change -- i did. that 99% will continue to shrink.
The plan exists. The time to argue was 5 years ago! It would be politically infeasible if it called for a reduction in the number of automobile lanes. We'd have no White Flint. Just bike obsessives like yourself complaining about the lack of bike infrastructure on a plan that never even made it to the county council because you made it too politically radioactive.
Plans can be changed up to and even during construction -- it happens all the time.
'Politically infeasible', to me, is proposing a very expensive and business-destroying plan (see 2nd Ave NYC) that plants an urban forest in the middle of a major road. It's so clearly insane that only tree obsessives could complain about _not_ planting a forest in the middle of a major thoroughfare.
It may be fair to call me a 'bike obsessive' -- bikes are, after all, the truth. :) But it's really bigger than that -- it's about freedom, self-determination, economic opportunity, community, etc. We have to let people move around under their own power -- it's a human rights/dignity argument that can't be explained away by 'drivers will be mad'. Complete Streets policies hint at this type of reasoning/rationale -- i.e. appropriate walk/bike infrastructure is not a 'nice to have', it's an absolute requirement for a decent/civilized society -- it is a human right.
If a plan didn't make it to county council, then I'd argue you didn't give anybody anything to advocate for. In other words, the argument that "the redesign will destroy your quality of life, your business, and your town for the next three years at least, but when it's done it will be multi-modal, we promise" has always been a political loser. Give people (in particular, bikers) something to get excited about, something to vote for, something to advocate for, and watch your fortunes change.
part of it is political positioning -- you can argue:
a) the dirty effing hippies want to ban cars, or
b) we're going to reduce congestion on the Pike, improve your quality of life, reduce pollution, save you money, and make the Pike a very pleasant place to shop, eat, and commute on.
But if the accompanying picture is an urban forest with a highway rammed through it, you're not gonna have too many people excited about it -- it'll seem like some weird hippie fantasy that is going to a) cost you a ton of money, and b) ruin your life for a few years.
by Peter Smith on Oct 27, 2010 1:17 pm • link • report
Peter, have you ever read Richard Layman's work? I think you'd really like it. (I'm not being sarcastic.). urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com
by Cavan on Oct 27, 2010 1:31 pm • link • report
yep -- all the time. i usually have to put my patience cap on if I really want to dig in, tho -- he's the only person who can write more than me! :)
and the more i think about it, the more i don't like property taxes. imagine you are approaching retirement age, and you love your house and your neighborhood, and you want to improve it -- maybe even a lot -- but you can't handle higher taxes on higher property appraisals on a retiree income, so you shoot down any proposed development that could raise property values b/c you don't want to have to sell your house and move in the future. i don't know if it actually happens or not, but it seems a part of the 'gentrification' argument, and it just seems to be a perverse incentive (or just a 'disincentive').
by Peter Smith on Oct 27, 2010 2:26 pm • link • report
If only there were some way of addressing those issues...
by oboe on Oct 27, 2010 2:34 pm • link • report
there definitely seems to me to be something very wrong about property taxes. i need to do a lot more reading, i guess. the wiki page says the UK does not have a property tax. does that mean 'gentrifying projects' (like bike lanes) get built easier/faster there? or that gentrification/displacement happens more slowly there? and what is the purpose, and what is the history, of property taxes? (someone on the internet says 'farms/agriculture/frontier/etc.,' as it basically served as a measure of income/wealth). may be obsolete today, to a certain extent?
get rid of property taxes altogether and bring back the 90+% income tax brackets! :-D
no, seriously.
by Peter Smith on Oct 28, 2010 3:13 am • link • report
I'm not sure getting rid of the viable option. Cities and counties depend on property taxes as a revenue source, and I'm not sure an income tax is a suitable alternative. Cities and counties provide a lot of infrastructure and services for the people that live or operate a business there. Income taxes won't always hit those people or businesses.
Say someone primarily lives and works in DC, but has a second home in Miami, Florida. How would Miami get "reimbursed" for the infrastructure and services being provided for that second home if we got rid of the property tax?
It probably gets worse when you consider businesses. If you own a set of restaurants, wouldn't all the income come back to you and the city/county you live in, rather than the city/county where the restaurants are?
Depending on government services are funded, getting rid of property taxes might not be a problem. But I think it would be hard to go that route in the US without dramatically changing who is responsible for the infrastructure improvements/maintenance and services that are typically relegated to cities and counties (e.g., roads and schools).
by Andy R on Oct 28, 2010 11:22 am • link • report
http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/
I'm not sure getting rid of [property taxes is a] viable option. Cities and counties depend on property taxes as a revenue source
It may or may not be viable (here) -- if the UK does it (it seems), then why not us? As for 'depending' on property taxes, same type of thing -- a lot/most Americans depend on cars right now, but that is slowly changing -- we just have to find replacements for cars, and find replacements for property taxes.
Cities and counties provide a lot of infrastructure and services for the people that live or operate a business there. Income taxes won't always hit those people or businesses.
yeah - i screwed up - i thought i put in some semi-qualifier for 'residential', but i did not -- my bad. that is, under My Plan as Benevolent Dictator, businesses would still be hit with property taxes, at least initially. i modeled my reasoning off of the UK 'no property taxes' policy, which from that wiki link, i think is just 'no _residential_ property taxes'. I couldn't then, nor even now, articulate exactly why we might want to keep or get rid of business property taxes - it doesn't seem to be that important to me (and, as you note, maybe prop taxes really make sense for businesses -- and, via the history of property taxes, they seemed to be based on the productive capacity of the land, thus they were a sort of income tax on businesses, so might still make sense for 'productive uses', aka 'businesses').
the idea being, i want to:
1) fully enable people (residents) of an area to be fully engaged in the pursuit of improving their homes/neighborhoods without fear of any type of repercussions that doing so will result in disadvantaging them in the future in some way, and
2) i also want to enable the hippie/non-or-low-consumerist lifestyle (which does not actively destroy the natural environment, imo). so, let's say you are a relatively-low-paid bike mechanic, you love doing it and you're great at it, you don't make much money, but you grow some of your own food, you don't spend unwisely, etc. etc., and you found a nice cheap house in a run-down part of town, and you live a nice, affordable lifestyle with your wife and children, and after 10 years, the developers and their co-conspirators (errrr....city officials) find the neighborhood, and decide to go to work gentrifying. whether you rent or own might not be all that important, though owning will probably make it possible for you to stay in your home a bit longer (for various reasons). all of a sudden, you need to make more money because rents/taxes go up bigtime, and now this pillar of the community, great hippie family who everyone loves and he does great bike work for, and she's a relatively-low-paid home-school-type-'Montessori/daycare' teacher/provider, and are happy/content, add tremendous 'community' value to the neighborhood, and are not destroying the earth, they're forced to become bigger workers/consumers -- essentially all because of residential property taxes. they don't qualify for an 'elderly' or 'disabled' or any other property tax exemptions. this is a bit of an extreme example, but i suspect it happens all the time -- it's probably at the heart of the gentrification debate. people are artists/teachers/baristas/police/fire/whatever, and just as they're getting to the point where community cohesiveness and 'community capital' are really starting to pay dividends for them and their neighbors/neighborhoods, they get uprooted by gentrification-brought-about-by-increasing-property-taxes/rents.
It probably gets worse when you consider businesses. If you own a set of restaurants, wouldn't all the income come back to you and the city/county you live in, rather than the city/county where the restaurants are?
so, just to reiterate, i meant to add the 'residential' qualifier -- businesses would still pay property taxes, at least initially -- so, you're correct, as far as i can tell.
but there's no reason we can't tax businesses appropriately -- we don't have to provide myriad tax havens/loopholes for businesses, in particular big businesses. so, if you ever try to start a small business, you'll be intimately familiar with how every government entity tries to, and often succeeds in, nickel-and-diming you -- only those nickels and dimes add up quick -- $150 fee to the City, $200 to the County, $1000 to the state, etc. etc. Instead, I say we make big enterprises like Google pay their fair share instead of just a 2.4% corporate tax rate. That's insane and should be illegal, but welcome to America (and a lot of the rest of the world). We need to change our value system and try to get rich people and big corporations to pay their fare share. I'm not saying it'll be easy, but it needs to happen. Starting a small business with zero up to ten employees should be relatively inexpensive/free, but right now, as with our tax system, the business tax system is regressive -- the richest/largest companies have the smallest tax burdens. So, when you hear politicians say "America loves small business" -- they're flattering you and lying to you -- the truth is that America hates small business, and this can been seen in the small business failure rate. The business tax system, and various other aspects, have been captured by big business to favor big business, and that comes at the expense of...small business. We shouldn't tolerate it.
Every once in a while I'm reminded thru some soundbite about what qualifies as a 'small business' in America -- up to 5,000 employees. Or, for a farm, up to $1 million revenue. These aspects allow politicians to lie to us more easily -- "I want to help small business!" -- yeah, they're not talking about your tech startup, your bike startup, your cupcake startup, etc. -- they're talking about their donors, what most everyone would consider to be BIG/HUGE companies.
and, of course, a danger with starting the whole 'get rid of property taxes' debate is you might end up with a Prop 13, like California -- it basically exempts homeowners from paying their fair share of taxes through hand-me-down properties, etc., and so your state goes broke, free college education goes away, your grade schools go from first to one of the worst, etc. there are other factors at play, of course, but any sane tax debate would have to be "Let's have rich people start paying their fair share in income taxes, but let's also dramatically reduce residential property taxes." I know for sure the economic/tax models could be done to properly raise more taxes, make the world a more fair/better place, etc., even factoring in incoming-hiding, etc. All of these answers, I am confident, are actually very simple -- it's just that most of the time they're off-limits in the public debate because, as Atrios says, only 'dirty effing hippies' could come up with policies that would actually work, like mortgage cramdowns, and only Very Serious People (VSP) could be taken seriously for suggesting policies like war/tax cuts for the rich/etc. (Though, in fairness, the Very Serious People's policies do work as intended by the VSP -- they just work only for rich people, and at the expense of everyone else.)
Make the world a better place, punch a big business in the face! :)
by Peter Smith on Oct 28, 2010 2:26 pm • link • report
Sure, you could probably tweak tax rates to deal with some of the problems. And you could try to change funding structures in state and local governments to solve some others, sort of like we do with school funding. Most states already have some sort of complicated process to redistribute money within a state to help poorer school districts. And there's already a little bit of that with local government aid in some states. But really, those haven't been smashing successes. You end up losing a certain amount of local control when you go to something like that.
But my bigger issue is it seems like getting rid of residential property taxes would be a huge change when one isn't required. Sure, I know people complain about property taxes when they're houses appraise at higher values, but people always complain about that. Is it actually rational to fear your house going up in value? It seems like you'd make more money from the house going up in value than you'd lose through higher property taxes.
Renters have more to lose when an area gentrifies. They'll only experience the negative impact of higher housing costs, since they aren't invested in the real estate. But I don't think there's a solution to that. I certainly don't think getting rid of property taxes would do anything.
Really I think fear of change is a bigger disincentive for redeveloping areas that the possibility of higher property taxes. People get worried their neighborhood will change undesirable ways. Maybe it will get crowded. Maybe traffic will get worse. Maybe they won't like their neighbors. etc.
Besides, property taxes have been the only way to tax the proceeds from most people's biggest investment- their home. Due to the $250k exclusion from the capital gains tax from the sale of a primary residence, you're really only going to tax the very wealthy if you just rely on capital gains without property taxes. And before you argue about the fairness of that, I'd just like to say I don't see a major distinction between $250k from the sale of Apple stock compared to someone that made $250k from the appreciation of his house.
by Andy R on Oct 29, 2010 12:19 am • link • report
Add a Comment