Image from Google Street View.

Recently, Montgomery County created a small connection between the dead-end of Woodbury Drive and Fenton Street in accordance with the county’s planned trails in the area.

This connection is needed to complete the Grove Street on-road bike route between the Green Trail at Wayne Avenue and the Metropolitan Branch Trail at Fenton Street.

Unfortunately, they didn’t do a very good job of informing the residents and decided to cut down two big trees to do so — visible in the picture at right.

And so people are upset. On a neighborhood listserv people wrote:

Just came back this evening to Woodbury Drive to find that the county has put in a sidewalk between the deadend on Woodbury Drive and Fenton Street. Further to do this, they have cut down two large mulberry trees that provided us a buffer between the dead-end of Woodbury Dr and Fenton Street.

Now the buffer that these trees created has gone. None of the neighbors requested this sidewalk. There is already a perfectly good one.

This is really appalling, since those trees probably took a good 15 years to grow. Part of the appeal of this dead-end was that although it was right next to Fenton the trees provided a nice buffer. Now this has been lost!

And:

The sidewalk serves absolutely no purpose, and an existing sidewalk could easily have been widened to be ADA compatible.

They’re half right. The existing sidewalk is only 4 feet wide, so to serve as part of a bike route it would need to be widened — meaning the new path serves a purpose, However, they’re probably right that the sidewalk could have been widened with the tree trimmed back.

Some of it was over the top though:

We are concerned for the safety of our children who frequently play in this dead-end street. The trees provided a nice buffer from busy 410 and Fenton Street.

The DOT said that the “tree removal and sidewalk ramp was necessary to allow for a safe connection to an existing bike route” but didn’t really explain how.

I’m a big fan of these kind of connections that help to make suburban street systems easier to bike and walk by allowing cyclists and pedestrians to avoid traffic sewers. But there needs to be proper outreach. Going a little off plan to avoid cutting down trees — or replacing them as best as possible — would probably help.