Posts by Rollin Stanley

This is a great thing, and it is unfortunate that surrounding counties did not do the same. The Ag Reserve, parkland and our established single-family residential areas comprise about 89 percent of the County, and these areas will remain largely the same as they are today.

But the plan compels us to look to the lands we have already serviced as the places to grow. Maybe this is the real vision of Wedges & Corridors: the first real Sustainable Growth Plan in America, 40 years before it was in vogue.

Did the plan authors realize there would be a time when we would be forced to look in a more limited fashion within Montgomery County to maximize the infrastructure to achieve their vision? They must have known we could not grow out forever. I like to think they thought about this and said to themselves, "We have created a framework that will challenge future community leaders to rethink our growth, leverage what we have built and at that point, become the one of the most sustainable suburbs in the country."

Wedges and Corridors was—and still is—very forward thinking. The plan established the concept of strategic urbanization through "corridor cities." The next stage in the evolution of the plan is to fill in the gaps.

Strategic growth on former strip malls will strengthen existing communities by creating new services and raising land values. We already know in Bethesda and Silver Spring that residential neighborhoods near mixed-use centers see higher home values because they are close to the amenities people want. Surrounding communities enjoy both convenient services and the preservation of their established neighborhoods.

Ask folks around Dale Avenue in Silver Spring or in the Luxmanor neighborhood of White Flint if they love their new grocery stores. Those stores are made possible through the kind of redevelopment that creates an incentive for property owners to create desirable new projects.

The large number of foreclosures over the past four years shows that neighborhoods isolated from services and jobs are susceptible to high rates of foreclosure, even in MoCo. These neighborhoods are sensitive to fluctuations in the cost of transportation, mainly gas. The average homeowner in MoCo spends over 18 percent of household costs on getting around.

Strategic infill near these neighborhoods, such as a small strip mall converted into a mix of housing and services, can help reduce transportation costs. Housing around office parks can bring people closer to work with the added increase in affordable housing.

To preserve the quality of life of our residential areas, we must generate new thinking for the areas we have left. The following maps show what little land we have left to effect change. Is this a function of Wedges and Corridors? I think it is more due to the zoning we created over the past 50 years. Clearly, we have not designated enough land in which to accommodate the growth that was expected to happen in Wedges and Corridors.

With 70,000 new households expected in the next 20 to 25 years, the need is pressing. Land for new single-family housing is almost gone, and we expect nearly 80 percent of the new housing to be in multi-unit buildings on smaller infill sites (about 5 percent of the County).

We expect 155,000 to 165,000 new jobs. Where we put those jobs and how people get to them is critical. We cannot price out our workforce from our jobs and force them to live outside the County.

This means attracting new services and housing to strategic areas. Our master planning efforts in White Flint, Kensington, Wheaton, Silver Spring, Takoma and Burtonsville all address the issues left to us by the founders of Wedges & Corridors.

While we have been handed a legacy, our thinkers of 50 years ago left us with new challenges. Limited resources, with the challenge to create a sustainable network of neighborhoods from what appears to be a network of suburban sprawl. It is up to our generation of thinkers and those who follow, to create a sustainable network of connections focused on mobility, design and the environment that will set the stage 50 years from now for the next evolution of the Wedges and Corridors.

The big ideas from the plan revolve around the concepts of cities laid out along corridors and wedges of different land uses between those corridors. Note that the "corridors" is plural, referring to the single one the plan identified in Montgomery County and the others in Prince George's County. So as it applies to MoCo, there is one corridor identified, and that is I-270.

Germantown is a corridor city with a population of just over 86,000.This is the largest defined place in the county, 25,000 greater than Silver Spring at 71,500 and Bethesda at 69,000. Yet, where is the downtown in Germantown? Compare the block or two around the Black Rock Center to the downtowns in Silver Spring and Bethesda. Clearly, the density of that corridor city is different than the other two. Perhaps centralizing more of the density could have created a walkable pedestrian-oriented downtown for Germantown.

Transportation:
MoCo has plenty of roads. However, we have too many cul-de-sacs or roads that just end. We lack a larger grid pattern that might mimic an urban setting, but at a much larger scale. And this will not change, meaning big challenges in trying to create an effective transit system that serves a low density, unconnected string of corridor cities, centered on one corridor: I-270.

Check out this graphic showing all the roads in MoCo. Whenever I show this in a presentation, I get the same reaction, that people are not aware we have this many roads. I am looking into trying to graphically show how many miles of roads we have and what percentage of them actually carry the bulk of the traffic. The results may be interesting.

The contrast between the black and white highlighting the roads of MoCo really points out the disparity between the roads we have built, and the roads we use to get places. Looking at the patchwork of roads would lead someone to think there should be no traffic problem.

And what about the transit the plan called for? We got the Red Line. Takoma Park, Bethesda and Silver Spring realized the potential of the rail stops. But what about Forest Glen and the Grosvenor metro stops? Did we realize the vision of the Plan at major transportation infrastructure investments? There are townhomes being built within walking distance of the Grosvenor metro stop, yet the mid-rise, multi- unit buildings are farther away

Not all transit stops are equal in terms of the density around them and that is how it should be. Yet perhaps the investment could have been better utilized in a few locations.

It has taken 40 years and a zoning change to finally realize the potential of the White Flint Metro stop. We are creating more density and housing at Twinbrook and it is something to consider as we move forward with White Flint II and Glenmont plans.

What does Wedges & Corridors mean for the future? Given the projections, the resulting landscape of 45 years of Wedges and Corridors, and the fact we built what was planned for, what are the implications for the future of the County?

It is interesting to consider where the plan predicted we would be today, and to consider the next 40 to 50 years of the plan.

Predictions:
The General Plan was surprisingly accurate in predicting job and population growth in MoCo. (It was less accurate for Prince George's, where the population there was anticipated to be larger than MoCo's.) The MoCo population was forecast to be 995,000 in the year 2000. The actual population that year was 873,346, about 122,000 fewer, or 14 percent less than predicted. By 2010, the Census puts us at 971,777 residents.

The plan predicted there would be 301,515 households by the year 2000, while in actuality we had 323,400, a difference of seven percent, again pretty accurate for a 40+ year projection. By 2010 that number grew to 360,500, an 11.5-percent increase over the 2000 number.

The job count is the reverse. The plan projected we would have 335,000 jobs in the county in 2000.Our actual job count then stood at 474,300, about 41 percent more than the predicted total. By 2010, the job total reached about 506,000.

So, if the plan was close on predicting the population and number of households, how did it miss the mark on the number of jobs in the county? This is an easy answer. Keep in mind the era in which plan authors made these predictions—within 15 years of the end of the World War II.

Couples married and had kids. Women stayed home while their husbands went to work. The plan's founders could never have imagined the boom in the number of women in the workplace and the advent of the DINK household (double income no kids). In fact, today we see only 20+ percent of households forming the "traditional" family of two parents with kids, and we have about an equal percentage of households where one of the parents is staying at home. Add to this the explosion of single-parent households, and it is easy to understand the inaccuracy in the job predictions.

If the demographers of the late '50s and early '60s had factored in the two-working-parent trend starting in the late '70s and beyond, they would have been almost dead accurate on the job count.

Pattern of Growth:
The plan called for a series of cities along the corridor. The idea was to centralize the bulk of the growth in smaller urban places, connected by roads and transit, preserving land for agriculture and open space. Clearly, strategic places of higher density were viewed as the way to preserve large parts of the county and, in fact, MoCo was planned to have urban places. The plan authors did not envision that MoCo would be a wholly suburban place.

Overlaying the 2010 population distribution over that 1960s plan map shows we pretty much grew as the plan called for. But while we grew as the plan authors had envisioned, we lag behind on the connections. Today, there are few options for moving north to south or east to west, hence the daily traffic congestion we have just measured in our latest biennial mobility assessment. (And why I choose to live a four-minute bike ride from work.)

Let's fast-forward past the opening and imagine the streetscape after a concert ends. Hundreds of patrons spilling out onto Colesville, making their way to cars, Metro, or crossing the street to head into the downtown or hopefully, Fenton Village south of Wayne for an after-concert bite or beverage. (Yes, there is nightlife in Fenton Village—two of my favorites are Jackie's and the Quarry House.)

The concert-goers have two intersections they might cross: Colesville and Georgia or Colesville and Fenton. Both have recently been redone (one of them twice), and the result is the usual type of crosswalks.

But let's consider a different type of crosswalk. Something new (but actually old) that engages the pedestrian, giving him or her priority over the cars. Consider an intersection that actually makes the pedestrian feel secure. One that reduces apprehension about crossing a downtown street, where most of the cars are intent on just getting through the intersection to get somewhere else.

Should this be our priority? Helping cars move through our downtowns faster so they can get somewhere else? Or should we be focused on the people who want to stop, visit, patronize our businesses or enjoy our markets, events or meet friends? Can we do both?

Believe it or not, the Fenton/Colesville intersection was once just like the intersections that are all the rage in cities like London, where pedestrian traffic and motor car interactions are in constant conflict. This intersection was a "scramble intersection." When the light went red for cars, it went red in all directions. Then it was the people's turn to take priority to move through the intersection. You could walk in any direction in crossing. You could walk at 90 degrees, or even 45 degrees, to avoid crossing to the other side, then again to get to the opposite corner.

Implementing a scramble is about a shift in priority from autocentric to pedestrian- and bike-centric movement. It's a simple and very efficient way of moving people and cars, and we used to do it.

This approach can work in many places here. Think about Rockville Pike a few years from now when the White Flint plan begins to become reality. We could create a pedestrian environment shared equally with cars.

Consider the many intersections in MoCo where this approach could be beneficial for people walking, in wheelchairs, on bikes, as well as in cars.

We are working on some designs in downtown Silver Spring, close to our offices, like at Fenton and Colesville, where this approach makes a lot of sense. If we could transform one or two intersections into a great multi-use intersection, maybe we could resurrect the model that MoCo had at one intersection so many years ago.

Imagine that Live Nation event emptying out onto Colesville, where hundreds of patrons will safely move south into the downtown. Beyond the post-event traffic, the hundreds of people who cross this intersection every day could do so safely, without the apprehension of conflicts with turning vehicles, cars running red lights, or crossing the street twice to get to the opposing corner.

This solution doesn't cost a lot. In fact, it makes the curb design simpler and only requires some changes to signals. And it removes street clutter. As we complete these designs, we will try to build a constituency to implement these at strategic intersections around the county.

This intersection above is at one of the busiest intersections in downtown Toronto. Where not only motor cars, but the subway and streetcar lines all converge. Count the streetcars moving through the intersection. Watch the crowds crossing in all directions then the cars. Unseen is the subway below. At any point in the day there are huge crossings of people and all types of vehicles.

The County is moving forward with some exciting new strategies for infill growth. We can bring our infrastructure along to help us realize the visions expressed in our plans for major intersections in places like Takoma/Langley, Long Branch, White Flint, and in our busy downtown areas. It is time to rethink how we do pedestrian infrastructure to complement our planning visions.

Crossposted at the Director's Blog.

I included in my presentation a video I took at a major intersection in Toronto on a cold spring day around 4 p.m. More than a dozen street cars go through this intersection in about 30 seconds. The buildings are all four floors or less.

This intersection is about 2.0 km from downtown. Count the streetcars going through the intersection in about 35 seconds. Even a guy on a bike. How tall are the buildings? Were we not maximizing the transit investment? Or is this a great example of how transit serves its purpose—moving people from one place to another, providing options for people to move to where they want and need to go.

The same is true for the Toronto subway stations. The one I used for commuting if I did not take a streetcar passed through neighborhoods of three to five-story buildings all along the corridor. The subway line ran under Danforth Ave, including Greektown, an incredibly vibrant 24-hour neighborhood, then continued for miles, with a stop every four blocks or so. (Cue the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding). In sum, a pedestrian-oriented, active, mixed use, diverse corridor with three-story buildings on top of a subway line with about a dozen stops. Any Toronto resident would say we capitalized on our transit infrastructure.

This is the 502 street car line in Toronto I used to ride to work every day. There were two other lines that shared some of the route. It traveled for over 20 km across the width of the city. Check out the buildings that line the street. Ends was a terrific clothing store with some apartments up top. For the most part, the buildings are two and three floors along the route except at major street intersections. During rush hour, you never wait for more than four minutes for a ride.

The point is simple. Not every transit station has to be downtown Silver Spring or Bethesda. In reality, the best transit systems have a very diverse network of transit stops.

A month ago, I spoke to residents in Park Hills, located around the Wayne-Dale intersection west of downtown Silver Spring. Great people, willing to listen about change, transition, transit and stable residential neighborhoods. They asked about the changes the Purple Line might bring to the Wayne- Dale intersection in terms of land use. Well, not much, for a number of reasons.

1. This is a stable residential community. The purpose of public transit is to move people to where they want to go, not to tear down neighborhoods to do it. These goals are not at odds, they can work together.
2. Wayne & Dale will not be downtown Silver Spring. There is a lot of property to develop in downtown Silver Spring for decades to come, and we hope the Purple Line will help. And maybe the residents of Park Hills will ride the Purple Line to get to Fenton Village and its restaurants in the future. Imagine, public transit getting people to entertainment rather than just being used to up-zone every neighborhood a rapid transit line runs through.
3. Nobody would invest the money, even if it were permitted, to buy up small lots at high prices, just to build a low-scale building where the number of units would not be a whole lot different than the original houses on the site.
4. There should never be tall buildings at Wayne & Dale. It does not make sense. With so much infill to do elsewhere, new rapid transit will help maximize the potential for redevelopment where it makes sense. And it does not make sense everywhere.

For those of us who have run streetcars into new emerging neighborhoods, who rode them each day through vibrant, ethnic, low-scale neighborhoods to reach the 50-story buildings downtown, we understand how transit connects people and neighborhoods. Rockville Pike has a subway under it, and, we hope, terrific bus service in the future.

This building height/use relationship is terrific; after a few months, everyone seems happy, except for a few people quoted in the paper saying they are not used to parking in a parking structure to go grocery shopping. (Welcome to the 90s—this is how the rest of the urban world shops.) This is a place where we decided maximizing transit investment makes sense.

There is road capacity on the Pike. There is an existing transit line with lots of capacity. The location is a major regional shopping node, and it can be designed so that within a block, there are townhouses.

Chevy Chase Lake meets none of those characteristics. In Chevy Chase Lake:

• There are considerable issues with traffic
• If this was such a desirable location, something would have happened here in 2004, during the biggest real estate boom ever, when there was 250,000 square feet of approved building capacity that was never taken advantage of.
• This is not downtown Bethesda, so would 18- and 19-story buildings really be appropriate at this location?
• Would 4.5 million square feet make sense at this location, as some have suggested?
• Should there be a near- and long-term strategy of phasing zoning and infrastructure to provide for sound, orderly development with higher levels of capacity once the Purple Line arrives?

We believe there should be orderly development structured around reasonable expectations of what might and should happen within this small node along a busy street. We have floated the idea that the near-term strategy should reflect the current approvals for development that has existed for many years—an extra 250,000 square feet, with the added flexibility to convert some of that space to residential uses.

We also suggest that once the Purple Line is under construction, additional floor area capacity be raised another 750,000 square feet, for a total of just over one million additional square feet. Those recommendations fall right within the Brookings fellow's criteria for upzoning around transit. With the exception of a transit corridor running out of Dallas, I believe he will be hard pressed to say the early ideas for this plan are not building on transit investment.

I stated to the Bethesda Chamber that the role of the planning department in master planning was not to increase land values, but to manage expectations. This means creating plans that have both short- and long- term scenarios. It also means setting the stage to maximize real estate where it makes sense, and at a scale appropriate to the immediate environment.

I have asked the staff working on several master plans to look at implementing "phased" zoning, where changes are made now in expectation of local potential, and then, when certain conditions and infrastructure change occur, maybe additional capacity is freed up. In this way, the community understands how the future landscape can evolve over time, and builders and landowners realize how their land holdings may develop over the next five, 10 and 20 years.

The County has had many master plans built on grand visions that had little basis in reality. Not every commercial area has the potential of White Flint, not even the area north of Montrose, as I wrote about a few weeks ago. And this is a good thing. MoCo is very fortunate to have such a diverse set of neighborhoods. Our planning efforts should capitalize on the individuality of each of those communities to help them grow and thrive and, more importantly, help the diverse people living in our communities realize the potential of their neighborhoods.

10 or 15 years from now, as White Flint hits its stride, there will be plenty of destinations drawing people into the area. Some will take transit, but most will drive. They will seek out parking and walk along new pedestrian-friendly streets lined with windows and activity. Many will work and live in this emerging community.

Will those same people look north to the White Flint II area and say, "Hey, let's go shop or eat over there?" And if they are making this decision, will they walk? No way. It will be a barrier. As the new streets and activities emerge in White Flint, they will not extend the grid across the underpass.

Would you really drive ¼ or ½ mile north and find a new parking spot in White Flint II to shop or eat? It's unlikely you'd find something there that will not already be in White Flint. And this is the challenge of White Flint II. What can it become? What can happen there that will make it distinct from White Flint?

This question would be different if the Montrose/355 intersection had remained at-grade. The street grid could have extended north to south. The building infrastructure could have created a seamless transition across the intersection, not much different than, say, Georgia and Colesville Road in Silver Spring. People could and would walk across the area into White Flint II because the transition would be lined with active uses day and evening.

The Montrose Underpass simply reinforces the view that Rockville Pike is a runway to get through White Flint versus moving through the area as a destination itself. Keep in mind that for a driver in a car to make eye contact with a pedestrian, they have to be travelling at about 23 mph (30 kph). So as long as we keep building our roads as expressways, we prevent the opportunity for "engaged" streets where a number of activities coexist safely.

So as we prepare to look at the White Flint II area, we have to take a hard look at what is possible. We have White Flint becoming known as NoBe (North of Bethesda), we have Rockville to the north, with White Flint II mostly in the middle. Will it be SoRo (South of Rockville) or can it establish its own identity? Can we expect the same demand for high-rise construction in White Flint II as in WF I? Will traffic modeling reveal that White Flint I occupies the bulk of the available and projected road capacity?

Or should we expect more like Twinbrook Station, a recent successful project north and east of White Flint at lower densities with a residential focus? Should this be the future of White Flint II, with splashes of retailing that are more convenience-focused than destination oriented? Will there still be a market for destination retail like the Container Store north of Montrose?

Several property owners own land both north and south of Montrose. How they lease south of the road in White Flint I—whether to big box retailers or smaller retail—will have a big impact on what happens to the north in White Flint II. That model does not fit into the urban character of White Flint. Property owners will lease according to the market, and will avoid investments that compete with other uses in the area. This will not only impact the retail market but the residential market as well.

If White Flint I is to be higher-density condo and rental, there may not be enough market share for both areas in the next 15 years. Perhaps White Flint II will be about managing expectations, meaning it may take awhile for the collective vision to emerge. This is the approach that we are investigating for the Long Branch neighborhood, where the near and long term goals are differentiated by the actions we can take to create incremental change.

Maybe 20 years from now the Montrose underpass may be MoCo's elevated expressway. The mistake realized decades later in places like Seattle, Toronto and San Francisco, where lots of money was invested to reverse the damage and open up new opportunities for creating better environments for people, not autos.

Several years ago, a portion of the one elevated expressway that reached downtown Toronto was torn down, about 1.5 miles of it. Support is now building to take down the rest. This is one of the locations around the world where the benefits of tearing down 1950/'60s era transportation infrastructure has and will open up new economic opportunities that also meld well with the greening of urban areas.

There are lots of things to consider when we start the White Flint II Sector Plan.We hope for engaged conversations with property owners, residents and business operators—all of whom will help guide the possibilities that White Flint II can be.

Crossposted at The Director's Blog.

When I arrived in Montgomery County in 2008, the White Flint property owners and members of my staff tried to divert $50 million in funding for the Montrose Parkway underpass, the first phase to reconstruct Rockville Pike, to study a future transit line along the Pike. Our efforts were unsuccessful. While I am sure many love to drive through the underpass, think of the missed opportunity.

I have driven the underpass on several occasions. Frankly, it is not that great. Connectivity is expedited in one direction—east-west—but getting off the road to head north or south is a pain. A regular at-grade intersection with turn lanes, appropriate signaling, pedestrian infrastructure and plantings would have been wonderful and much more effective for the broader public.

You can forget the pedestrian environment on the overpass. I watched a bike commuter ride across and was struck by how brave he was. With new condos just south of Montrose and major mixed-use development plans on the way in White Flint, the whole Montrose project works against what the new master plan is trying to create.

People do not walk over overpasses, they walk where there is something at the edge of the sidewalk that enlivens the space. Current and future residents will have to drive to the shopping north of Montrose if, as White Flint develops, they go north of Montrose at all.

The graphic at right illustrates the point about the Montrose underpass. It shows the I-270/I-370 interchange overlaid on top of Bethesda's Woodmont Triangle.

The Rockville Pike/Montrose Parkway interchange sterilized huge tracts of land that could have been used to create a vibrant urban intersection with buildings framing the street, people on the sidewalks interacting along the street edge, traffic moving at effective speeds and with room for future surface public transportation.

Not doable, some say? I pass along the best example of a street designed effectively for both high motor vehicle traffic and high pedestrian activity: the Champs-Elysées. Think about it. This street has some of the most expensive shopping in the world. Cars stop along the curb to drop or pick up Europe's elite to patronize those shops.

There is a sidewalk that can best be described as too big, tourist numbers beyond comprehension, views that astound, trees galore, yet the road itself carries more cars per hour than many interstate highways. You can cross the Champs on foot at numerous signalized intersections, yet the traffic still moves, except of course on the last day of the Tour de France.

I am not saying the Montrose underpass should have been the Champs-Elysées, but it could have been an at-grade intersection that offered a terrific urban pedestrian experience. That would have also opened up land for development that has been consumed by roadways and created the urban experience White Flint needs while generating a heck of a lot more property tax for the county.

In Montgomery County, we are fortunate that both County and the State leaders are looking in a different direction.

Consider all the initiatives underway:

• The growth policy the Planning Department advocated and that the County Council adopted calls for a part of impact fees assessed on developers to be dedicated to transit.
  
• Zoning that assigns increased density for places close to basic services like groceries and dry cleaners.
  
• Master plans like White Flint, the Purple Line plans for Takoma Langley Crossroads, Long Branch and Chevy Chase Lake, and the soon-to-be-released Wheaton and Kensington Sector Plans.
  
• The state has their "ag print" and "green print" initiatives that are leading into the emerging Plan Maryland program which we hope will result in a rethink of the priority funding areas (areas of growth for each county).
  
• Maryland DOT's leadership in funding infrastructure through smart growth is a national model.

In participating at the FHWA session, it became obvious that here in Maryland we are leading the nation in not only thinking about change, but in preparing for the future as well. It is a great time to be planning here in MoCo.

The Planning Department, the County Council and the state Departments of Planning and Transportation are in sync at many levels. Together we can shift the thinking from one of moving cars, to moving people.

Crossposted at The Director's Blog.