Posts about Walkability

Photo by author.

Because of the placement of the bus stop located on the south side of Marinelli across from the Metro entrance, there is a desire line across the street. The wall makes pedestrians go the long way around, and is typical of the conventional mid-20th century transportation orthodoxy which asserted that cars and pedestrians should be kept separate.

Additionally, the wall creates hazards for motorists. While I was taking photos, I saw two motorists turn left from southbound Rockville Pike (MD 355) into the oncoming lanes on Marinelli Road. A friend of mine who lives in one of the apartment buildings adjacent to the Metro said to me that she did the same thing the first time she turned left onto Marinelli. This wall violates the concept of driver expectancy. Drivers often drive based on what they expect, not necessarily according to actual conditions. To many drivers, a wall implies the side of the road rather than a median.

The wall also partially obstructs drivers' view of pedestrians in and around the crosswalk. It is especially hard for drivers to see road hazards, shorter pedestrians, children, and wheelchair users.

A more progressive approach would be to relocate the bus stop directly across the street from the Metro entrance. The stop line for cars approaching the Rockville Pike intersection on westbound Marinelli Road would also be moved back to allow a crosswalk to occupy the new desire line to the bus stop and NRC headquarters across the street.

As White Flint develops into a more urban area, Montgomery County will need to begin to treat the needs of pedestrians as more important than those of drivers. If Rockville Pike remains as hostile to pedestrians as it is now, no amount of density will turn White Flint into an urban center.

The site also features custom commute reports, allowing users to compare their commutes by foot, bike, transit and automobile. Using data from real estate website Zillow and the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Housing+Affordability Index, these commute profiles allow users to see how much of their monthly budget they can expect to spend on combined housing and transportation costs. The real estate search site ZipRealty has integrated these scores into all of their listings.

By providing these tools to a mass market looking for real estate, knowledge about the relationship between location and transportation can become more easily accessible. You don't have to be an urbanist - or the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - to make the connection between transportation and the bottom line.

It has now been almost 10 years since our Metro system was completed. We have experienced almost 10 years of dramatic revitalization of our urban places both in the District and in the inner suburbs. As a region, we now expect safe, vibrant urban neighborhoods as the norm along with a busy Metro that accommodates play in addition to work. The fact that we expect these things when as recently as 10 years ago, they were largely pipe dreams says a lot about how much our region has changed.

The conversation also drove the point home that the dramatic increase in the vitality of our urban places was not an automatic thing. Much of the urban vitality we now take for granted is completely alien to large swaths of the rest of the United States. The progress in our region was due to a combination of political will for good planning, dramatic infrastructure investment, and being lucky enough to have good legacy street grids.

We spend a lot of energy on Grater Greater Washington debating things like sector plans, infrastructure construction, and business incentives. Because of zoning and funding mechanisms that are largely left over from the 20th century, creating and maintaining great, vibrant, desirable, sustainable, human-scale traditional walkable urban cities and towns still takes more work than creating gas-guzzling car-dependent places.

Whether we feel that way about ourselves or not, the Washington region is now an inspiration to improve the vibrance of traditional cities and towns for many visiting Americans from other regions. We should feel proud of that fact and also understand that such a position also brings the responsibility to maintain what we've got as well as making our region Greater.