Posts about Bethesda

It sounds far out, but it might actually work. Montgomery County is blessed with a number of above-ground public parking garages in the downtowns of Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Wheaton. Their rooftop levels have great views, but outside of a few events each year, most of them are empty.

Our parking garages may not be as pretty as the Herzog and de Meuron-designed garage in Miami Beach which doubles as an event space. But since many of our garages are intended for commuters, they're usually next to Metro stations or bus stops, meaning you don't have to drink and drive.

Unfortunately, most parking garage roofs in Montgomery County are blocked off with chains when they're not being used for parking. County police threaten to arrest anyone who tries to go up there.

In 2011, photographer Chip Py attempted to do a photo shoot of a popular go-go band atop a parking garage in downtown Wheaton. He'd been detained by police for taking pictures there before, so he decided to contact the Department of Transportation, which manages the garages.

"It was 13 people, lights and everything. And I didn't want to risk going in there and getting it shut down," Py said. But officials from the county said he'd get arrested for trespassing. "You can't do anything in there except park a car," he remembers being told.

Of course, people go anyway. One Saturday afternoon last year, I decided to visit the top floor of every parking garage in downtown Silver Spring. As with any forbidden-but-accessible place in the urban realm, I also found teenagers. On one garage roof, I walked into a stairwell to leave and stumbled on two kids sketching and listening to music on a little boombox. The smell of pot wafted through the air. I wanted to ask, "Why are you here?" but before I could, they freaked out and packed up.

To me at least, the answer is obvious. I remember sneaking onto the roof of the Town Square Garage on Ellsworth Drive with my friends from high school before it opened in 2004. There's the thrill of breaking the rules, yeah, but there's also the great view and the feeling like you're in the middle of everything and completely alone at the same time.

That's not too different from being in a great urban park or plaza. Public parking garages belong to the public, and we should think about them as part of the public realm. In other words, Montgomery County should take advantage of all this empty space they have, especially since it's not being used for parking. Of course, not all parking garages are engineered to actually hold people, like this one in Phoenix that violently shook when Arizona State University students held a dance party on top. We'd have to make sure that our garages were up to the task.

In recent months, there's been a lot of talk about growing the county's nightlife scene. However, it's primarily been about street-level drinking, or in the case of the Quarry House Tavern in downtown Silver Spring, subterranean drinking.

Not only would rooftop events on parking garages be a good use of wasted space, but they might be unusual enough to draw people here for a night out. The DC area may have a lot of rooftop bars, but definitely not one like this.

For more examples, check out this photoset of views from parking garages in downtown Silver Spring.

In addition to offering an alternative when the existing escalators are out of service, it will bring the station up to modern safety standards by providing a second entrance for emergency personnel and a second evacuation route in the event of an emergency.

Sadly, Maryland does not yet have the funds lined up for its portion of the Purple Line costs, and Leggett is citing potential Purple Line delays as a reason to postpone the Metro entrance as well. From the Bethesda Patch:

"Due to the current lack of state construction funding for these projects, this reduction is not likely to cause a delay in the project," read the county release announcing the CIP amendments.

This statement is very puzzling because County Executive Leggett has been an excellent advocate for increasing transportation revenue at the state level, teaming with Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker, both counties' state delegations, and other counties' delegations.

Governor O'Malley has made it clear that a significant piece of the increased transportation revenues would go towards constructing the Purple Line. One would think that the Leggett Administration would be more publicly optimistic about future state revenues, based on its own hard work.

Further, the Maryland MTA has already stated that construction on the entrance would have to begin by 2016 in order to meet a projected 2020 start of operations for the Purple Line. Last year's budget kept the project on schedule to break ground by 2016. Any delay would put the project too far behind schedule to be open when the Purple Line begins operation, if the Purple Line gets the funding it needs.

This proposal continues the pattern with this administration of trying to defund smart growth-oriented projects while proposing lavish spending on sprawl-oriented road projects.

When the County Council restored the Metro entrance funding during the 2012 budgeting process, it deferred some wasteful new road projects the Leggett administration has proposed. Those include building Montrose Parkway East, and widening Snouffer School Road and Goshen Road in Gaithersburg. It's unclear if the Gaithersburg area road widenings are linked to the M-83 "Zombie Road" proposal that MCDOT continues to study.

The County Executive's office now wants to defer the Metro funding, though for less time than in last year's proposal, and restore many of these same road projects.

Just like last year, the County Council can rein in the county Department of Transportation's least considered road-widening impulses. It's up to us to contact them and let them know that the electorate supports smart growth and economic development projects, such as the new Bethesda Metro entrance.

In this report, the two groups suggest a network of bike lanes in Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Bethesda and Friendship Heights. They proposed having dedicated bike lanes on major roads like Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring and business district streets like Arlington Road in Bethesda.

Streets that were too narrow or too congested for bike lanes, like Elm Street in Bethesda, would get sharrows, which help drivers and cyclists share the road.

They also asked the county to complete major regional trails, like the Metropolitan Branch Trail, which currently stops half a mile short of its proposed terminus at the Silver Spring Metro station.

The proposed lanes make a lot of sense, focusing on compact downcounty neighborhoods where everything's already within biking distance. I've written before that more on-street bike routes can make bicycling more practical as a form of transportation by bringing riders to shops, jobs and other activities. And bikes take up a lot less space than cars, meaning we can fit more bicyclists on a congested street than we can drivers.

Some of the proposed routes, like Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road, may face resistance from the Montgomery County Department of Transportation and the State Highway Administration, which have been reluctant to take away space from cars. But WABA and MoBike weren't the first to propose bike lanes for them: earlier this year, County Councilmember Nancy Floreen asked that the state paint lanes on several major roads that they're scheduled to repave anyway next year.

Creating a countywide bicycling network will take a lot of time and planning, but there are things we can do to improve the biking experience sooner rather than later. As more people take up bicycling, they may find that they don't have safe places to ride. As a result, Capital Bikeshare could help build a constituency for bike lanes that doesn't exist now.

Capital Bikeshare is ready to expand into Montgomery County. The question is whether our streets will be ready for Capital Bikeshare.

The intersection of Bethesda and Woodmont Avenues is the best-known place in downtown Bethesda. Located a few blocks from the Metro, it is surrounded by shops, offices, movie theaters and apartments. A complex mix of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians traverse it every day.

Faced with the problem of managing traffic while a large mixed-use development goes up, the county took a standard traffic engineering approach. It treated the crossroads as an intersection consisting of 3 roads that carry cars and sought to eliminate "conflicts" by removing obstacles to automobile movement.

But Bethesda & Woodmont is also a major travel node for bicycles—vehicles too—which arrive on two other routes, the Capital Crescent and Georgetown Branch Trails. Suburban traffic engineering concepts, applied in this highly urban setting, have made a mess for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists alike.

A 20-month road closure began 3 weeks ago. Woodmont Avenue, which crosses the construction site, had one block shut completely. On Bethesda Avenue, MCDOT removed turn lanes and eliminated a section of sidewalk. It moved back stop lines for the traffic light, sending bicycles exiting the Capital Crescent Trail directly into the intersection.

Problems quickly emerged. Because motorists can no longer use Woodmont Avenue to reach Bethesda Row from the south, Bethesda Avenue carries more traffic than before. Traffic on that newly narrowed road regularly backs up.

Closing a section of Woodmont shut down an important pedestrian corridor, which connects a densely populated apartment district with downtown Bethesda and the Metro station. Pedestrians now detour through a drive-through bank.

In addition, Bethesda Avenue has foot traffic of its own. A 190-unit apartment building (where I live), stores, and restaurants adjacent to the closed sidewalk generate significant pedestrian activity. Yet the traffic plan did not replace the crosswalk lost to construction. Pedestrians now dodge cars as they cross the street.

One cause of these difficulties is that the county did not retime traffic lights. A longer green light could move through traffic faster on Bethesda Ave. But with this fix alone, turning cars would still back up at crosswalks. And faster-moving traffic would endanger pedestrians crossing Bethesda Avenue and bicyclists leaving the trails.

The traffic engineers, focused as usual on cars, made another, more fundamental mistake. They ignored the movement of bicycles between the trail and the roadways. The great majority of weekday cyclists go from the trail into the traffic lanes. The new traffic pattern endangers these cyclists with a signal that sends them into moving auto traffic.

Also, the construction traffic pattern continues the county's ongoing disregard for the safety and convenience of pedestrians. There may not be room for a temporary walkway next to the construction, but a crosswalk could have been marked where the sidewalk ends on Bethesda Avenue. Instead, the county erected a "Sidewalk Closed" sign a block away, needlessly driving away walk-in customers that the street's businesses depend on.

This construction project cries out for innovative traffic management. A two-phase traffic signal could fix many of the problems pedestrians and cyclists face during the construction. One phase would be green for all pedestrian crossings and for bicycles entering from the trails, making the intersection much safer and more convenient.

The other phase would be a flashing yellow that allows cars to move slowly through the intersection in all directions. The significant reduction of traffic on Woodmont Avenue since the closure of the block south of the intersection could make this feasible. Pedestrians and cyclists would be much better off, and auto traffic would back up less.

That might or might not be the best solution. What is certain is the need for more multimodal thinking. In this sort of urban setting, traditional traffic engineering fails pedestrians and cyclists, and hurts motorists too.