Posts about Gaithersburg

Between my parents, who listened to adult contemporary, and my friends who were getting into musical theatre, I was anxious to hear music I could actually relate to. Green Day was pretty easy to find: on the radio, on television, and in the halls of Blake High School, on t-shirts and patches sewn to jean jackets.

Their songs were fast and catchy, though as a preacher's kid, I was initially horrified by the foul language. But I'd spent plenty of mindlessly dull afternoons like the ones Billie Joe Armstrong described in "Longview," and was relieved to know someone else felt the same way.

Meanwhile, I'd never been to Washingtonian Center before the evening of the party. Walking felt like a punishment, something I did on those "Longview" afternoons when I didn't have a ride to any place more interesting. On those days, I'd walk 45 minutes to the shopping center closest to my parents' house, down streets with look-alike 1950's ranch houses and all while not seeing another person. It was boring, but slightly better than being at home.

At the Washingtonian Center, walking suddenly became something fun. We could walk from the movies to an artificial lake, then look in store windows on our way to dinner. And we could do all of this while being around and looking at other people. Not only was it better than sitting at home alone, but it was more fun than going to the mall.

I didn't question Washingtonian Center's authenticity at first, perhaps because I couldn't yet tell the difference between it and a traditional downtown. But I definitely wondered why Green Day called themselves a "punk band," which didn't seem to describe a group who played stadiums. Punks, I imagined, were more likely found in places like Phantasmagoria, the grungy and now-closed punk club in Wheaton.

But both of these experiences served as a sort of gateway to more "legitimate" pursuits. It's because of Green Day that I made friends with similar taste in music who would later introduce me to "actual" punk bands like Fugazi or invite me to see their band play shows in punk houses. (The webcomic Nothing Nice to Say jokes that Green Day fans get into real punk out of embarrassment for liking Green Day.)

And it's because of Washingtonian Center that I began to explore downtown Silver Spring before it became a new "town center" in its own right, and taking Metro into the District to wander around there. I've always been interested in architecture, but it's trips to places like Washingtonian Center which got me excited in the spaces between the buildings, which is why I'm currently in school for urban planning.

Much as I wouldn't have gotten into real punk if I hadn't listened to Green Day, I wouldn't be so excited about walking down real city streets had I not walked down a fake city street first. So for that reason, I'm not bothered when a new development is compared to a small town or an Italian piazza. Some of these places are like the Good Charlotte of urbanism, unable to be even a good fake downtown.

But like a good punk song that can teach you to see yourself and your world differently, I'm convinced that a walk down a good urban street can do the same, whether it's in a city or a suburb, old or new.

For more on the topic of punk rock and New Urbanism, check out this post from Scott Doyon comparing the two.

The Laurel Macy's has managed to remain open for years despite much of its host mall being shuttered. That store would likely have closed years ago if it wasn't making money, especially in the wake of the Great Recession.

Similarly, if it had not been profitable the White Flint Bloomingdale's would have closed in 2007 when another location of the luxury retailer opened a mere 3 Metro stations away.

Within the Favored Quarter, the most economically competitive and healthy part of our region, only the largest and most dynamic enclosed malls are continuing to thrive. The rest are slowly dying.

In Maryland, Montgomery Mall is the most vibrant, while in Virginia the Tysons cluster reigns supreme.

When the White Flint redevelopment plan was approved in 2010, it provided the owners of White Flint Mall the opportunity to earn a healthier profit by giving the market more of what it wants: walkable urbanism.

Elsewhere in the region the malls are doing as bad or worse. Most have either closed or are in the process of being converted to walkable town centers.

Arlington has had success turning the area around its two enclosed malls into mixed-use towns, first at Ballston and now at Pentagon City, where the process is still under way.

In Fairfax, Springfield Mall is slated for redevelopment, and Fair Oaks Mall is actively considering a mixed-use future.

In Prince George's County, the area around the Mall at Prince George's (formerly Prince George's Plaza) has been undergoing a process similar to Pentagon City. At Bowie Town Center, County officials are looking at adding more entertainment and housing options.

Meanwhile, urban shopping areas that I mentioned three years ago have increased in prominence:

In the District of Columbia, there are four shopping districts that support clusters of national retail chains that are usually mall-based: Downtown (Old Downtown clustered around Metro Center), Connecticut Avenue between Farragut Square and Dupont Circle, Friendship Heights, and Georgetown. Columbia Heights is emerging and has a different mix of retailers.

Urban-format suburban shopping districts also continue to thrive and grow.

Silver Spring's retail is more vibrant than ever. The space vacated by Borders was quickly filled by Smart Toys. Bethesda and Clarendon are continually adding to their mixture of chains and smaller upscale retailers. Wheaton is a work in progress.

Even outside the Beltway, urbanism is catching on. Rockville Town Square and Gaithersburg's Washingtonian Center are growing, and National Harbor is setting the standard for Prince George's County. Two decades ago, all those developments likely would have been enclosed malls.

While purely car-dependent malls aren't going to go completely extinct, they are becoming far more rare. In the future, it is likely the only enclosed malls that remain will be the largest super-regional "winners" inside the Favored Quarter. Meanwhile, no new malls are planned.

As the 21st Century continues, both living and dead mall sites will be either be completely redeveloped or will evolve into mixed-use walkable urban places. Retailers will continue clustering at transit-oriented, walkable urban locations, both downtown and at new suburban "uptowns."

This development, close to Shady Grove, was explicitly built around a central boulevard with a very wide median that could accommodate a light rail line in the future. Yet some residents afraid of a transit line have organized against bringing the line where it was always meant to go. Marcuccio and Gajewski both voted to ask the state to reroute the line.

Gajewski, who lives in King Farm, said the line would provide "no benefits." It's strange to think that a quick ride to the Metro in one direction and jobs in the other wouldn't benefit residents. Fortunately, the state isn't heeding this bad advice.

Patch contributor and lobbyist Richard Parsons wrote a useful summary of the growth and transit issues in Rockville. He says that few candidates in either city want to reform the damaging Adequate Public Facilities laws that hinder walkable development while encouraging sprawl. These laws, designed to ensure development doesn't overcrowd schools or roads, actually end up just stopping growth in the core and pushing it to less dense outer areas which will create more traffic and a need to build schools in the future.

Parsons' summary of Gaithersburg's races, on the other hand, are a lot more suspect because he was previous paid by Johns Hopkins to promote their so-called "Science City" development. The Gaithersburg council opposed the project at its proposed size, and Parsons criticizes this decision without disclosing his conflict of interest.

2 challengers to the Gaithersburg incumbents are criticizing that decision, which Parsons applauds on behalf of "those who want to see a more aggressive approach to job creation and transit-oriented development." "Science City" could have been true transit-oriented development by locating around Shady Grove or other underdeveloped Metro station areas; instead, Johns Hopkins brought enormous pressure and lobbying dollars to approve widely-scattered "towers in the park" office parks, connected by a winding bus route, and stamped as "transit-oriented development."

Gaithersburg voters should make up their own minds, but be wary of any recommendations around "Science City" from anyone who made some real money in exchange for promoting this lousy project.

A new draft of the City's Land Use Plan retains this vision. Yet if the smart growth planned for the Red Line corridor is to extend through Gaithersburg, the Frederick Avenue Corridor is where it must go. Like the Corridor through Bethesda and Rockville, Frederick Avenue is quite thickly hemmed in with older residential neighborhoods.

Any plan to urbanize the Corridor needed to pay close heed to the borders. Rather than just commenting on the inadequate city plan, my activist friend and neighbor Judy Christensen and I decided to work with our neighbors to prepare our own plan.

The neighbors responded. We organized three charrette meetings in spring 2011 with pro bono help from Scott Knudson of Wiencek and Associates, an architecture and planning firm with an office in the Corridor. Zoning lawyers representing some of the larger land and building owners in the Corridor also advised us.

The result, the Citizens' Plan, exceeded my expectations. The plan embraces transit-oriented smart growth in the corridor, sometimes literally in peoples' back yards. Residents want redevelopment of substandard buildings, better retail we can walk to, and Frederick Avenue rebuilt as a multi-use urban boulevard. We accept that considerable planned density is necessary to make all this financially feasible.

The Corridor needs more primary businesses and affluent residents to patronize the higher-end retailers. The Plan thus calls for medium-height mixed-use buildings along a narrow corridor with ground floor retail in a limited area. Greenways and alleys separate the Corridor development from the neighborhoods along the current borders between the two. Creative traffic calming is invoked to permit but discourage traffic on the residential side streets.

The highlight of the Citizens' Plan is the New Downtown for Gaithersburg, a concept we resurrected from plans dating back to the 1960s. City officials didn't want to sacrifice their historic Old Town for a major modern downtown, but they identified the perfect place for a New Downtown: about a mile north of Old Town, in the empty space at the intersection of Frederick with Quince Orchard Road/Montgomery Village Avenue. As happened at most of the County's designated "corridor cities," large-scale retail, including Lake Forest Mall, came to dominate the New Downtown, and the idea of a real downtown was forgotten.

But we liked the old plan and reinstalled the New Downtown in the Citizens' Plan. The downtown core is west of Frederick Ave, where the tall buildings would be visible from miles away. The proposed Frederick Avenue Bus Rapid Transit line runs directly into the main public plaza.

The Citizens' Plan seeks to inspire redevelopment of the Corridor in a way that protects and enhances the adjoining neighborhoods. It generated enthusiasm among the residents who worked on it. The draft plan was widely circulated through the neighborhood email lists; the only responses we got were positive, and even appreciative.

We presented the Citizens' Plan to the Gaithersburg elected officials and Planning Commission in July. They were also enthusiastic, and instructed the planning staff to figure out how to incorporate our concepts into their official plan. We also had a discussion at a Planning Commission meeting in September.

While we were unable to do the broad public outreach and host the kind of extensive dialogue we envisioned, the Citizens' Plan has already succeeded. Better than telling officials, we have shown them what a plan for smart growth looks like, and shown that the public will embrace such a plan if they are empowered to shape it to suit their needs.

To read the Citizens' Plan, visit the City of Gaithersburg website and look through the list of Land Use Plan Exhibits for the Citizens' Plan.

It's especially maddening because of the way school boundaries are drawn. The most overcrowded schools happen to also cover most of Gaithersburg's smart growth receiving areas, including its most walkable and transit-connected downtown and new urbanist districts.

For the most part it isn't the smart growth developments that are overcrowding the schools (they tend to attract smaller families), but because they're within the same school boundary as other neighborhoods that do produce a lot of kids, residential development is outlawed in precisely the areas where it's most appropriate.

And the really bad news is that the moratorium isn't effective at saving schools. Because Gaitheresburg is a geographically small jurisdiction within a larger, growing region, the school capacity test merely pushes growth out to other jurisdictions that have even less capacity, and less ability to plan.

In fact, the moratorium is doubly damaging because of the type of growth it is pushing away. By including these smart growth receiving zones in the moratorium, Gaithersburg is pushing out high-density urban developments that don't produce many students, but are very effective at reducing sprawl and growth in congestion.

The school capacity test makes sense in a vacuum, but not when all the issues of urban development are considered together. It's counterproductive, and should be changed.

The good news is that the Gaithersburg City Council, which does seem to sincerely want to do the right thing, realizes there's a problem and is considering corrective measures. According to a Patch article, the council is looking to add flexibility and leniency to the ordinance. Proposed modifications could allow the council to grant exceptions in certain circumstances, or could allow neighboring schools to share capacity if one is over its limit but another nearby school is not. These are good suggestions.

The city might also consider designating official smart growth receiving zones that are automatically exempted from the ordinance altogether. That would allow the right sort of growth to take place in the right places, while still controlling the sort of growth that is a problem for school capacity.

Gaithersburg deserves credit for acknowledging a difficult problem and moving to solve it. Other jurisdictions with similar ordinances should follow Gaithersburg's example and carefully consider whether or not their growth controls are accomplishing the right goals.

In reality, the existence of another through-road would increase the pressure to open up the county's Agricultural Reserve for more car-dependent sprawl.

M-83 would become congested like every other new road due to induced demand while being very expensive to maintain. More money will be taken out of the county's general funds that could go to transit, police, schools, etc. We'll be paying for environmental destruction yet again.

Just like the zombie outer beltway in Virginia, M-83's route was selected years before planners began taking environmental issues into consideration. Over the years, local residents have killed plans for this road multiple times.

The Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA have denied federal funding in the past because many of the alternatives would pave over protected, undeveloped parklands that contain tributaries to Great Seneca Creek.

Because each alternative includes widening existing sections of surface roadway to highway standards, local residents would lose private property. The Coalition for Transit Alternatives to Mid-County Highway Extended (TAME) has arisen to oppose the misguided plans to build M-83. TAME comprises mid-county and upcounty environmental groups, religious organizations, and civic associations.

While presenting to the August 9 Action Committee for Transit meeting, a representative of TAME described how some people attending the public meetings on M-83 originally angled to have someone else's yard taken for the road widenings. The representative noted that once the different stakeholders began talking with each other, they came to a consensus that no one's yard should be taken for a road that is expensive, environmentally destructive, and unnecessary. Stakeholders also agree that M-83 should be eliminated from the county's Master Plan and CIP.

Currently the M-83 project is funded exclusively with county money. Why is there money for M-83 when the county executive's office refuses to add boulevardizing Rockville Pike in White Flint to the CIP? Likewise with adding a second entrance to the White Flint Metro Station or funding the Corridor Cities Transitway?

This current mentality, where the county happily pays for any road project yet requires outside funding sources for transit projects, is selling our future short and must stop.

Just like TAME's vision, I implore Montgomery County to defund the cost-ineffective and environmentally destructive M-83 project in favor of projects like White Flint's urban retrofit, the Corridor Cities Transitway, and possibly the county's BRT vision.

New Gaithersburg Heights: The blogger behind New Columbia Heights moved to Gaithersburg, learned to walk a dog while driving an SUV, and inaugurated a new feature, Chili's of the Day.

We want 3-D! Wheaton residents are outraged that a proposed plaza for Wheaton looks like a Sketchup model, and started a group "3-DIMBY" to push for a more 3-dimensional plan. (JUTP)

Too many ped-on-ped crashes: The New York DOT was alarmed to discover a high frequency of pedestrian-on-pedestrian crashes. Small children even get into such crashes intentionally. Fortunately, there are very few injuries. (Transportation Nation)

Planjokizen: Ben & Jerry's adds a new flavor, Janette Sadik-Pecan ... LA will add car racks to its buses ... After many Republican governors rejected high-speed rail money, Ray LaHood spent the $2.4 billion on a huge party in Las Vegas. (Planetizen)

Public spaces get better: The Project for Public Spaces, which always does great news coverage at the start of April, revealed that Brooklyn's Prospect Park West will new get new kayak lanes, Arlington, Texas will train riders to use ESP to find out when their bus is coming, a new iPhone app helps starchitects not listen to public input, and a newly-unveiled plan would solve New York congestion by replacing most of Manhattan with freeways. Once upon a time, that last one was not a joke.

And well it should. In the targeted half-mile stretch of MD 355 between Brookes and Odendhal Avenues, described in the Gazette as a "block," there are six street intersections. There are two lanes of traffic in either direction, with a bi-directional turning lane in the middle.

There are seven bus stops, for the seven-day-a-week 55 and 59 Ride-On buses. There are apartment buildings, a supermarket, fast-food and sit-down restaurants, office buildings, stores, and a shopping center. And there is one crosswalk—at Chestnut Street, 0.4 miles south of the crosswalk at Odendhal.

Again according to the Gazette, the Gaithersburg police chose this section of MD 355 "based on complaints from the public." But who could the complainers have been? Given the police department's response—writing tickets for jaywalking—it's unlikely they were the people forced to choose between walking nearly half a mile out of the way to cross at a crosswalk or dashing through five lanes of traffic on a state highway. That leaves the people who see the road through a windshield and have to slow down when pedestrians try to cross in front of their cars.

So maybe the City of Gaithersburg should try again. If they're really concerned about pedestrian safety, perhaps they should cut back on the jaywalking tickets and instead propose a joint effort with the MD SHA to put in a few more places for people to cross safely and legally on foot.

Yes, this might mean a slightly slower trip, for the people who use this major commuting route in cars. But how about all of the other people who want to use the road without reorganizing their day or risking their lives?