Posts about ICC

Of course, cars aren't held to the same standard.

There also aren't many drivers on the ICC. Around 21,000 cars per day use the road. The state says that meets projections, but the projections seem to change. At one point they were as high as 71,000.

But is anyone proposing the state shut the road? Nope. Instead, the strategy is to try and boost car use.

Lawmakers hoped to induce more traffic with lower tolls last year, although that proposal was never accepted. This year the state raised the speed limit to make driving more attractive.

When it comes to bikes and transit, it's cut and run at the first hint of a problem. For cars, it's roll out the red carpet and hope for more traffic.

This isn't the first time this has happened. When Virginia's I-95 HOT lanes were first proposed, the firm hoping to expand the highway called its proposal "BRT/HOT lanes," but of course nothing resembling actual BRT was ever built.

Transportation advocates should remember this the next time someone proposes a "multimodal" highway. Odds are they won't deliver.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

MdTA's booth at the Bethesda Farmer's Market. Photos by Ronit Dancis.

Promoting the ICC seems a strange use of state money when Maryland's governor has set a state goal of doubling transit use by 2020. An MdTA spokesperson claimed that this is standard outreach aimed at encouraging use of the electronic E-ZPass system to pay tolls. But the focus of the agency's signage was the ICC itself, not the electronic pay system.

If the ICC were an isolated road, encouraging more people to use it might not be a problem. Yet drivers on the ICC access it from other crowded roads, such as I-270, Route 29 and I-95. These roads need fewer drivers, not more.

Are any readers aware of a campaign anywhere in the world that is trying to make people drive more?

Part of the trail runs parallel to Columbia Pike between Fairland Road and Briggs Chaney Road in East County. Like the Forest Glen pedestrian bridge that crosses the Beltway, it runs under a highway. As a result, the trail is also lightly used and has already been vandalized.

This is unfortunate, because the trail could tie neighborhoods on both sides of the ICC together and is a crucial part of a "commuter bikeway" along Columbia Pike first envisioned in master plans 15 years ago. But this part of the ICC Trail won't get any busier or safer without better foot and bike connections to get people to it.

Let's take a look at the trail:

Here we are on the trail, just north of Fairland Road. That's the exit sign for the InterCounty Connector up ahead.

First we pass this small seating area. People do use it, judging from the abandoned pair of shoes. I enjoy the dry stacked stones and wooden bench, which give the trail a woodsy, rustic feel despite its surroundings. Behind the seating area is the recently-built Fairland View subdivision.

The development is separated by a grass berm and has no connection to the trail, despite being yards away. (The view, of course, is of the InterCounty Connector.) I assume these nearby chalk drawings came from kids living there.

Now we're heading under the interchange between Columbia Pike and the ICC. This part of the trail is almost invisible from either road and the surrounding houses, and I passed a group of young men smoking right before I took this picture.

There is Sharpie graffiti in the tunnel, though it's not much worse than anything I saw or did myself in high school. The tunnel appears to have been repainted a few times since it opened; in fact, since I took this photo, the scribbles have already been painted over. It's good to see that the state is maintaining the trail, though I wonder how regularly they patrol it.

After the tunnel, we go under a couple of overpasses. The roar of traffic is pretty intense, and I noticed some broken glass on the path where lights have been knocked out.

We're now between Columbia Pike on the left, and the Montgomery Auto Park on the right. Turn around and you get a great view of the interchange. There are maybe waist-high concrete walls on either side of the trail and a chain-link fence separating it from the Auto Park. The wall might keep bicyclists safe from car traffic, but I wonder if it's also there to protect the car dealerships from bicyclists.

And then we hit a wall. This is the interchange of Columbia Pike and Briggs Chaney Road, which was completed about four years ago; the trail takes a hard right to get around it and then joins Briggs Chaney Road.

Across the street is the Briggs Chaney Plaza shopping center; there's a stoplight and intersection in front of us, but no pedestrian signal or even a crosswalk. From here, we can continue down Briggs Chaney, which has a nice, wide shared path for about a mile and a half before connecting to a portion of the trail that's actually on the ICC.

Residents of Tanglewood, a subdivision on the south side of the ICC, complained that a trail would invite "criminals" from the apartment complexes along Briggs Chaney Road. While I still think that accusation was unfair, residents' predictions that there would be vandalism on the trail turned out to be true.

But as WashCycle points out, the best way to make a safe trail is to make it busy. In the handful of times I've used this one-mile portion of the ICC Trail, I've seen maybe a dozen people there. The trail is new enough that some people haven't heard of it, but it's also obscured by a highway interchange and sound berms.

It would've been ideal if the State Highway Administration had laid out the trail first and then worked around it, rather than the other way around. The trail would be more direct, and possibly more visible, while having little or no effect on the ability of drivers to pass through.

Since that opportunity no longer exists, the best thing we can do is to improve foot and bike connections to nearby destinations like Briggs Chaney Plaza and neighborhoods like Castle Boulevard, which recently got new sidewalks and medians. The easier it is to walk or bike in the area, the more likely people are to use the ICC Trail, and the less destructive behavior will occur.

But the state's forecast also assumes that gas will cost $2.50 a gallon, adjusted for future inflation. If instead, gas costs $10 a gallon in 2030, traffic on the ICC is projected to be about 40% below the $2.50/gallon forecast.

With higher gas prices, the overall drop in driving would be smaller, but rising gas prices would take cars off all roads. With parallel routes less congested, fewer drivers would be willing to pay the high ICC tolls. The project consultants make an educated guess that a $2.50 increase in the price of gas would cause people to drive 10% less. Their model calculates that a 10% drop in miles driven on all roads would cause a 16% drop in traffic in the ICC.

Moreover, the forecast assumes more sprawl development. To their credit, forecast authors Wilbur Smith Associates adjusted the official population projections from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, putting a little more future growth in DC and less in outer suburbs. But the forecast still projects outer suburbs to add more people and jobs overall than inner areas.

The forecast also assumes that wealthy and poor neighborhoods will be in the same places in 2030 as they were in 2000. Yet today, the affluent are migrating inward, while the population farther out—which is the ICC's potential market—is becoming less affluent and thus less likely to be willing to pay high tolls.

Over the next 2-3 years, traffic on the ICC will almost surely increase as drivers get more familiar with the road. But even then it will be half-empty. And what happens after that depends on events that no one can predict with certainty.

If the price of gasoline stays where it is now, the migration of the affluent into DC and Arlington halts, and McMansions spring up like weeds again in exurban counties, the road will indeed be filled with traffic in the evening rush hour 20 years from now. But if the demographic trends of the last five or six years continue, and gas keeps getting more expensive, the outcome will be very different. The ICC will stand forlorn, half-empty at its busiest moments; a $3 billion relic of a policy mistake.

There's nothing at all wrong with building for the future. The planners of Metro thought big, and we are all better off as a result. The question about the ICC is whether it was built for the future, or for a past age of cheap gasoline and sprawl that is gone forever.

You can also see expanded commentary in a thread at SkyscraperPage forum.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.