Posts about Fake TOD

Transit-oriented Wal-Mart?: Calling projects "Transit-Oriented Development" and "Smart Growth" is all the rage, even when it's really not. But this one takes the cake. An old auto-oriented shopping center in Charlotte will become a larger, auto-oriented Wal-Mart Supercenter. They're also widening a turn lane and building a new interchange to handle increased car traffic. And yet, bizarrely, Nancy Carter of the Charlotte City Council says this will "anchor" some "transit-oriented development." If you say so. (News 14 Carolina) (Comment)

Development

Gaithersbungle, part 7: 30% mode share is totally unrealistic

by David Alpert • July 31, 2009 11:16 am

The Gaithersburg West "Science City" Master Plan hangs its "Smart Growth" claims on the Corridor Cities Transitway, a proposed transit line from Shady Grove northward to Gaithersburg and Germantown. The plan insists that 30% of commuters will ride the line. That's highly dubious. You can design a circuitous, low-quality transit line and claim many people will ride it, but that doesn't make it so.

To satisfy the political pressure of enabling development on every parcel, the Planning Department proposes rerouting the line from an already-circuitous route (red) to an even more circuitous one (blue). This reroute took the line away from the DANAC property, whose owners originally developed it with the promise that they would have a CCT stop. The published draft of the Master Plan, however, eschews any new development on DANAC's property. After the owner complained and put pressure on the board, they added a stop back in.

Corridor Cities Transitway alignments. Left: Entire alignment before latest rerouting. Right: Proposed reroute not including DANAC station.

The Planning Department also recommended BRT over light rail, claiming it would actually draw more passengers because buses can leave the transitway to circulate through nearby neighborhoods. Rerouting the line through more of the office parks in Gaithersburg West also added riders under the Planning Department's model. Without seeing the underlying models, there's no way to know how they arrived at this result or whether it's correct, but it sounds like the model assumes that more frequent stops on a more circuitous route that passes closer to people's homes will draw more riders than a faster route that connects major, dense centers.

The plan claims that Gaithersburg West will achieve a 30% mode share between the density, transit, and Travel Demand Management (TDM) programs. According to a Fairfax County presentation on Tysons Corner, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor's mode share is 26%, Bethesda's 19%, and downtown DC's 51%. Achieving 30% in this distant, auto-dependent area with buses following a long and winding route seems highly dubious.

According to the Action Committee for Transit, planners arrived at 30% by assuming that the mode share will match White Flint. However, White Flint is right atop a Metrorail station, closer to the region's core, and very close to many more jobs. It also assumes that 24% of people will carpool, while the current actual number is approximately 5%, and carpooling has declined regionwide in recent decades. According to ACT, COG's modeling of this area predicted that 8% of people will actually take transit to work absent residential development, and there is far too little residential development to boost the number anywhere near 30%.

Nor does the plan enforce that 30%. The staging requirements do mandate that most of the development can't happen until the CCT is at least funded and under construction, but that's no guarantee anyone will use it. If the County wanted to truly enforce the 30%, they could allow the development only if mode splits are really meeting the projections, or impose impact fees on the new development if they don't.

Critics have charged that JHU isn't really serious about building a research campus at all, but that they rather want to make a lot of money on turning their farm into an office park to fund their main operations in Baltimore. We don't know for sure if that's the case. But if it is, and the 30% mode share and everything else are just a smoke screen, the County Council should put some teeth into the 30% requirement, enough that building an office park without that kind of mode share ceases to be a cash cow for JHU.

A county could develop a bus system that stops at 20 people's individual houses, drives for 30 minutes, then drops them off one by one at their jobs, and call it BRT. They could then spend billions to make a very wide expressway and lots of interchanges to speed drivers. And finally, they could write a plan that claims that one-third of the people will ride this transit system. But we would laugh. And that should be our reaction to this plan as well.

Previously:

Part 1: Planning Board staff latest to ignore better way for Gaithersburg
Part 2: Old, tired formulas generate old, disastrous solutions
Part 3: What else can you get for $3.8 billion?
Part 4: Why emulate Tysons' existing road network?
Part 5: What you callin' a city?
Part 6: What else $3.8 billion could buy, more specifically

13 comments

Tags: BRT, Corridor Cities Transitway, fake TOD, Gaithersburg West, Maryland, Montgomery

Development

Gaithersbungle, part 5: What you callin' a city?

by David Alpert • July 15, 2009 2:45 pm

The Gaithersburg West plan for biotech development west of I-270 between Gaithersburg and Rockville is often called "Science City." However, as conceived, this is no city.

Good cities create "spiky" land use patterns, concentrating development into small areas most easily served by transit. The Gaithersburg plan, on the other hand, spreads out the development among many areas based on political pressure to give every large landowner their piece of the development pie. Those pressures are what create auto-dependent sprawl in general, and what made the area the collection of office parks it is today. Montgomery County should avoid compounding this mistake by spreading out the growth in the area across many parcels.

Good cities also allow high Floor-Area Ratios at their densest points. Despite claiming to focus density around Corridor Cities Transitway stops, the plan limits overall FAR to 1.5 in one central area and 1.0 in the rest. Christopher Leinberger says that walkable urbanism is infeasible below FAR of 1.0, and really works best at 1.5 and above.

The Planning Department is at least trying to get the area out of the "neverland" FAR zone and into the potential walkable urbanism zone, but creating new places at the very low end of this range, surrounded by auto-oriented suburban development, is a recipe for failure. By comparison, Bethesda's FAR is 4.0, Rockville Town Center's 2.5, Twinbrook's 1.9, and Clarendon's 2.0. Twinbrook does not feel like a city. If Gaithersburg West is half as dense, it really won't.

A dense core area on a quarter or a third of the land, with open space around, could average out to an FAR of 1.0 across the entire parcel. But this, too, is a bad land use pattern. A series of small, walkable pockets surrounded by empty space diminishes each pocket. Clarendon works well at FAR 2.0 because it's within walking distance of several other similarly-dense areas. Plus, of course, it has Metrorail. This won't.

There are better places to put new development. There are large, underutilized parcels and parking lots at the Shady Grove Metro station. A coalition including the Montgomery Sierra Club and nearby neighbors suggested pushing more of the development to Shady Grove, and concentrating the new development in the Gaithersburg West area onto the eastern side, nearest Shady Grove.

To accommodate the wishes of individual landowners, they suggested a TDR system allowing property owners on the western side, like JHU, to sell development rights to other owners inside the area or in other nearby spots nearer to transit and existing walkable development. Many of those property owners are eager to add denser development on their parcels, but the plan rejects that in favor of developing the central sections of Gaithersburg West and Hopkins' Belward Farm. A more compact Science City would still be no city, but it would at least be a little bit closer to one. The Planning Board, however, is uninterested in such options.

There's also a broader issue at work. Whatever the size of this "city," is it really the right policy to build a "city" at the same distance from DC as Dulles Airport? Montgomery County has better places to put 56,000 new jobs than in the former farms outside of Gaithersburg or at the end of the longest Metro line in the system. In an upcoming part, we'll look at that.

Previously: