Monday, June 26, 2006

finally, someone reppin' the east side

I've been toying with the idea for a while now - a blog for East Montgomery County. Not that I don't already have a presence on the 'Net - a few of you might vaguely recall a project called "The New Urban Suburbanite" from a few years back, before blogs were big. Well, I was a bit younger then, perhaps with good intentions but a severe lack of will, largely due to nonexistent readership.

Time to change that. This is Just Up The Pike, your source for news and commentary in East Montgomery County. We may have address reading Silver Spring or Burtonsville, but we are not quite in either. We inhabit a land of rolling hills, roiling traffic backups on our beloved Columbia Pike, and a landscape of farms and office parks, cul-de-sacs and apartment blocks derived from a muddled planning legacy that goes back decades.

On the horizon: The ICC is coming. Two of the new interchanges on Route 29 are open, with a third well on its way. Over a dozen new housing developments are going up. Things are changing fast. It's time to make sense of it all, for better or for worse.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We already know who you are... a Silverman shill.

Anonymous said...

The ICC has been on the Planning Board maps for over 30 years, and during that time many housing developments have been built along its right of way. That's why the developers put them there, and I'm sorry for the homeowners that didn't check the master plan to see what was planned if they didn't want to live near good access to other parts of the county. As I drive around Maryland, I find that we have the worst, narrowest and slowest roads in the state. It's time to get with the program and build a few more roads. Roads don't bring development to these areas, the development is already there. Of course it's easier on the residents if the roads are built first, so they can see with their own eyes what the infrastructure is, since so many of them don't seem to know about the County or State planning process and seem to have no interest in educating themselves.