A family tries to cross Route 29 at Stewart Lane in White Oak. Below: pedestrians are rare in White Flint, save for this homeless man at the corner of Old Georgetown Road and Rockville Pike; townhouses in Briggs Chaney backing to Route 29.There's been a lot of talk about the ongoing redevelopment of White Flint, which Montgomery County planners say will be bigger than Downtown Bethesda. Landowners in the area around Rockville Pike and Randolph Road are seeking to build 335-foot-tall buildings, which would be the tallest in the county.
No one who lives on the east side of the county would disagree that there is already a huge discrepancy between where we live and the rest of MoCo, specifically along the Route 355/Wisconsin Avenue/Rockville Pike corridor. I can't help but look at the proposals for new housing, offices and retail in North Bethesda and say: does this really do the east side any good? Should I support any elected officials who continue to push this development over something here?When I read about the White Flint proposals in last week's Post, I remembered when Henry (from the Silver Spring Scene) and I went to interview County Councilmembers two years ago. "Why are we approving 300' tall buildings in North Bethesda when the height limit is still under 200' in Downtown Silver Spring?" he'd ask them, never receiving a satisfactory answer. While I doubt buildings that tall would be appropriate anywhere on the east side, I think the emphasis on densifying the Rockville Pike corridor now means we've lost an opportunity to provide dense, pedestrian- and transit-friendly communities in areas where a population that relies heavily on walking and transit already exists.
The Z line buses along Route 29 are some of the most well-ridden routes in the region, always packed as they head into Downtown Silver Spring each morning and out each evening. I've never seen as many people walking or riding buses along Rockville Pike with its strip malls as I've seen on Columbia Pike, darting across six lanes of traffic, exit ramps, service roads. It's far more dangerous than Rockville Pike, which at least has sidewalks along some segments - and no interchanges, either.
East County does not look like a transit-friendly place, because even when there were plans to run light-rail down the middle of Route 29 we still designed everything around the car - hence the "great failure of transit serviceability" that resulted in the removal of any mention of increased density or improved transit from the 1997 Fairland Master Plan. But this community, with its thousands of apartments and townhomes and a large population of transit riders, has the potential to become a very transit-friendly community, as much as White Flint, I think. We've already got the people, and they're already out of their cars.I'm not asking for 300-foot towers. But I'd like to see Montgomery County at least begin to study ways to practice here what they already preach in Rockville and Bethesda, if only on a smaller scale. We don't have transit like the Red Line to sustain the level of development proposed in White Flint, and it doesn't hurt that demographics and zoning make the profits a lot higher for any development over there, either. But, on the other hand, we could probably fit all of the retail opportunities on Columbia Pike between White Oak and Burtonsville into a couple blocks of Rockville Pike. It's time to level the playing field, one game at a time.
2 comments:
Dan,
At last night's Candidate Forum in Burtonsville's Paint Branch High School -- which had rather terribly low turnout -- the feeling was expressed both by many of the candidates and by the locals themselves, that in a lot of ways people were really pretty happy with what we have here in East County.
In particular, we have some of the healthier streams, greenest fields, most open space, and remnants of the Old Maryland. We're the last vestige of a place where you could drive ten minutes and be at a decent shopping mall with a professional building or two filled with doctors and dentists, accountants and lawyers. You could drive ten minutes in the other direction, and you'd be far outnumbered by cows and/or corn. Back in the day you could drive to the beach and actually find a nice lonely spot to relax, and only a ten minute walk from ample parking, and the Bay was full of tasty shellfish and you could fill up a basket with crabs with nothing more than a net and a string and a hunk of rancid bacon and it might take you less than two hours.
Well, the shellfish are all gone and we live miles from what's left of the Bay. Yet we can still, in many parts of District 4, still drive 20 minutes to the mall and offices, and drive 20 minutes the other way and be surrounded by, well, maybe not cows, but the deer are all rural instead of urban and the landscape is largely natural, rather than concrete sterility disguised by potted plants. We're still mostly a true Suburbia, ranging in character from the old homes of Ashton to the newly slumburbianized "emerging favela" of Aspen Hill.
What bothers people around here, most of all, is that they cannot all travel at the same time, in a way that's close to comfortable or tolerable, to get from where they want to live, to where they need to be to work or to shop.
But to add development out here, to plop down a new Corbusierian vision of shiny complexity like the mounds that erupt in the fields of Texas from Fire Ant infestations, that may be poorly thought through.
Do we need to improve our roads and transit facilities? Absolutely. Should we have commuter/light-freight "people mover" rail running the length of US-29 at least from Silver Spring to Columbia? That should be pretty obvious to anyone by now.
Should we rationalize MD-198 west of Burtonsville, at least from US 29 out to the cemetery and perhaps all of the way through to a grade-separated intersection at MD-97 and MD-28?
Clearly this would make sense, but it would make more sense to also design in a "people mover" facility along that exact axis. The intersection of a heavy-hauling north-south axis along US-29 and an east-west axis along MD-198/28 would leave Burtonsville sitting at the crossroads even more than it now does. Yet until the crossroads carries more people and less cars -- or at least, until the cars can move freely on the east-west axis towards Rockville as well as they can towards Laurel -- Burtonsville as a business or shopping destination is destined to remain a traffic mess to struggle through, and not a destination. Yet it will, and should, remain a destination of Home, despite the traffic, so long as it can retain the pleasant suburban character one sees as soon as one gets away from the arterial roads.
Do we really want to crush that pleasant suburban character just to do away with traffic mess, any more than we'd want to turn the pleasant pastures of East Texas into a pockmarked wasteland characterized by the presence of nothing at all but regularly-spaced mounds packed full of venomous stinging insects?
I have seen this happen, literally exactly that. As Houston exploded in growth throughout the late 1970s, I saw field after field plowed under, with apartment block after apartment block being slapped into place. People would move into really nice and very affordable apartments, and quote frequently they'd move right back out as fast as they could, lease be damned. Ask them why, and they'd say "goddamn bugs".
Aside from the palmetto bugs, you just don't much see cockroaches on the outside of Texas buildings, not unless you get deep into the city. The birds get 'em. The birds get the fire-ants, too, though they prefer to pick 'em off one at a time at some distance from the nest. Inside the nests, though, it's nothing but all fire ants, all of the time, and good luck to anything that falls (or gets dragged) into a fire-ant nest.
One thing that a lot of people learned about Texas apartment living when I was there in Houston in the late 1970s: You actually want to see cockroaches in your place. Of course, you don't want a lot of them, but they're inescapable anyway. Just don't feed them and you won't have a lot of them, and don't live near or with people that feed them, and they won't be much of a problem. Cockroaches promote good housekeeping. They also crack most satisfyingly when you crush them in a corner with your pointy boots.
Cockroaches also are proof positive that you don't have a fire-ant nest living in their walls. And we used to have these rental agents at brand-new apartment buildings who would tell you "not a single cockroach, we don't even have to spray". That's because the walls are full of fire-ants. The fire-ants don't usually venture out of their walls... unless they decide to swarm, and the best way to get that to happen is to see a cockroach and spray it. The cockroaches are immune to almost everything by now, and the fire-ants are more resistant than the cockroaches.
And so, even without the end of the Oil Boom of the 1980s, a lot of Houston apartment buildings sat pretty much empty. They had plowed under a lot of lush pastures, created the perfect environment for a noxious and aggressive pest, driven off that pest's natural enemies, and populated that perfect environment with the pest's preferred prey.
And they kept on building apartments like this for a while, even though they knew what would happen. Why? Because the developers made money for building and got paid regardless of whether nor not anyone could ever live there.
Let's not do the same to Burtonsville, or to White Oak, for that matter. Build White Flint at the intersection of Briggs Chaney and US-29 and if you're not exceptionally careful to keep the ecology balanced, you'll see the same failures as seen in Chicago's Cabrini Greens, or in the desolate fields of apartments of East Texas... where you can get rid of the ants only by using enough insecticide to render every surface toxic to the human touch, and incredibly fertile fields for neurotoxic mold.
> East County does not look like
> a transit-friendly place,
> because even when there
> were plans to run
> light-rail down the middle
> of Route 29 we still
> designed everything around
> the car - hence the
> "great failure of transit
> serviceability" that resulted
> in the removal of any mention
> of increased density or
> improved transit from the
> 1997 Fairland Master Plan.
> But this community, with
> its thousands of apartments
> and townhomes and a
> large population of
> transit riders, has
> the potential to become a
> very transit-friendly
> community, as much as
> White Flint, I think.
> We've already got the
> people, and they're already
> out of their cars.
Dan, a few comments:
(1) More than once, I have
heard Smart Growth advocates
and planning groupies in
Montgomery County call
for our county to look
more like Arlington [County],
Virginia.
That's not going to happen, for
several reasons:
- Exactly none
of Montgomery County is within
the 10-mile square that makes
up D.C., Arlington Co. and most
of Alexandria. People that want
a non-D.C. urban living
experience will not move
to Fairland when places like
Arlington and Friendship
Heights (just beyond the
10-mile square) are available.
- Montgomery County lacks the
freeway connections to
downtown D.C. and Dulles Airport
that Arlington has - and a ride
by transit from most of
Arlington to D.C. is significantly faster
than from Montgomery County
anyway.
- Do we have a lot of choice transit riders in Fairland?
Or do we have transit riders
who cannot afford a private
automobile?
(2) The 1997 Fairland Master
Plan reads the way it does as
a direct consequence of
the catastrophic 1981
Eastern Montgomery County
Master Plan (based on "a
concept of transit serviceability,"
and much more intended to
serve countywide
priorities, not the
needs of the East County.
(3) Could we be more transit-friendly? Yes! But
not if those things damage
our existing communities.
Post a Comment