tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30306615.post7212154692808454639..comments2008-07-23T08:40:08.286-04:00dan reed!http://www.blogger.com/profile/10594208011755406956noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30306615.post-59290907960314193232008-07-23T08:40:00.000-04:002008-07-23T08:40:00.000-04:00Yikes!<BR/><BR/>Dan, here is where you and I part ways over aesthetics, I guess. But I couldn't begin to call that a "town square". <BR/><BR/>"Downtown Burtonsville" is, in my opinion, not really salvageable until and unless a few things happen. Feel free to hate on me but I cannot see too many alternatives.<BR/><BR/>1. Free your mind and realize that the only way to save Burtonsville is to destroy it.<BR/><BR/>2. Understand that Burtonsville is laid out wrong, aligned wrong, and could not be better designed to obstruct traffic and outrage drivers. Furthermore, except to the west, everything is laid out even more wrongly. One obvious solution set for dealing with the traffic -- preserving existing businesses and making them more accessible by both foot and car -- is out of the question due to the layout of the area southeast of the intersection of US-29 and MD-28. O the horror.<BR/><BR/>3. All possible solutions to "rationalizing" Burtonsville utterly depend on two prerequisites. First, the elementary school goes. Done gone finish, kaput. Auf Wedersehen. The only thing more in the way is Burtonsville Shopping Center. Second, Burtonsville Shopping Center vanished utterly from the face of the earth and the minds of planners. History. Toast.<BR/><BR/>4. Bulldozers and heavy equipment are the friend of mankind and all things good for Burtonsville. Get ready to use them extensively or all hope is lost. Get ready to condemn some land, too. That is all. <BR/><BR/>5. Take your map and take a nice straight ruler. Mark a line from roughly the intersection of MD-198 and US-29 westward to roughly the intersection of MD-198 and Kruhm Road. Bulldoze everything along that line, 9 lanes wide. Pave it into three lanes by three lanes with left-turn pullouts and either elevated or cut-and-cover light rail. <BR/><BR/>6. Everything north of the highway-rail alignment is henceforth by proclamation and decree nothing other than Patuxent Watershed and conterminous farm or park lands. Offlimits for development etc., except as public space. <BR/><BR/>7. Leave the old Spencerville Road if you want to and in fact that's a great idea. However, at the southernmost point, once again break out the bulldozers and punch a road due east to the frontage road. Blackburn Road, counterintuitive as this may seem, goes the wrong way one way and that has to be fixed north of your new road. The new road should be one-way eastbound.<BR/><BR/>8. Santini Road gets realigned and improved between the new highway-rail line of MD-198 and the road you just built. <BR/><BR/>9 Everyone <I>residing</I> within that new square gets told that they just got zoned "mixed use high density" and to start packing, have a nice paycheck from our eminent domain action. The dirty trick here isn't the power play, it's that however you zone the place, you preserve as a public greens most of that land encircled by Blackburn Road and bounded on the north by Tolson Place. <BR/><BR/>Now you have your town square! Develop it how you will. But you can not ever possibly have a decent downtown Burtonsville until land unless you get almost all (and all passthrough)vehicular traffic off of the current alignment of MD-198. <BR/><BR/>Leave the current businesses where they are, more or less, and let "old 198" become more of a boulevard for local traffic, and develop stub streets perpendicular to that, connecting to Tolson Place and put a comparable street parallel to "old 198" to the north of it. <BR/><BR/>Thus you have the skeleton of a much more densified and walkable downtown Burtonsville, where locals can also drive but which has the vast majority of passthrough traffic routed around it. You stop preserving relic roads that got their modern layout when the vast majority of traffic was quadruped and ungulate. Then once the hideous traffic snarls and "you can't get there from here" layout has been rationalized, <I>then</I> you start debating on how to develop that. <BR/><BR/>And there you have it, something that will work and is far more ambitious than the Burtonsville Town Square as proposed, which really would be nothing more than trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and a gangrenous sow's ear at that. Fix the traffic first and all else will follow. Fail to fix the traffic and Burtonsville remains not a destination, but a horror to be suffered while just passing through. Not to hate on Burtonsville, I'm sure there's plenty there that's just hunky-dory, but generally speaking I can't get on or off the road to go see what might be there.Thomas Hardmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07951423786343852055noreply@blogger.com