The central planners come for me

Telling my neighbors to walk, bike, and roll

I have written about how my neighborhood, Kemp Mill, has been held up as an example of what a child-friendly community feels like. Now, our overlords in Montgomery County, Maryland have their own ideas for how they want our community to feel.

We have been presented with The University Corridor Plan, a 150-page document offering a new vision for a small area that includes our neighborhood and some others nearby.

The University Boulevard Corridor Plan (Plan) envisions transforming approximately 3.5 miles of University Boulevard West and East (MD 193) into a pedestrian-oriented and multimodal corridor that supports safe movement for all people, especially those walking, biking, and rolling.

The plan is based on a county government buzzword, called Thrive.

Thrive also introduces the concepts of “Complete Communities” and “15-minute living” as principles for planning at the neighborhood scale. Complete Communities include a broad range of land uses, infrastructure, services, and amenities to cater to the diverse needs of county residents, including housing options of all types, sizes, and prices to promote racial and socioeconomic integration. The related concept of “15-minute living” seeks to enhance community appeal and efficiency by integrating housing, office, and retail uses so that people can access daily necessities within a 15-minute walk. Recommendations in this Plan, such as new housing options and enhanced transit, further many of the compact, corridor-focused growth, Complete Communities, and 15-minute living principles included in Thrive.

Community equity and environmental resilience are also key outcomes of Thrive, consistent with Montgomery County’s Racial Equity and Social Justice Law (Bill 27-19) and the CAP, which recommend several approaches to repair past injustices that disproportionately impacted people of color. The CAP aims to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% by 2027 and 100% by 2035, detailing strategies to reduce climate-related risks. This Plan includes recommendations to advance community equity, as well as further climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

What appalls me is the arrogance of the project to alter other people’s lifestyle. When people moved here, they showed a preference for living as we do. The plan replaces the preferences of the residents with the preferences of the planners.

If a developer came along and built a community where cars were disfavored, that he said would “repair past injustices that disproportionately affected people of color” and “reduce climate-related risks,” then people could decide whether or not to reside in that community. I have no problem with that. But to take a community that people chose to live in and completely remake it to suit the planners’ idea of utopia to me seems un-American.

Transportation

To achieve its goal of getting people “walking, biking, and rolling,” the plan calls for reducing the speed limit on University Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in the area, from 35 MPH to 25 MPH. It also calls for reducing lanes and reconfiguring streets to impede car traffic flow, while imposing new regulations on drivers, such as outlawing right turn on red.

I should point out that the area that we are talking about does not consist primarily of affluent people working white-collar jobs from home. The students at the local schools that my daughters attended were mostly minorities, and the proportion of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch was above the national average. Our daughters’ high school had more graduates headed to the military than to the Ivy League.

People who live in the corridor depend on cars.

Incremental Changes

For me, the area is already walkable.¹ It is also bike-friendly. I can take bike trips north, east, and south for 15 miles or more with scarcely any time spent on streets.²

I would not claim that the current configuration of the area is perfect. I can see making some incremental changes.

The main intersection in the corridor is called Four Corners. The largest public high school in the state of Maryland is located right at one of the corners.³ Many students need to cross going to and from school. It is not ideal.

I have some suggestions for making an improvement at Four Corners. Digging an underground pedestrian passageway would be one way to help. But I also would advocate cutting the student population of the high school from over 3000 to something less than 1000. This would make it a more humane place while lowering the pressure on the intersection, including reducing motor vehicle traffic. The county would have to relocate students to other existing facilities or build new ones.

Instead, the planners’ approach essentially involves making life as difficult as possible for motorists, without offering them an alternative road to get to where they need to go. The impacted motorists will include students and staff who drive to the high school, which has an enormous parking lot filled with cars when school is in session.

Housing and Zoning

The document states that

The Plan area is characterized by its general affordability compared with the county in sales prices, rents, and the large amount of the housing stock that is income restricted.

In other words, our area is already ahead of the rest of the county in terms of affordable housing. Nevertheless, the plan recommends rezoning sections to allow for additional housing construction. I wonder how much housing we should add at the same time we are reducing the capacity of our roads.

There are no overall numbers included in the plan. I cannot tell whether implementation would lead the area’s population to increase by 2 percent or 200 percent. It would help to have an idea.

Of course, if the transportation re-engineering has the effect I anticipate, then there will be a big increase in available housing here. That is because so many of us will move out in order to escape the inconvenience of not being able to get where we need to go.

Conclusion

It is not just the left that has utopian ideas for local living. Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute would like to see President Trump’s Freedom Cities idea fleshed out and attempted. I suspect that such efforts would fail. I think of growing a community as an emergent process, not easily created out of nothing. But at least no one is suggesting that Freedom Cities be forced upon existing populations.

I would like to see people with visionary ideas for community design go into business as private developers. Let households voluntarily choose to adopt the proposed lifestyles, rather than impose them on households who made a different choice when they selected our community.

1. I only avoid a different area, called downtown Wheaton, which is less than a mile west of the planning zone. I was mugged in broad daylight there a couple of years ago. The mugging took place two blocks from the subway stop. Based on that experience and the turnstile jumpers that you see if you get off at the Wheaton stop, I have chosen to take the subway as little as possible, less than once a month, and when I do go to have my wife drive me to and from the subway stop.

2. I used to be able to do the same thing to the west, but about 7 or 8 years ago the county started constructing a new subway line, and they immediately tore up the bike path to make way for the construction. When they finish the subway, there is supposed to be a new bike path, but at the rate the project is going I am not counting on being alive to use it.

3. Our daughters attended a different public high school, closer to our house.