Snow, wonderful snow

We now have well over a foot of snow here in Bethesda, MD and it much more to come.  I went out this morning to take a look around.  The state and county are doing a pretty good job keeping the roads passable (at least for 4-wheel drive vehicles) and this is helped by almost no one being out on them.  With few exceptions, the only vehicles on the road are state/county plows and private plowing contractors going from job to job.

Snow is still coming down hard and there is over a foot on the ground.  Interstate 495 has been plowed but is mostly deserted, only a single car drives on it.

A front-end loader equipped with a plow clears snow on Old Georgetown Road

A John Deere tractor, equipped with a plow clears snow on Old Georgetown Road

The county is pulling out all the stops, even putting a plow on the front of this full-size tractor

The intersection of Old Georgetown Rd and Democracy Blvd. Both roads have been plowed, but there are a couple of inches of packed snow on them, and the intersection itself has small mounds of snow in it.

Sign for Interstate 495 in the snow.

Prepping for the Impending Doom snow

It is getting close to time for the snow to start and everyone is doing last minute preparations I went to Giant and Balducci's around noon today to see how they were coping.  Balducci's was busy but not much worse than the average weekend, all the registers were open with 2 or 3 people in line for each.  I didn't notice anything out of stock and there were several employees stocking shelves.

Giant was a bit of a different story.  Again, they had a bunch of people stocking shelves, especially in the dairy area, but it looks like they have run out of milk, eggs are almost gone, and other areas of the store (such as the soup aisle) had limited selection available.

The place was also packed.  The line for the self checkout was well over half way down the aisle behind it, the express lane had a similar number of people in it.

The gas station across the street was busy, with all pumps being used, but not more than one car waiting in line.

I didn't see many plows out in Bethesda, but towards Silver Spring they were starting to stack them up on the side of the road to be ready.

Traffic calming structures in Montgomery County, MD

I was recently involved in a discussion about how to make traffic go slower on neighborhood streets.  The main options people put forward were 1) speed bumps, and 2) speed cameras.  I'm not a big fan of either, speed bumps can do damage to your suspension and it makes it harder for emergency vehicles to get around.  Montgomery County also has limits on where and when speed cameras can operate.

It struck me that most people, me included, don't know what the options are for traffic calming and knowing the options might help people decide which ones are most appropriate for a given situation.  There are several general classes, including laws (speed limits), signage, and physical modifications to the road.  I decided to look around Bethesda and start inventorying different physical traffic calming structures I found.

Concrete islands are placed on the sides of the road to artificially narrow Ewig Drive near Fernwood Road.

Cars have to slow down to go around the traffic circle.  This reduces speeds without making people come to a complete stop at an intersection like a stop sign would. Traffic circles are generally used at intersections.  This one is on Ewig Drive near Greentree Road.

Not only does a pedestrian refuge slow traffic down by constricting the road, it also provides a safe place for a pedestrian to stand if traffic is heavy and they can't make it all the way across the street.  I think this one is flawed because cars coming towards the camera can't see if someone is standing in the refuge because of how large the plants are. This one is on Ewig Drive near Greentree Road.

One of the many ways the county tries to slow traffic down is by artificially making the street narrow in places.  This bump in is at the corner of Greentree and Hempstead.

A raised crosswalk is bit like a speed bump but much longer.  It makes crosswalks stand out a bit more to cars. This is on Beech Avenue near the YMCA.

 If you know of any others, let me know in the comments.  Include a street name if possible so people can see for themselves how they work.

A small change you can hardly notice

Sometimes you don't notice the little things, small, subtle changes that can pass you by without you even realizing it.   Here is one of those things.  Before Capital One Bank bought Chevy Chase bank, the name above the door said "Chevy Chase Bank",  For a long time after, even when Capital One changed the name of the branches, the sign remained.  At some point, without me noticing, they changed the sign above the door to read "Chevy Chase Trust"  Anyone know when this happened?

I dug through my old pictures and came across this one from 2008 which has the old name on it.

December Rock Spring planning meeting

 Last night there was another Rock Spring planning meeting at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda.

The start of the meeting was a quick recap of what was covered at prior Rock Spring planning meetings, possible future development in the area, and a review of the recomendations of the Urban Land Institute Technical Assistance Panel (ULI TAP) which looked at the high office vacancy rate in the Rock Spring and White Flint 2/Executive Boulevard areas.  After that there was a presentation on planning ideas for Rock Spring, Breakout sessions where people at the meeting could talk with planners, and finally, report outs from each of the breakout sessions.

Possible Future plans

 Since the last planning meeting, the planning board met with several property owners to discuss their plans for possible future development.  These plans include:

• Montgomery Mall: Possible expansion of anchor tenant and expansion of a parking garage.
• Wildwood Medical site: Recieved special exception in 2012 for a 5 story residential building and has applied to amend that approval to increase the height of the building.
• Wildwood shopping Center: Proposing an addition at the end of the shopping center building.

ULI TAP presentation

The planning department requested the Urban Land Institutes (ULI) assistance to look at the office vacancy in Rock Spring and White Flint 2/Executive Boulevard.  They only focused within the boundaries of Rock Spring, they weren't looking holistically at the area and were looking for ways to decrease the office vacancy rate by changes to the areas

• Identity
• Connectivity
• Amenity
• Land Use

The full presentation that resulted from the ULI TAP workshop is available on the planning website.  The parts related to Rock Spring are on pages 54-69 of the powerpoint (which is actually a PDF)

Rock Spring Plan

Mike Bello (the planning departments lead urban designer) then gave a presentation on the status of the rock spring plan and ideas they are considering.

Major community issues

•  Lack of Access to White Flint or Grosvenor Metro stations
•  Safety concerns crossign Old Georgetown Rd
•  Too much congestion at intersections
•  More schools
•  Larger library
•  Safety issues crossing Democracy and Fernwood
•  More open space and recreation
•  Better trails and walking paths
•  Improve access to the mall
•  Lack of walkability

 Creating a Spine

Mike brought forward the idea of "creating a spine" of rock spring running from the mall, across the bridge, down Fernwood road, then down Rock Spring drive, along the proposed BRT route.

Streetscapes and streetscape comparisons

Mike went over the current profile of the various major roads in the Rock Spring area, then showed how some similarly sized roads in other parts of the county were laid out.  The above picture compares Rock Spring Drive to Redland Boulevard.  Both are roads with two lanes in each direction.

Walkshed

 One thing I have learned is that planners are obsessed with adding the word "shed" after everything.  Watershed and Viewshed I had heard before, but Walkshed was new to me.  It includes all the area that are within a ten minute walk of a place.  The goal is to increase the number of places that you can reasonably walk to (increase the walkshed) by improving pedestrain connectivity options.  (I suppose this means there is the term "bikeshed" and it doesn't mean a place you store bikes.)

Breakout groups

After the presention, there were breakout sessions so those in attendance could talk tot he planning department on areas of interest.  The meeting closed with each of the four groups reporting out what they talked about.

Next Meeting

The next Rock Spring Master Plan Meeting will be 7pm  January 28, 2016 at Walter Johnson High School.

Is it Spring already?

The warm weather recently has been pleasant, if uncharacteristic for this time of year.  It has succeeded in confusing not just people, but trees too.  I was driving on Little Falls Parkway on Sunday, and right at the corner of it and Dorset Avenue were about half a dozen cherry trees blossoming!

New York City day trip

Last weekend I took a day trip to New York City to see the sights.  I saw the WTC memorial site, the Statue of Liberty, and Times Square.  You can take the bus from Bethesda in the morning, spend 6 or 7 hours in NYC, then get back to Bethesda, all in the same day.  Both Vamoose Bus and Tripper Bus make these runs.

Make sure you plan what you want to see and how you are going to get there before you go, you will probably want to take the subway once or twice to quickly get you from one spot to another.

WTC memorial North pool

The morning sun illuminates one wall of water at the North Pool of the WTC memorial

WTC memorial South pool

Survivor Tree: This tree was originally planted in the WTC complex.  After the attack it was temporarily moved, then planted here once the memorial site was constructed.

WTC 1 from Battery Park

 There are a few ways to see the Statue of Liberty.  The park service contracts a ferry operator to take people to the island where you can walk around (it also goes to Ellis Island), and several other private ferry operators run tours that circle the island (but don't stop at it).  If you don't mind just seeing the statue from the water, the private ferry tours are much faster.  To actually get on the island you have to go through airport-style security with a long line, then the ferry itself has one of the slowest boarding processes imaginable.  The boat holds about 800 people and there is a single entrance to the boat that you are going through that only one to two people across fit through.  Between coming and going to the islands, expect to spend well over an hour waiting in lines.

The main building on Ellis Island

The statue of liberty

The statue of liberty

Manhattan Island

Times Square area

Times Square

Concept Plan for the WMAL field development

Toll Brothers has submitted their concept plan for the WMAL property showing the roads and other amenities.

Plan Variant 1, without 5 acre public use set-aside

The plan calls for 328 dwelling units, a mix of 40% townhouses, duplexes, and 60% single family detached houses.  There will be 4.39 houses per acre and each house will have parking for 2 cars.  The plan follows a "loosely curvilinear grid" pattern of interconnected streets and pedestrian green spaces.

The property will connect to Greentree road in two places and also to Greyswood road.  It will be possible to drive from Greentree to Greyswood, but it won't be a straight shot, you have to take a turn and loop a bit.  The plan is for the roads to remain private roads and not turned over to the county.  One thing this allows for is for houses to be as close as 10 feet from the road instead of the 25 feet required for county roads.  Preliminary traffic studies indicate that three intersections will require improvements.

Walking trails proposed for the property

The majority of the trees on both the north and south side of the property will be preserved.  There will also be a network of trails that go through the trees as well as through the other greenspaces in the property.  The trails will connect with both Renita Lane and Derbyshire Lane.  Overall, a little less than 30% of the site will be available for recreation and open space.

Other amenity include a dog park that will be open to the public and a new noise barrier along I-495, they note that one may be required along the I-270 spur as well.  The part of the field by Derbyshire Court that gets muddy in the spring is marked as a "Stream Valley Buffer".

Plan variant 2 showing a 5 acre public use set-aside

 They actually submitted two variations on the plan, Plan 1, which has the full 328 units, and plan 2 which includes a 5 acre Public Use Reservation that covers the area around the WMAL transmitter building.  That plan only has 308 units and a single road connecting to Greentree.  This 5 acre reservation would be held for three years to allow for the county to purchase it at market value.  If the county doesn't, the area will be built with 20 houses (so it will match plan 1.)

Rock Spring master plan update

I went to the Rock Spring Master Plan community update meeting last night to find out how the planning was progressing.  They split the meeting into three parts.  First there was a summary of prior meetings, then there were two staff presentations, one on an economic overview of the Rock Spring area and one on Placemaking, finally there were presentations by three developers in the master plan area.  After the structured part of the meeting there was an opportunity to talk one-on-one with the planners.

Economic Overview notes

In the Rock spring plan area (which includes Montgomery Mall and Wildwood shopping center) the top employers are (in order) Lockheed, Marriott, NIH, and Nordstrom.  The top three employers account for 62% of non-retail jobs in the plan area, so if any one of them moved away it would be a significant loss of jobs.  The area has 1.8 billion dollars in payroll and accounts for half of the corporate management jobs in Montgomery County.  It also has 3 of the 4 Fortune 500 companies that are in Maryland (Lockheed #64, Marriott #221,  and Host Hotels and Resorts #485).  There is currently 5.5 million square feet of office space

Placemaking notes

Placemaking is one of the currently popular buzzwords.  It means making an area appealing to people so they want to go there.  It encompasses everything from having a destination that draws people to having appealing sidewalks, to buildings at a "human scale" to bike lanes.  The focus on the rock spring area seems to be better walkways such as having sidewalks set back from the road by several feet with trees and greenspace, having buildings closer to the road (many parts of Rock Spring have them set back by up to 150 feet) and having chairs that can be moved (that last one came up several times during the presentation)

My thoughts on the meeting

They are spending a lot of time trying to make the different aspects of the Rock Spring area work together, but don't seem to be addressing how it fits into the larger community.  What can they do to not make area traffic worse, or even better, is there anything they can do to improve area traffic? Montgomery Mall has approval to build another 400,000 square feet of retail, how will people get to and from the mall?  If they add thousands of housing units to the area, how will those people get to the metro station or to downtown Bethesda? How will the bike lanes in Rock Spring connect to the rest of the bicycle network (such as the nearby Bethesda Trolley Trail). 
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White Flint 2 sector plan meeting today

If you are interested in what the county has in store for the land to the west of the white flint area (Called White Flint 2 right now), there is a community meeting scheduled for tonight, from 7 to 9 pm at the Luxmanor Elementary school, 6201 Tilden Lane.

Here is some information from the White Flint 2 sector plan page:

 Residents, business owners, community groups, and other interested stakeholders are invited to examine and discuss various plan elements including: land use and density; connectivity; public facilities; and open spaces. County Planners will facilitate focused discussions about these topics and work with participants to begin to prioritize a variety of issues within the Sector Plan area.

 Background:

 The White Flint 2 Sector Plan area covers approximately 290 acres in a horseshoe shape on either side of Rockville Pike (MD 355). The plan area includes office buildings along Executive Boulevard, west of Hoya Street; Montrose Crossing Shopping Center and Pike Center along Rockville Pike; light-industrial and commercial properties along Parklawn Drive, south of Randolph Road; office uses along Executive Boulevard; and Randolph Hills Shopping Center and other light-industrial uses along Parklawn Drive.

Issues:

• What level of new development can the transportation network support?
• How should Rockville Pike (MD 355) between the city and County be coordinated and designed?
• What transportation policies should be introduced or amended?
• Should the White Flint Special Tax District encompass White Flint Phase 2?
• How can uses on both sides of the MARC station and CSX tracks be integrated?
• What is the role of the proposed MARC station and how should nearby properties outside of White Flint Phase I develop?

Also note that this plan area feeds into the Walter Johnson Cluster and portions of it are currently in the Ashburton school district.