Smarth Growtherie Recycling of Planning Fads

SMARTGROWTHERIE MD

Recycling of Planning Fads

Smart growth is in many ways just a recycling of old failed planning fads and repackaging them in new verbiage, presented by new messiahs claiming to have authored a brilliant original idea. (As my aunt Jean once said: “These young people think they are the first generation to have discovered sex.”)

The language may change a bit. What remains the same is that the higher-density/no-roads plans don’t deliver on their promises, and the roads eventually have to be improved anyway, usually at greater expense.

That’s the lesson from the heart of Smart Growth country, Montgomery Co Maryland, which first debated all this in the 1970s. In 1981 the Master Plan for the Fairland area of eastern Montgomery Co embraced a policy along the US-29 Corridor (Colesville Road) then called Transit Serviceability. Auto-dependency was supposedly to be reduced by zonings that allowed dense ‘garden apartments’ and a mix of shops and residences so that people could walk to do their shopping. The main drag, US-29, was to be kept a signalized arterial, albeit with access control, rather than upgraded to motorway standard with grade separations – again to discourage car ‘dependence’. The denser development along the arterial was to support upgraded bus service. Standard planning stuff of exactly the same specifications that are being touted under the presumptuous new phrase Smart Growth (All the old planners must have been Dumb?)

Transit serviceability a la 1981 turned out to be a total fiasco in Fairland. Density was increased alright. Developers, who usually want higher density development, leapt at the opportunity to build more housing per acre. But far from reducing congestion it greatly worsened it. A few more people took buses but car use increased far more, and the roads were swamped. There was citizen outcry. Eventually the planners focused on the problems and revised the plans.

The approved and adopted 1997 Fairland Master Plan in its section on transp declares: “This Plan recognizes... that the ‘transit serviceability’ concept from the 1981 of increasing land use densities is no longer appropriate. The concept of transit serviceability has proven to be more limited and problematic than was envisioned in the 1981 plan. It has been difficult to balance the recommended land use and transp infrastructure...” (p87)

And guess what? The 1997 plan calls for upgrading US-29 to urban motorway standard with grade separations all along it (see plans this page). And it explicitly caps development densities. (“Fairland Master Plan” Montgomery County MD, 1997 p87-88) Some of the locals are eagerly waiting to see how the governor’s smartgrowth czars will handle this one.

Transit-oriented development they often call it nowadays, but it is indistinguishable in substance from the transit serviceability that was tried before and failed, and has been dumped.

Now US-29 has already been upgraded to full motorway standard further north. Work has moved southward from I-70 through Howard Co to MD-32. Plans are in the works at the State Highway Admin to continue “intersection improvements” southward on US-29 much of the way down to the Washington beltway.

That term “intersection improvements” is a beauty! And then there’s a section of US-29 that is “realigned” according to the county plans. In fact it is a new stretch of motorway, to bypass Burtonsville’s commercial center, where there’s no access control. The intersection improvements are interchanges. All commendably sensible stuff, but totally at odds with smartgrowtherie as pronounced by the anti-roads fundamentalists around the Guvnr.

They are in fact building piecemeal a nice new urban motorway (6 and 8 lanes) but no one uses such a word, let alone that awful LA-word “freeway” for fear of what the words might stir up by way of opposition. The old local term “expressway” is no longer PC either. The Inter-County Connector toll road at the southern end remains bitterly resisted by these guys. Otherwise the area between the Washington and Baltimore beltways is gradually getting a very neat motorway grid, what with the upgrades of MD-100 and MD-32. (Contact Montgomery Co Planning 301 217 2500)