Md. Going 'Beyond the Pavement'
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post
Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2000

When Maryland Department of Transportation planners took a look at downtown Silver Spring, they came up with a novel approach to improving traffic flow: They closed a road to cars.

At a cost of $350,000, newly planted trees and decorative brick paving will turn Fidler Lane into a "pedestrian access way" intended to encourage residents of 50 new town houses to walk to a nearby Metro station instead of jumping into their cars.

Not so long ago, the department frowned on using road money for sidewalks, much less landscaped "access ways." But in the last four years, the state has nearly tripled spending on innovative programs that encourage transit use and make roadways friendlier to bicyclists and pedestrians.

The programs are changing the face of older communities inside the Capital Beltway and throughout the state, replacing dirt paths with sidewalks in Bladensburg; creating bridges and walkways to Metro stations at Bethesda, Landover and Addison Road; and transforming inhospitable commuter raceways in College Park and Mount Rainier with tree-lined plazas and boulevards designed to entice people to get out of their cars and walk to the corner store.

Officials are enthusiastic about the results. Nationally, Maryland is credited with leading a transportation trend known as "thinking beyond the pavement," a phrase that has become an Annapolis trademark.

"Ten years ago, the whole highway industry had two goals: mobility and efficiency. Period. The interstate system is probably the greatest example in the world of that kind of approach to transportation," said Bob Douglass, Maryland's highway design engineer.

But today, "the interstate era is over," Douglass said. Highway planners in Maryland are encouraged to take as much pride in a finely wrought crosswalk as they once found in the vast lanes of Interstate 270 or the mountain-hugging curves of Western Maryland's I-68.

Such thinking marks a departure for the department--and represents a dramatically different approach to the region's endemic traffic problems from strategies pursued across the Potomac in Virginia. Larger, more rural and more conservative, Virginia still generally responds to congestion by building roads and widening existing ones, rather than turning to mass transit and other alternatives.

In Maryland, by contrast, new roads are considered magnets for suburban sprawl, the enemy of Gov. Parris N. Glendening's "smart growth" initiative. By focusing state spending on established communities in designated growth areas--particularly inside the Washington and Baltimore beltways-- Glendening hopes to lure developers, businesses and home buyers back from the exurban frontier, where new subdivisions devour farmland and cough more cars onto the state's crowded roads.

The much-hyped smart growth initiative has yet to produce measurable results. Even at the Department of Transportation, smart growth projects account for less than 5 percent of a $6.7 billion construction budget. Most of the money--almost $2.3 billion in the next six years--still goes to new roads, a trend that raises doubts about the seriousness of Glendening's marquee program, critics of the initiative say.

State officials argue that the department's entire capital budget supports smart growth principles because all but a few projects are in designated growth areas. But critics point to developments such as the vast new Arundel Mills shopping mall, which is chewing up virgin territory near Baltimore-Washington International Airport and will be virtually inaccessible except by car.

"Arundel Mills is in a smart growth area, but that doesn't make it smart," said George Maurer, a transportation analyst with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "It's like we've got one foot dipping into smart growth while the other foot is knee-deep in the mud of the past."

Still, the department's innovations have been widely praised. Since 1991, when federal highway laws introduced the concept of building roads that meet the needs of both cars and people, Maryland Transportation Secretary John D. Porcari has been recognized as a state official who "gets it," said Michael Replogle, federal transportation director for the Environmental Defense, a Washington-based nonprofit organization focused on innovative strategies to fight pollution.

"Maryland is a bright light on the landscape right now. It's still a fairly dim landscape, but our hopes of finding greater illumination across the country and in Maryland are growing," Replogle said. "This is really developing into a national movement, a fundamental shift in how people in these agencies think and how the agencies view their own role."

Porcari agrees.

"We have accomplished a very substantial restructuring of both philosophy and how we spend transportation money," he said in an interview. "I have highway engineers coming up and talking to me about how good they feel about stabilizing and revitalizing communities. That's a sea change."

Yolanda Takesian is leading that charge. Takesian, a former planner in Anne Arundel County, joined the department after a frustrating experience at the MARC station in Odenton, where the department was expanding parking. It blithely designed a lot that would have leveled a stand of old trees and sent an ugly overpass soaring from the lot to the station.

"The state's concern was to get as many parking spaces as possible into this space--not to save trees," Takesian said.

In the end, the community complained, the overpass was scrapped, the trees were saved. And Takesian had found her calling.

Now she is a senior planner for the department, overseeing a big part of the $150 million Neighborhood Conservation program, which solicits requests to improve existing roads and transit facilities to spur investment in older communities. So far, 33 projects have been completed across the state, 34 are under construction and about 100 more are in the works.

"Some people say the road belongs to the automobile. . . . What we're trying to do is recognize that a road also contributes to the feel and function of a community," Takesian said.

Each project typically costs about $2 million and can make a surprising difference in the life of a community. In Bladensburg, for example, the department installed miles of sidewalks where people had worn "goat paths" in the grass on their way to catch the bus, Takesian said.

"All that sidewalk, it used to be just dirt," said Bladensburg Mayor David C. Harrington. "Now you can walk from here all the way into Washington, D.C."

In downtown Silver Spring, the department is funding a host of projects related to the $33 million redesign of the transit center. In addition to the Fidler Lane project, the state spent $50,000 to help move the historic Tastee Diner into a node of Metro-accessible restaurants "to convey the idea that you're in a happening place," said department planner Henry M. Kay.

In exchange, the diner's owner, Gene Wilkes, installed a transportation kiosk that shows people how to get anywhere in the state via public transportation.

"This will be a nice little town. You can see it changing for the better," Wilkes said.

The department promises even more dramatic results in Mount Rainier on the District border. Rhode Island Avenue cuts a nasty gash through the tiny town, fives lanes of fast cars slicing through two blocks of liquor stores and abandoned buildings. Residents of the town's otherwise leafy streets found the crime-ridden strip ugly and dangerous. Four years ago, they asked the state for a traffic circle to slow the cars and make Rhode Island
easier to cross.

What the little town is getting is a $1.8 million face lift, courtesy of the department. Now under construction, the Mount Rainier plan calls for grassy new plazas, bus shelters built on early 20th century designs and, at opposite ends of the new circle, two slender blue-glass sculptures that will be lighted at night--"like two voices calling across the space,"
Takesian said.

"I can't thank them enough for their response," said Mount Rainier Mayor Fred Sissine, noting that Takesian even hired an art consultant to help the community settle on the perfect ethereal blue. "This went way beyond any normal highway program."

'Smart Growth' in Maryland

Since the passage of "smart growth" laws in 1997, Maryland has more than doubled spending on innovative transportation programs that improve older communities, encourage transit use and make roadways friendlier to bikers and pedestrians. However, most of the transportation budget still goes to highway construction, a trend that undercuts smart growth principles, critics say.

Capital Transportation Projects* (in millions)
Highways
1996  2000  % change
Smart growth programs      $111  $307  168%
Preservation                      $1,516  $1,733  14%
New construction              $1,150  $2,279  98%
Total                                $2,777  $4,319  55%
Mass Transit
1996  2000  % change
Smart growth programs      $0  $21  n.a.
Preservation                      $407  $719  76%
New construction                $1,478  $1,715  16%
Total                                  $1,885  $2,455  30%

*Figures represent six-year spending plans.
SOURCE: Maryland Department of Transportation

© 2000 The Washington Post Company

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