For Montgomery County, congestion solution is to build up, not out
The Daily Record (Baltimore, MD) June 24, 2010
By Liz Farmer
Daily Record Business Writer
In what used to be a quintessential bedroom community just outside the Capital Beltway, Anthony Greenberg is standing in a gleaming silver tower that looks like it should be 13 miles south in Washington.
He pointed 23 stories down at the White Flint Mall in North Bethesda.
"From here you can get a really good view of what Rockville Pike used to be and what Rockville Pike is becoming," Greenberg, a developer with Chevy Chase-based JBG Companies, said.
The mall was built in 1977 and is typical of the era - three stories of stores surrounded by acres of parking lot. Across the pike, what Greenburg sees as the future for this stretch of road between the Capital Beltway and downtown Rockville, is JBG's development. North Bethesda Market features a 24-story residential tower, now the tallest building in the county, surrounded by retail and other community services. And - most important - it is within walking distance of a Metrorail station.
Developers and Maryland transportation officials say they hope this development and others like it will attract thousands of residents to what is already one of the densest regions in the state. But they say these projects will actually help ease the traffic congestion in an area that badly needs it because of their placement near mass transit.
That means parking lots are coming out and mid-rises and high-rises are taking their place. With virtually no more undeveloped land and a continuously increasing population, Montgomery County is turning toward the sky for its future.
Across the street from the White Flint Mall and adjacent Metro station, JBG's North Bethesda Market apartment tower sits at just under 300 feet, the maximum height allowed in the county. Its floor-to-ceiling windows boast a view of the Washington Monument to the south and the Shenandoah Mountains to the west.
Next to the tower is a retail building that will house a gym and two restaurants. A third residential/retail building that Whole Foods will soon call home sits above a parking garage, replacing the lot that occupied this ground before. Construction on the project began in December 2007, and JBG hopes to have its first renters in by the end of the year.
Two miles up the Pike, at the Twinbrook Metro station on the south side of Rockville, is another JBG project. The first phase of the development is open and holds 15,500 square feet of ground floor retail with a bank, Subway sandwich shop, Asian restaurant and nail salon already committed. The four-story Alaire apartment building has 279 units, 80 of which have been leased since March, according to Greenberg.
Fertile commercial stretch
This area, considered one of the most fertile stretches of commercial land in the country, has long boasted mile after mile of car dealerships and strip malls selling to affluent commuters. Montgomery County's median household income is the highest in the state - $93,895 per year, compared with the state's average of $70,482.
As the region has gone from sleepy suburbia to suburban sprawl, the commuter population has swelled. This is the densest county in Maryland with 1,761 people per square mile, while the state's average is 542 people, according to the U.S. Census. During rush hour, eight-lane Rockville Pike is swollen with hot cars and impatient commuters. This five-mile section between Rockville and the Capital Beltway in Bethesda carries nearly 53,000 cars per day.
The problem is how to accommodate new residents and commuters more efficiently when there's seemingly no room, said Rollin Stanley, director of the Montgomery County Planning Board. According to the board, the county has 8,000 acres of surface parking lots and 106 strip malls. Of its 495 square miles, just 4 percent of that land remains untouched.
"And most of that is land people don't want to build on because you can't do anything with it," Stanley said. "In other words, we don't have any land left, so the county has to assess its growth in the context of what's already been built. "
It's different than the problem Washington, D.C., faced in the late 1960s and early '70s, when the plans for the Metrorail were formed. When the first downtown stations opened in 1976, it was largely a response to the dearth of parking spaces in the city. As Washington's suburbs became more populated, stations and vast parking lots in Maryland and Virginia were built to accommodate the park-and-ride commuters, and Metrorail's daily ridership of 103,000 in 1977 grew to 750,000 by 2009.
257 percent growth
The Red Line (which parallels Rockville Pike on the line's west end) is Metrorail's oldest - and busiest, according to Metrorail. The number of passengers boarding at the Shady Grove Station, the end of the Red Line and just inside the Gaithersburg city limits, has grown by 257 percent since it opened in 1985 - that's more than any other Maryland station after the College Park Station at the University of Maryland.
But the region's population has taxed the capacity of suburban roads as housing developments spread far beyond access to public transportation. Last year alone, Montgomery County grew by nearly 18,000 people to an estimated 971,600, said Stanley. From 2000 to 2008, suburban cities like Rockville and Gaithersburg grew in population (28 percent, or 13,300 people, in Rockville; 12 percent, or 6,200, in Gaithersburg). Takoma Park, on the other hand, inside the Beltway and bordering the District of Columbia, grew by just 2 percent, or 400 people, in the same period.
To better meet the demand, planning commissions and developers are focusing on putting more residents at existing public transportation stations, which started their life in suburbia as vast islands of paved parking lot.
Called "transit-oriented developments," or TODs, these projects are part of Gov. Martin O'Malley's push to reduce the state's carbon footprint and encourage use of public transportation by building communities around transit stops. These communities typically include hundreds of residences stacked around a grocery store, restaurants, cafes and other service businesses like dry cleaners, gyms and banks. Public parks and plazas give the green finish to a walkable community. Last week, O'Malley announced seven transit stops in Prince George's and Montgomery counties will get development assistance priority for such projects.
The North Bethesda project, which is on 6 acres that JBG owns, did not get a TOD designation, but the developer's 26-acre project on Metro-owned land at the Twinbrook Station in Rockville did. And so did the 90 acres surrounding the Shady Grove Metro station, which are owned by the county.
According to studies done by the Maryland Department of Transportation, people who live in transit-oriented developments are up to five times more likely to use mass transit. In addition, households in those communities make 40 to 60 percent fewer auto trips per year.
"The total number of vehicle miles traveled is growing faster than our population and faster than we can build highways," said Andrew Scott, special assistant to the secretary for economic development at MDOT. "When you have to drive to everything, it drives traffic congestion. "
More Metrorail
He said Metrorail has the ability to carry extra traffic "fairly easily" and is now operating at two-thirds capacity. Metro runs mostly six-car trains during rush hour, while it was designed to run up to eight cars, he said. According to a recent Metro inventory report, Red Line trains should expand to 100 percent capacity by 2025 to meet the expected demand.
Montgomery County took a stab at something like transit-oriented development in the 1990s during the revitalization of downtown Bethesda and Rockville. But some say they missed the mark for what the rapidly growing county needed.
"I think they are feeling today they did not allow enough density around the Metro stations and are sort of wishing they had allowed for more," said John Myers, managing director for Cassidy Turley commercial real estate in Washington. "Developers have naturally wanted as much density as they could get. I think this is the planning commission realizing their errors of the past. "
Last year, the Montgomery County Council approved a development plan for the White Flint area that incorporated JBG's North Bethesda project as a model for Rockville Pike.
Stanley said Rockville Pike's landscape of strip malls and parking lots was not one that could accommodate the county's growth - or attract the next generation of taxpayers.
"The older group is leaving the work force, and we're not attracting the folks behind that group - the Generation X and Y folks," he said. "When we urbanized in Silver Spring and Bethesda, we saw those folks going there. And we need to create more places where these people want to come. "
Following Va. 's success
Developers and county officials hope to follow the success of Metro transit stops paralleling Interstate 66 in Northern Virginia. When the Ballston Metro station opened there in 1979, the area was mostly used-car lots, according to Metrorail. The county encouraged denser residential development near the station, and with that came more retail. Today the area is filled with restaurants, shops and offices, bringing customers and workers to the area, and as a result, increasing tax revenues.
The Urban Land Institute estimated that in Arlington County, development in two Metrorail corridors is concentrated on 6 percent of the land in the county but produces almost half of the county's tax revenues.
Greenberg said JBG was encouraged by the leasing rate at The Alaire apartments at Twinbrook and pointed to that as evidence of a demand for urban-like communities in suburbia. The Twinbrook Station project will eventually add 1,595 residences, 220,000 square feet of retail and 325,000 square feet of Class A commercial office space. The roads, utility lines, parks, buildings and parking garages will replace what is now parking lot.
"Surface parking is the lowest and worst use of environmental and state investment," said Greenberg. "There's nothing but runoff and heat. "
These projects are no quick feat because the developer is creating city blocks from scratch. Preconstruction work started in the early 2000s at Twinbrook, and building did not begin until 2008. But JBG is in no hurry to move on the next phase - 206 apartments and 35,000 square feet of retail - until the time is right.
"We're waiting for the market to move in the right direction before we start," Greenberg said, noting JBG planned to use a different architect for each phase in development. "We're growing up organically and over time so it's more natural. "
That's probably for the best, said urban development expert and author James Howard Kunstler.
"With that kind of thing, you've created a neighborhood with not enough critical mass for businesses to live there," he said.
Kunstler, a supporter of transit-oriented development, said he was unsure how the suburban version could alleviate traffic. Unlike in the urban version - State Center in Baltimore is an example - suburban dwellers have more reasons to use their car.
"There's a great need to get people out of their cars," he said. "But my sense of things is that Americans will have to be dragged kicking and screaming from them. "
But Scott said that with coordinated development, it can be done. Those living in traditional suburbs will still use their cars - but if new development is focused on transit stations, those are people who will be using their cars less and not contributing to the congestion.
"Maryland is projected to have 1.1 million more people in 2030," he said. The state's population now is 5.7 million. "So the people are coming. It's a question of how we grow. "