Gettin’ Over on M-83

Not that long ago, I had the chance to attend another one of Montgomery County’s unending public hearings on the M-83 road project. It was a beautiful example of a “noh” play, in which all the theater goers know the plot and the outcome, and the actors are graded on intonation and faithfulness to their scripts.

For those of you who are numbed with local politics, M-83 is the proposed extension of Midcounty Highway through Montgomery Village and on to Clarksburg, where it will supposedly relieve the congestion caused by building Clarksburg without adequate infrastructure in the first place. There are many proposed routes for the road, each seemingly designed to divide community opposition along new axes and to make bludgeoning us into accepting this asphalt apatasaurus easier for the road lobby and its servants.

The M-83 proposal is surprising in a number of ways. First off, the route clearly favored by the County (Shh, we’re not supposed to notice) is the original master plan alignment from the middle 1970s. That alignment has been previouslyrejected as requiring too much demolition, costing too much and damaging watersheds we need to help remediate water quality in the county. Even the County Council backed down the last time the proposal came close to implementation.

What brought it back? A desperate need for real estate tax revenue opened much of the upcounty lands beyond Germantown to medium density development in the late 1990s and  early 2000s, just before the real estate bust. Much of that development was allowed to take place on the promise of future infrastructure (roads, schools, commercial infill) without actually having any of the prerequisites in place. 

So now the taxpayers and homeowners south of the Germantown border have the privilege of having their communities torn apart so that they can be “good citizens” by (allegedly) reducing the commuting time of their northern neighbors.

Looked at dispassionately, the proposed M-83 routes are anything but desirable.

1. The proposed routes put a new road and right of way within a mile of two other major road corridors serving the same population, namely, I-270 and SR-355. Adding four new lanes of parallel concrete and a complete right of way would do little to solve the long term problems and might even add to congestion, for we all know that “people go where transport is,” and not the other way round. At its best, the project adds only four continuous through lanes to a corridor that has between ten and sixteen for most of its passage. It’s easier and cheaper to expand those existing footprints, but we’re in no mood for economy here. It is, at best, forty percent more lanes (only in short parts of the corridor) and for most of the route, a modest sixteen percent more “road capacity” (read ‘impermeable surface’) that terminates in a south county “mixing bowl” that can’t hold the inflow. If this is supposed to alleviate congestion, it will have to do it by pulling more than a rabbit out of a hat.

2. The project plans pay only the most superficial service to the proposed widening of I-270 to accommodate more flow (cheaper by far) or to improving the 355 corridor north of Rockville.

3. Taxpayers get to fund road building by the hundreds of millions and perhaps billions, when a combination of techniques that the MCDOT dismisses as “demand management” could improve traffic flow by as much as ten percent for an estimated 5 million dollar outlay to simply coordinate traffic signals up and down the corridor. I know we want to stimulate jobs, but five percent of the cost for one quarter of the benefit sounds better to me as a taxpayer. There is a difference between stimulus and pornography. In this economy, why not relieve the taxpayers and put scarce bond monies to more economic use?

4. Further rational demand reduction would come in the form of improved transit
capability, an effort championed by Council Member Marc Elrich. New rapid transit options, coupled with the long delayed Corridor Cities Transitway, and combined with intelligent signal management would eliminate the very need for this concrete constrictor around the heart of mid-County.

5. If all the above weren’t enough, the very same County government that crows about its plans to develop “smart growth” around “transit hubs” (read Metro) has seemingly “gone retro” to produce one of the finest pieces of 1950s “roadway construction to bedroom suburbs” planning possible for the mid-twenty first century. Perhaps what’s sauce for the goose in Silver Spring and Bethesda just isn’t sauce for the gander in Gaithersburg and Montgomery Village, since the planners must assume we have the intelligence of domestic turkeys to swallow that inconsistency.

6. The job of transportation planning is largely one of how to move people from place to place. It used to be from home to work, suburbs to downtown, but now the  two are increasingly co-resident. Montgomery County leads the nation in home business and work-at-home arrangements. The very assumptions about requirements are flawed from the start. The job of transport planners is not to move vehicles from A to B, but to facilitate the movement of people and goods in a way that helps support sustainable communities. But again, what’s good for the sleek shiny new developments and the ivy covered mansions is too good for the lumpen proletariat of mid County? 

7. The folks are MCDOT are good people, to be sure. But it’s pretty clear that when it comes to Mid-County, they see their mission as being road-builders first and transportation planners second. What’s even more surprising is that a County Executive who’s making a name for himself crusading for spending restraint has remained silent and let the bureaucracy run amok. More road miles means more cost in the end to maintain them, and M-83 will simply facilitate congestion we want to discourage, as well as giving us high costs and ongoing maintenance bills.  Such a deal!

So down the list:

Real capacity to improve the transportation web? No. Best cost alternative? No. Minimum impact on the environment? No. Most economical alternative? No. Do the relatively inexpensive parts first? No. Fits in with the announced strategy for the rest of the County? No. 

Is M-83 the right thing? No, no, and no.