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Health & Fitness

Comments before USACOE on M83

Comments on the Proposed M83 Extension

Mark J. Firley

I come before you today as a private citizen to share some concerns and objections to the proposed extension of county road M83 from its current terminus in Montgomery Village into the Clarksburg area.

I should, at the outset, point out at least two flaws in the process which I believe may result in serious concerns about the project:

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1.       The purpose and needs documents originally offered have methodological and substantive defects which cause me to question the validity of any conclusions drawn from them.  Examples:

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  • No evidence can be found of coordination with other transportation modalities.  The effects of the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT) were allegedly NOT part of the original plan, yet in subsequent public meetings, we were assured those effects had been included from the beginning.  What is the real story?

  • No evidence can be found of coordination with the Federal and State plans for the I270-US15 corridor.  To propose spending hundreds of millions of scarce taxpayer dollars (no matter what financing plan is approved) without clearly indicating how this piece will help do anything but add a lane or two to allow more of Frederick County and beyond to commute through Montgomery County on its way to the District is at best, unresponsive and at worst irresponsible.  It doesn’t solve the problem it sets out for itself.

  • At no point was the traffic model or the assumptions used to craft it made transparent or even exposed to the public.    The data presented suggest that assumptions were “cherry picked” to give the most favorable treatment to these specific alternatives in isolation, and that the only plan really ever considered remained the so called “Alternative 9”[1].   In reading the examples and data given, one has a strong impression that approximate load factors were taken from tables and very basic linear models “cranked over” to produce these results.   If something more sophisticated, starting with the SWIFT™ model, or OmniTRANS™, or CORSIM™ or Aimsun™ to name a just a few possibilities, there is no evidence of it here.  
    • Basic queueing theory used in these models confirms a commonly available sensory experience.  Traffic flow can be analogized to a balloon.  Squeeze a section and constrict the flow, and it bulges out to form backups accordingly.   The belief that we need this road this way is belied by a flaw in the final projections.   Time and words are spent indicating the horrors of backlog in the middle of the Clarksburg-Rockville corridor.  That’s fair.  But if this road were to be built, the constriction then appears at what theorists would call the terminal nodes of the network, that is, there isn’t sufficient interconnectivity at either end of the proposed route to handle the increased volumes the middle section would drive, and we’d in effect have to build even more roads to keep up.  We haven’t actually solved the Clarksburg commuter problem, we’ve moved it around, but are doomed to repeat ourselves like some modern Sisyphus with a concrete mixer instead of a rock.  We’d have to rework Shady Grove, SR355 and bits of I200 at the south end to make it all work.  Where have we calculated that in the plan?

    Failure to fully address these consequences is a fatal flaw in my view. 

    2.       Another class of objections concerns the insistence that only a shiny new ribbon of concrete can solve the problem.  SR355 is only two lanes north of Germantown, and it’s already available for widening.  I270 widening including hot lanes has been proposed.   But let’s look at one of the least expensive alternatives, which is dismissed here as “demand management” as if somehow that was an impossibility.

    • Demand management may include, among other things, strategies as simple as intelligent signalization of intersections.   For 10 to 15 percent of the cost of this road, the entire county signal grid could be coordinated and moved toward adaptive signal timing.  Where this has been tried, traffic flow improvements of over 15 to 20 percent are common.   If you run the numbers through any one of the simulators I’ve spoken about above, you come to a rather astonishing conclusion:  adaptive signalization reduces the need for overall road building in the county for a fraction of the cost of even one major road project.   

    In this area, we often pride ourselves on our forward thinking, but when it comes to transportation, we haven’t even made the 1990s elsewhere.   These techniques are working in California, New York, and Minnesota, to name a few places.  But we run from them in order to make more bedroom suburbs with no downtowns so we can emit more carbon while doing more commuting at an ever slower pace.   If that sounds undesirable to you, it sounds ridiculous to me.

    The same county that touts “smart growth” based around transit when the construction is renewal and infill (the most expensive kind) suddenly reverses emphasis when we’re a lot closer to green fields and lower implementation costs?   How is that sensible?

    The proposed M83 extension is worse than unworkable, the plan as stated contains internal contradictions and can be charitably described as intellectually incontinent.  I view it as a tragedy of good intentions finding shop-worn solutions and clinging to 1950s models of execution.  It’s time we end this folly forever and move on to develop real solutions to the problems we created in the UpCounty.

    We need to plan for the effect of transit, through commuting from Frederick and beyond, growth out toward the Agricultural Reserve, and integrated, intermodal transit where the private automobile is neither venerated nor vilified, but co-exists in a diverse mix with rail, omnibus, and other modalities.

    We need to finally reach ahead of our problems and plan swift relief for UpCounty citizens, not just a “mulligan” of more road building.

    Thank you.


    [1] At least Plan 9 from Outer Space was fiction and so bad as to be funny, Alternative 9 has no such redeeming social value.

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