As a person in the middle of moving from DC to Frederick, this is a very interesting post. The one struggle I’ve had in thinking about the move is how I’d commute to DC if needed on public transportation. I reached the conclusion that other than driving to Shady Grove and taking the Redline, no other meaningful option exists. It seems crazy to me that there isn’t a direct train line alone I-270 to serve these areas. But now at least I can better understand why.
Friend of mine lives long the I-270 corridor and doesn't own a car. We were going to explore downtown Frederick and I had to pick her up, because she can't take a bus, much less a train, from her I-270 corridor city in MoCo to Frederick. Even though that whole line from Frederick down to D.C. is almost one urban corridor. And that's the crazy thing, the county purposely built it that way and then the transit got cut at the end.
The major flaw in your thinking is this statement: "This illustrates how we build housing and communities with transportation as an afterthought."
Not so. The transportation that is, has always been, and will be until it gets to be more money than building good transit (and of course places that are well served by such transit), is automobile transportation. It's not a bug, it's a feature. That is what most people want, especially when they buy into suburban and exurban places. Sure having a rail line might be nice to commute, but the development patterns in these suburban counties have so much low density development in between that it becomes (at least in people's minds) impossible to live without a car.
100 years ago when there were dense, walkable population centers connected by rail, it worked because the interstitial space was either unused or farmland that people didn't need/want to go to regularly. This is why building rail in suburban locations generally doesn't work and never meets expectations because it just becomes the rail version of a STROAD. Very expensive, low ridership and if there are enough stops to get you to every little strip mall, very slow.
While transportation and land use are flip sides of the same coin, the problem is not we don't do proper transportation planning, it's that we don't do proper land use planning... that is if you want successful rail. People who want low density autocentric development are another story entirely.
Well, but not quite, because the communities along this proposed line were built more densely and were not like the rest of the autocentric sprawl-style development. King Farm and Kentlands, for example, were early New Urbanist projects. Clarksburg is built as high-density clusters but it’s quite close to the Agricultural Reserve. That’s what’s maddening about this one is the land use did align with transit.
It may be that the light rail would have been too expensive, which is why they pared it down to a rapid bus lane idea, but then they scrapped even that, so you get left with high-density communities that nonetheless end up being car-dependent.
Sure I get it and I apologize for my rant. I still do push back that any of this transit would be very successful though because, perhaps, of the choices in the past that resulted in this low density interstitial land use. As we all know BRT *can* be as good as rail if it has dedicated ROW and signal priority, but it (as well as most light rail in suburban area) is never implemented that way because of complaints from drivers. I don't know what the right answer is here and there may not be a good one, but until some economic circumstances change that make driving really hard, we'll continue to STROAD our way through life.
As a person in the middle of moving from DC to Frederick, this is a very interesting post. The one struggle I’ve had in thinking about the move is how I’d commute to DC if needed on public transportation. I reached the conclusion that other than driving to Shady Grove and taking the Redline, no other meaningful option exists. It seems crazy to me that there isn’t a direct train line alone I-270 to serve these areas. But now at least I can better understand why.
Friend of mine lives long the I-270 corridor and doesn't own a car. We were going to explore downtown Frederick and I had to pick her up, because she can't take a bus, much less a train, from her I-270 corridor city in MoCo to Frederick. Even though that whole line from Frederick down to D.C. is almost one urban corridor. And that's the crazy thing, the county purposely built it that way and then the transit got cut at the end.
The major flaw in your thinking is this statement: "This illustrates how we build housing and communities with transportation as an afterthought."
Not so. The transportation that is, has always been, and will be until it gets to be more money than building good transit (and of course places that are well served by such transit), is automobile transportation. It's not a bug, it's a feature. That is what most people want, especially when they buy into suburban and exurban places. Sure having a rail line might be nice to commute, but the development patterns in these suburban counties have so much low density development in between that it becomes (at least in people's minds) impossible to live without a car.
100 years ago when there were dense, walkable population centers connected by rail, it worked because the interstitial space was either unused or farmland that people didn't need/want to go to regularly. This is why building rail in suburban locations generally doesn't work and never meets expectations because it just becomes the rail version of a STROAD. Very expensive, low ridership and if there are enough stops to get you to every little strip mall, very slow.
While transportation and land use are flip sides of the same coin, the problem is not we don't do proper transportation planning, it's that we don't do proper land use planning... that is if you want successful rail. People who want low density autocentric development are another story entirely.
</ rant>
Well, but not quite, because the communities along this proposed line were built more densely and were not like the rest of the autocentric sprawl-style development. King Farm and Kentlands, for example, were early New Urbanist projects. Clarksburg is built as high-density clusters but it’s quite close to the Agricultural Reserve. That’s what’s maddening about this one is the land use did align with transit.
It may be that the light rail would have been too expensive, which is why they pared it down to a rapid bus lane idea, but then they scrapped even that, so you get left with high-density communities that nonetheless end up being car-dependent.
Sure I get it and I apologize for my rant. I still do push back that any of this transit would be very successful though because, perhaps, of the choices in the past that resulted in this low density interstitial land use. As we all know BRT *can* be as good as rail if it has dedicated ROW and signal priority, but it (as well as most light rail in suburban area) is never implemented that way because of complaints from drivers. I don't know what the right answer is here and there may not be a good one, but until some economic circumstances change that make driving really hard, we'll continue to STROAD our way through life.