Transportation demand management planning for real vs. for show

Action Committee for Transit, the optimal mobility advocates in Montgomery County, have put out a press release, Nov 30, Press Release on Bethesda $89 Million Garage Boondoggle , about Montgomery County's plans to build a massive parking structure deep underground in Bethesda.

From the release:

Under current plans, the county will spend $89 million to dig seven stories into the earth beneath a planned mixed-use development across the street from Barnes & Noble in Bethesda. The 1100-car public garage, buried under two floors of private parking for the new development, will cost some $80,000 per parking space. Because it will be so deep, the cost is more than double what is usual for underground parking. ...

To come up with the size of the garage, the Parking Division assumed that 74% of Bethesda employees drive to work and need to park. Currently, this number is less than 70%; under the county Master Plan it is scheduled to decline to less than 63%. And the planned Purple Line station just a few hundred feet from the garage site will reduce demand for parking even more.

Yet many of these expensive new parking spaces will almost surely sit unused -- like the empty lower level of the new public parking garage in Columbia Heights. Although the county Parking Division contended, when it won approval for the project, that the surrounding area was hundreds of spaces short of daytime parking even before the new stores on Bethesda Lane opened last year, the Parking Division's own aerial photo taken late last year (like recent photos of the area on Google Earth) shows an empty top floor in the public garage across the street.

Aerial photo of Downtown Bethesda.

The high cost of the garage means that even in the improbable event that the garage fills up, parking fees will not cover the cost of construction and the garage will need subsidies. At 80 cents per hour, the average cost of public parking in Bethesda today, and 80% occupancy between 10 am and 10 pm weekdays, the annual revenue from each parking space would be $1600. That is not enough even to cover the interest on the construction bonds.

What this shows is that just because a municipality might have a transportation demand management program in place, as Montgomery County does have for Bethesda, it doesn't mean that the agencies and officials tasked with transportation planning and/or transportation operations are committed to optimal mobility, and shifting trips away from the automobile.

As much as I hate to say it, I understand how and why Montgomery County Department of Transportation officials are car-focused because the reality is that the county is spread out and most households have cars and rely upon the automobile.

On the other hand, we get tricked into thinking that Montgomery County is progressive on transportation issues (and sprawl) because of the 12 red line subway stations in the county (plus Takoma station, in DC, is on the border), the existence of four transportation management districts, the Agricultural Reserve which keeps 150 square miles of the county free of sprawl (which instead is displaced to Frederick County...), and the county's creation of the RideOn bus system to complement and support people getting to the subway system (since the original creation of the RideOn system, the bus route structure has been expanded to provide supplemental bus service that isn't strictly focused on the subway system, although parts of the county without subway service don't have bus service).

Arlington County and the City of Tempe in Arizona have Transportation Commissions which address transportation issues in the same kind of detail that planning boards and planning commissions address land use issues. (Note that they need better websites.)

Technically, this is supposed to come together through a comprehensive land use plan or a county master land use plan. But if you have very independent Departments of Public Works/Transportation, the system usually ends up being discoordinated.

My preferred course of action is that planning commissions deal with all planning within a jurisdiction, i.e., transportation, schools, health and wellness, emergency service, parks, libraries, etc., not just land use.

And in DC, this is the flip side of my joke that DC doesn't have an office of planning, it has an office of land use, because even though the office of planning works with other agencies, most of the other agencies plan independently of the office of planning. (The way most jurisdictions bring this under control is by having a master capital improvements plan and budget, run by the planning office. DC doesn't do this.)

I don't know yet how to bring a renegade automobile-centric Department of Public Works under "control" and focused instead on optimal mobility.

I do think that baring having robust planning commissions with some oversight over the DPW, a transportation commission is a necessary step forward for counties and municipalities working to move optimal mobility to the forefront of the transportation planning agenda.

In Arlington County, the transportation function works just fine and progressively under a public works agency (there it is called "Environmental Protection" and maybe that's why they can function together, because there is a shared understanding of what the environment and environmental protection means).

Many center cities are splitting off the transportation function from the Department of Public Works, and there is an association of these transportation agencies called NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

But Montgomery County demonstrates that just because you split off a transportation department from public works, it doesn't automatically mean that you have a progressive transportation department.

I hope that in Montgomery County and in other jurisdictions in Maryland that a more progressive local transportation policy becomes a key issue in the 2010 election cycle, pushed forward by local residents, civic organizations, environmental groups, and other activists, just as how Action Committee for Transit was so successful in making the Purple Line light rail system an issue in the 2006 election for positions on the Montgomery County Council and the County Executive.

Hans Riemer wasn't successful in his candidacy, but he was one of many candidates who committed to support the Purple Line, and he made transportation and the Purple Line a central part of his 2006 candidacy (the agenda and the literature) for a seat on the Montgomery County Council.

Even though certain candidates in Montgomery County ended up making themselves seem better on transportation issues than it turns out in actuality compared to how they are deciding as elected officials, the fact of the matter is that in 2005 the Purple Line was declared dead by the Washington Post and most people in the know, and now today, we know that the Purple Line is going to happen (well, pending federal funding) within the next few years, to the point where some residents along the line are now starting to advocate for the inclusion of a stop to serve their neighborhood(s), see "Residents lobby for Purple Line station" from the Gazette.