Action Committee for Transit questionnaire for candidates for Montgomery County Planning Board chair

(While I would have reordered this list, it's a good start.) From Action Coalition for Transit via email:

Dear Candidate for Planning Board Chair,

As you know, one of the Planning Board's core responsibilities is to plan for good transportation and for land use that will make good transportation possible. In recent years, the county has made great forward strides in this area, exemplified by the rejuvenation of downtown Bethesda and Silver Spring and the recently adopted White Flint master plan. Yet the basic structure of our planning and zoning rules continues to rest on the failed concepts that created the present transportation mess.

The next chair of the Planning Board will have the opportunity to reshape the future of our county by bringing our system of land-use regulation into the 21st century. The Action Committee for Transit hopes that the County Council will choose the candidate best qualified to meet that challenge. To assist in that process, we have developed a short questionnaire. We request your response by May 4. All responses received by that date will be posted on our website and made available to the Council.

Thank you for your willingness to serve the county in this demanding position and thank you in advance for taking the time to respond to these questions.

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1) Do you support the Locally Preferred Alternative selected by Gov. O'Malley for the Purple Line, including an at-grade light rail line with a trail alongside it on the Georgetown Branch right of way between Bethesda and Silver Spring?

2) Would you support further study of alternatives to the Locally Preferred Alternative, such as heavy rail or single-tracking, which might delay the building of the Purple Line?

3) Do you support the current growth policy which ties development to the movement of motor vehicles, or would you replace the "PAMR" and "LATR" tests with a growth policy that gives transit, pedestrian, and bicycle travel equal weight with automobiles?

4) Are minimum parking requirements, which make transit riders, pedestrians, and bicyclists pay for parking they don't use and thereby subsidize drivers, wise policy in places with good transit service?

5) The Parks Department's current policy is to clear snow only from roadways used by motor vehicles and not from roadways used exclusively by bicycles and pedestrians, even when the roadway used by bicycles and pedestrians carries far more people. Will you reverse this policy?

6) Will you end the Planning Department's use of biased language that treats only automobile travel as the norm, such as referring to an intersection widening that worsens pedestrian travel conditions as an "improvement" and describing non-automobile travel as "alternative" transportation?