Local weatherman unloads on impotent Montgomery County Council over traffic congestion

WUSA9 meteorologist Howard Bernstein had some frank talk on Black Friday for the Montgomery County Council, over its failure to upgrade I-270 and build the M-83 MidCounty Highway Extended to Clarksburg. Those failures have led to even worse traffic snarls upcounty following the opening of the Clarksburg Premium Outlets mall.

The Council - and the Planning Board members they hand-select - have approved growth that has expanded the population of Clarksburg by over 1000% since 2000. Yet our impotent elected officials have never funded or built the M-83, which has been on the books for decades, and would divert Clarksburg and Damascus-bound traffic off of I-270. They've also kicked the can down the road on widening the interstate, and adding Express Lanes, even as they allowed the housing and mall to go forward.

Reporting the backups on I-270 on his Twitter account, Bernstein asked Councilman Craig Rice (D-District 2), "What are you and the Council going to do about it?"

The short answer is, nothing.

One of several residents who seconded Bernstein's sentiments had some frank talk for the Council, and noted that he is now moving out of the county "asap" due to the mess our elected officials have created. 

"Did the county ever think about the quality of life issues impacted by this," Bernstein asked in a second tweet. The answer to that question is yes.

They thought about it when I debated them in 2010 and in 2014. And then they did absolutely nothing. It is now 2016. 

Another humiliation for our incompetent Council, and kudos to Bernstein for calling them out on it.

STUDY: NO DEMAND FOR MONTGOMERY COUNTY BRT SYSTEM

As if you needed any more evidence that The Emperor's New Bus, a.k.a. Montgomery County Bus Rapid Transit, would be a $10 billion boondoggle, a new study says it... would be a $10 billion boondoggle.

The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which was paid taxpayer money to do yet another study, concluded there is insufficient demand for BRT service in the county.

While that general conclusion is sound, and supported by solid arguments, there are other conclusions drawn in the study that are empirically incorrect.

For example, the study claims that BRT riders would save 10 minutes in commuting time. But that is inaccurate. The BRT system proposed requires 50 minutes to travel 15 miles, according to the MCDOT.  That would be nearly an hour from Clarksburg to the Shady Grove Metro station, for example.

Given that, even in the typical morning rush hour, you could drive from Clarksburg to Shady Grove in far less time than that, who in their right mind would use BRT?

The second flawed argument, and one that suspiciously supports one BRT faction's new plan, is that Route 355 is the one corridor where BRT could work.

When you apply the reality of 15 miles in 50 minutes (the county's own stat - not mine!), you not only realize the claim of 10-minute time savings is complete bunk, but that this would be a disaster on 355.  Remember, the latest 355 plan calls for a 33% reduction in automobile capacity in order to make room for BRT. And, the BRT "signal priority," which stops car traffic while giving BRT a green light, would make it impossible to synchronize signals during rush hour, causing even worse traffic jams.

Beyond that, as I've mentioned before, you would be duplicating Metro Red Line service. Since Metro and cars are both faster than BRT, who would be riding the BRT?

And, ultimately, where are you going on this BRT? Most commuters are heading into DC.  But, BRT would dead end in Bethesda. So, if you have to transfer to Metro at Bethesda anyway, why would you take a slow BRT and be out in the heat, cold, or bad weather? Any sensible person would just board Metro to begin with.

If it doesn't work, is nonsensically impractical, and duplicates an existing - and costly - service, why would politicians be heck-bent on 355 BRT?

Aside from the hubris of some, who want this "thing" to tout when they run for higher office, it's a not-so-surprising reason: developers.

You can't provide the highway capacity necessary for the growth planned at White Flint, without building the Rockville Freeway through White Flint.  But if you build out the necessary roads, congestion will ease, and developers will have lost one of their straw justifications for "smart growth:" traffic congestion.

By cooking the numbers and getting away from strict automobile volume counts, as the County Council is currently attempting to do, they will gain fake "capacity" with BRT.  This will allow the dense, concrete canyon they imagine as the future of 355 between White Flint and Clarksburg, while snarling traffic to a dead stop.  The result? Developers get to build. Traffic gets even worse. And then developers will get to build even more, saying only high-density "smart growth" can solve the congestion problem (that they are creating).

That is a bus, and a future, rapidly going nowhere.

MONTGOMERY COUNTY COOLING CENTERS - BETHESDA STORM UPDATE

For the many without power and AC:

3 cooling centers are open in Montgomery County:

Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville

Clarksburg High School in Clarksburg

White Oak Recreation Center in White Oak

*Bring any prescription medications you need with you*

RIVER ROAD DETOUR

Much traffic, including T2 Metrobuses is being diverted from a stretch of River Road just north of the Ridgefield Road-Little Falls Parkway commercial strip onto parallel Ridgefield Road.  Ridgefield Road is a 2  lane road through a residential neighborhood.  With speed bumps!  Slow going.  Avoid, avoid, avoid!

BETHESDA LIBRARY on Arlington Road is open to the public as a limited hours cooling center.  The county has not specified the hours.

MORE STORMS APPROACHING!

Monitor weather channels and @BethesdaRow on Twitter for the latest!

CORRIDOR CITIES TRANSITWAY: THE EMPEROR'S NEW BUS

FOLLY EXPOSED:

15 MILES IN 50 MINUTES

COST? 
$828,000,000+!

Another Robert Dyer @ Bethesda Row Exclusive!!!

Is it time for a new season of Last Comic Standing?  The Montgomery County Government sent out a press release Friday - or was it a draft of a standup comedy routine?

Touting Governor Martin O'Malley's approval of Bus Rapid Transit as the preferred mode for the Corridor Cities Transitway, it also included the first public citing of the estimated speed of the new service.

And if they keep this up, they're going to put Jerry Seinfeld out of business.

Now remember, the CCT was supposed to be light rail.  The County Council went on the record saying it had to be light rail.

And at a council debate in 2010, residents of Clarksburg warned the council that if the ride from Clarksburg to Shady Grove Metro on the CCT was too long, no one would waste time using it, and the whole project would be a waste of taxpayer money.

It turns out our elected officials have been dishonest on each of those points and promises.

Ladies and gentlemen, the travel time of the rapid bus CCT from Clarksburg to Shady Grove will be:

49 MINUTES

49 minutes!

Much like the proposed countywide BRT system, this is a complete and utter boondoggle.

Unlike the local media, which trumpeted the underwhelming CCT announcement with no skepticism or critical analysis, I immediately did some simple research on Google Maps.

Once I could stop laughing, that is.

First, I asked Google Maps how long it would take me to drive from Clarksburg to Shady Grove Metro.

Answer:  23 minutes by car.

So, how would you make the trip?  23 minutes, or 49?  Do you even have to think about it?

Wait, it gets even more hysterical!

What if you drove a few blocks south on 355 from Clarksburg, and conveniently parked your car at the Milestone Park and Ride lot, and took the Route 55 bus to Shady Grove?

33 minutes, says Google Maps.

So let's just consider this, folks:

Today, without spending a dime, there are driving options of 23 minutes, and transit options of 33 minutes.

Your county executive and council are proposing to spend $828 million (and you know that's going to increase as every other capital project does), for a bus that makes the same trip in... 49 minutes.

Am I making too much sense here, people?

Is that the poster stepchild of boondoggles and government waste or not?

What kind of spell is the local media under, that they accept this malarkey with no intellectual curiosity whatsoever?

The county also stated that a BRT trip from Metropolitan Grove to Shady Grove will take 33 minutes.

By car, it is 13 minutes!

This is downright crazy!

What's going on here?

The bottom line is that the council is putting its developer buddies ahead of fiscal responsibility, and the citizens of Montgomery County.

As you can tell from the numbers, the CCT will be anything but "rapid transit."  It will provide no meaningful benefit to citizens, while drawing scarce transportation money away from critical projects like the Purple Line, Midcounty Highway Extended (M-83) and the Rockville Freeway.

The M-83 serves the same purpose as the CCT for upcounty residents, but for less cost and shorter travel time.  Like the Rockville Freeway, the M-83 is far more likely to receive federal funding than the CCT; both highways would carry many times the number of commuters daily, a critical data point for winning federal funds.

We just heard Sunday about the increasingly bleak financing prospects of the Purple Line.  Why, in that context, would we waste a billion dollars on the CCT?

Simple.  Those developer buddies of the council I referred to earlier.

The sprawl of Science City cannot be fully built unless the CCT is built as well.

So you can understand why they would push forward with a BRT CCT, that any intelligent person with common sense can recognize is a complete disaster.

They just have to get it built, or the developers will cut off their campaign donations.

But if the developers want to build, they should pay for the CCT themselves.

This council is pushing a new model of financing, where the infrastructure burden switches from the profiteering developers, to you, the taxpayer.

They've rammed through 3 developer tax cuts just in this term of office.  One alone switched $72 million in tax burden from developers to residents and business owners.  Now they're working with the Planning Department, to reduce the amount developers have to spend to compensate for the traffic burden they add to county roads with each megaproject.

Beyond the financing issues, the BRT travel time proves why the CCT should have been a rail line.  By comparison, the MTA light rail that runs alongside the Jones Falls Expressway, makes its rush hour, inbound trip from Hunt Valley to the center of Baltimore in only 33 minutes.  That trip is 17 miles, 2 more miles than the CCT's route! The superiority of rail is obvious.

Rapid buses simply cannot provide the needed efficiency - to attract the needed ridership - to support the costly service.

But much like Metro in Tysons Corner, they're ramming it through anyway.  Do they expect people to use Metro at Tysons?  From the location of the stops, to the utter lack of commuter parking lots, the clear answer is, No!

The same Developer First logic is prevailing here.  Get something built that we can call a CCT, so the developers can make money.

Isn't it time for the media, the business community and the citizens to stand up and say the Emperor has no clothes?

IS VDOT CHIEF

TALKING ABOUT

MONTGOMERY COUNTY?

A new rule passed by the Virginia legislature will stop a problem that has afflicted Montgomery County for the last 40 years: allowing development, but not building the roads to support it.

If Virginia counties try to do that, they will now lose state transportation funds. We need a law like this in Maryland.

The Examiner article on the law cited Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton's exasperation over developer-beholden county officials' nasty habit of "nixing roads they had previously planned to build."

"'Our big issue is we've seen in many instances the localities approve growth plans, then remove the transportation facilities (a.k.a. roads) for various reasons,' Connaughton said. 'So we get the growth but we don't get the transportation, and then the state is the one left trying to foot the bill, as well as put up with the grief of the citizens.'"

Sound familiar?

The most notorious example of this is in Clarksburg. When plans were made to develop that rural area of the county, a new highway known as M-83 (Midcounty Highway Extended) was a central part of the plan. In fact, it was placed in the Master Plan.

The county council went ahead and eagerly approved all of the real estate development, and collected the hefty donation checks from developers for their massive campaign accounts. But they never built the M-83, leading to traffic jams on 355 and 270 that worsen every year.

The M-83 money was instead spent on goodies for the special interests and developers.

What other roads deemed absolutely necessary by wiser planners in the old days were cancelled?

The Outer Beltway, Rockville Freeway, Northwest Freeway, Northern Parkway, North Central Freeway, Palisades Freeway... just to name a few, and ones that were partly or entirely within the county borders.

DR. YES & COUNCIL

SAY "YES!" TO

BETHESDA SCHOOL

FUNDS; "NO!" TO

UPCOUNTY SCHOOLS

It is Dr. Yes' natural response to say, "YES!" to developers - and predictably, he's done it again. I'm following a two-track power grab by the developer-beholden County Council and Planning Board.

On the Planning Board side, the law makes clear that a development moratorium must be imposed when schools reach a certain level of overcrowding. That was not convenient for a developer with a project going forward in downtown Bethesda. So Dr. Yes (a.k.a. Royce Hanson) and other developer allies on the Board have rushed to approve that questionable project - without regard for the design or the impact on Bethesda ES and other schools.

It seems that Amy Presley, one of 2 members to vote "NO" on that, is the only objective member of the board. Former delegate and fellow Republican Jean Cryor does offer much hand-wringing, but virtually always goes ahead and votes with Dr. Yes and the developers.

We hear all of this doublespeak from Dr. Yes and Rollin Stanley, but the results going forward are clear: our current officials have no intention of making substantive road and highway improvements, have no regard for the quality of education nor the environmental conditions in our school buildings, and have set a mad course for radical infill overdevelopment countywide.

Meanwhile, councilmembers Nancy Floreen (D - at Large), Mike Knapp (D - Upcounty), and Marc Elrich (Marc Elrich - helping developers?!) (D - at Large) are planning to wave a magic wand and generate generous new funds for Bethesda school construction.

Improvements to recently-built schools in wealthy areas would then take precedence over improvements to old buildings in Gaithersburg, Damascus, and Silver Spring, for example.

And the goal of these councilmembers is to ignore the law and lift the moratorium in Bethesda, not the one in Clarksburg - putting councilmember Knapp in the position of betraying not only the schoolchildren in his own district, but residential development and business interests in the Upcounty, as well.

What does this mean in the most basic sense?

It means that older schools, such as those in the Damascus cluster, will not receive emergency funds while new schools in Bethesda will. Those schools - Damascus ES, Baker MS, and Damascus HS - all have specific facility needs which have been delayed for "lack of funds." Yet, we are to believe that funds can magically appear for Bethesda school improvements?

But it also reveals again what I said in 2006: the school population estimates have been set too low. Here in Bethesda, Woodacres ES will install its sixth portable this fall. And that is a brand new school, built a few years ago.

Same for Bethesda ES and the renovated Westland MS. Schools which could have been built larger.

Biased reporters laughed off my comments at the time, but look like fools now.

It's outrageous.