American Dream

'Meddling' in Metro's Messy Plans

Saturday, August 6, 2005; Page A18

Quotes:

The July 29 editorial "Metro's $1.5 Billion Carrot" characterized concerns about development around Metro stations as "meddling." However, building housing near Metro stations is supposed to encourage people to use mass transit and get cars off the road. Ironically, the development proposed for the Takoma Metro station will do the opposite.

Takoma Station is in the District adjacent to Takoma Park and serves both jurisdictions. It has a short-term parking lot, many bike lockers and nine bus bays with room for buses to lay over between runs.

To squeeze 95 townhouses onto this site, half of the parking spaces will have to be eliminated and space for bike lockers will be lost, just when the new Metropolitan Branch Trail will bring more bikes to the station.

The development plan also eliminates one of the two bus entrances, forcing all buses onto congested Carroll Street. This will cause backups and idling in the terminal, as well as increased bus traffic on Blair Road. The proposed development on Metro property is not the only opportunity for transit-oriented development in the area. Housing recently was built on two sides of the Metro property, and construction will begin soon on another a block away. Metro should have set aside enough space for future transit needs at the station and then determined how much of the site would be left for development. Instead, it is letting the market economics determine how much housing to build, and it wants to squeeze transit services into the leftover space. Transit-oriented development is a good concept, but not if it makes it more difficult for people to use Metro.

KATHY PORTER
Mayor
Takoma Park

The writer is a member of the Metropolitan Washington Transportation Planning Board.

What I find interesting in all of this is the contrast between Mayor Porter's letter above, and the stated enthusiasm that she and other Takoma Park elected officials and activists show for transit-oriented development in other parts of the Washington region (generally far from Takoma Park - for some reason).

I found online here some comments from Ben Ross, an articulate transit advocate who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland (but not in Takoma Park). A few of his thoguhts are relevant here:

A different type of NIMBY can be found in the suburban enclaves of post-sixties radicalism that have grown up around some cities. Communities like Santa Monica and Berkeley in California, and Takoma Park in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, are among the most stringent in limiting growth. In these hothouses of environmental activism, opposition to the automobile rarely extends so far as to support building anything new close to public transit. As these words are written, owners of restored Victorian houses in Takoma Park are righteously waging battle to prevent construction of townhouses on an empty lot next to the local subway station.

Where Chevy Chase projects an aristocratic image--columnist George Will lives next door to one of the homeowner leaders--the style of Takoma Park is funk. But both types of NIMBYs share the same objective, that of protecting distinctions that allow them to feel superior to outsiders. For not a few Takoma Park leftists, their walkable enclave is less an example to be copied than a badge of nobility that distinguishes its residents from ordinary suburbanites. The critique of a society that creates ticky-tacky boxes has mutated into a feeling of superiority over the people who live in the boxes.