Been on a “joyride” lately? Not likely. How about a leisurely “Sunday drive”? Remember when roadway slow pokes were disparagingly described as “Sunday drivers”? If you do, you are dating yourself to a time before the word gridlock was invented, when heavy traffic was a sometime thing, when rush hour lasted, well, an hour.
These days traffic is hell and it’s getting worse. Road rage is all the rage. Stop and go has become the norm, even on weekends, in much of Montgomery County. On the car radio, we religiously tune to “Traffic on the Eights,’’ and we avidly read “Sprawl and Crawl” (The Examiner), “Dr. Gridlock” (The Washington Post) and “Bumper to Bumper” (The Gazette). Little wonder that traffic news draws listeners and sells papers.
Radio and television traffic reporter Lisa Baden has been at it for 17 years now, making her something of an expert on the subject. What’s changed?
“Volume,” she says. “The rudeness. The hours of the rush hour—it’s extended. And the parameters: It used to be such a short area of the Beltway. Now, it’s like Frederick, Hyattstown. Who ever talked about Hyattstown before? C’mon.”
The Washington region recently achieved the dubious distinction of having the second worst congestion in the country, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. “We don’t want to be first,” says Maryland Transportation Secretary John D. Porcari. Yet, that could happen.
The National Capital Region Transportation Board predicts that, compared to 2002, congestion will increase in the metropolitan area 119 percent by 2030. In Montgomery County, according to the county’s 2006 Highway Mobility Report, miles traveled are expected to rise 20.6 percent by 2010 and hours traveling to 25.8 percent, while average speed will drop 4.4 percent, compared to 1998.
With Montgomery County’s population rapidly approaching one million and projected to rise to 1.15 million by 2030, residents can expect even more cars on the road.
Even if the county’s transportation wish list were reality by 2050, planners wrote in 2002, “congestion levels would be higher and speeds lower than today.” “We’re not going to build our way out of congestion,” says Emil Wolanin, director of traffic engineering and operations for the county. “There are some arterial roadways to be built, but 90 percent of the road system is built out.” From his vantage point, traffic management is more about tweaking then building.
The problem has been long in the making. “It’s a reflection of prosperity, lifestyle and land development after World War II,” says Porcari. To underscore his point, he quotes Pogo, the comic strip character created by cartoonist Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
For years, Montgomery County has tried to mandate that adequate public facilities, such as schools and roads, precede new development. Officials point to Germantown, where infrastructure got ahead of growth, as a success. However, they say, Clarksburg has been a traffic disaster because roads weren’t built to handle traffic.
Every two years, the Montgomery County Council revisits its growth policy. A perennial hot button issue is: What is an “acceptable” amount of congestion? In 2005, the county said more congestion was okay in some urban areas. The council is again revising the standard, but this time upward. Such designations matter when it comes to designating and funding road improvements.
The council in November approved a slow growth policy that increases taxes on developers to pay for roads and encourages development near public transit stations.
Since where people live and work affects traffic, planners prefer “smart growth,” concentrations of high-rise housing and jobs with public transportation. Think downtown Bethesda and Silver Spring. Says Ron Kirby, transportation planner for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a regional organization of local governments: “People and families who live closer to those [Metro] stations do less driving on average than people who live further off. The tradeoff is the area around a Metro station can get more congested because the density is greater.”
Rick Hawthorne, chief of transportation planning for the county, says Montgomery County goes so far as to call Bethesda and Silver Spring “just extremely good success stories.” He notes that Silver Spring has achieved the goal of 50 percent non-auto commuters, and Bethesda is approaching the 37 percent goal set in 1994. Once the goals are met, more buildings may be approved. Still, Bethesda feels more congested, and it could get worse. The planned expansion of the National Naval Medical Center, a fixture on Wisconsin Avenue, has caused alarm and a demand for more federal funds for major road improvements in the area. According to an impact study by the Navy released in December, the expansion will bring, per day, an additional 1,862 patients and visitors and 2,500 employees to the medical center. The increase in traffic means Wisconsin Avenue, North Drive and West Cedar Lane are expected exceed their “capacity,” the study says.
“It’s bad and getting worse with normal growth, with not much relief in sight,” says Sam Raker, who co-chaired the county’s 2002 transportation task force and then worked for the State Highway Administration as a community liaison.
There is another, bigger problem. Since Montgomery County is not a walled-off kingdom that can bar outside traffic, growth in neighboring counties inevitably puts more traffic on already overburdened county roads. Then there’s the east west issue that has made the Beltway from Georgia Avenue to Interstate 270 during evening rush hour the Washington area’s most congested stretch of highway.
“It’s part of a larger regional phenomenon,” says Kirby. “There’s a tidal flow in the morning from east to west and back again in the afternoon. Job growth is much higher on the west side of the region in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County and much lower on the east side in Prince George’s. As a result, a lot of people living in the east have to go west for jobs.”
