The National Institutes of Health has responded to a letter from Montgomery County elected officials asking the research center to reduce parking at its Bethesda campus.
The letter, signed by NIH director Francis Collins, states that NIH has taken steps to reduce traffic entering and exiting the center and has long been an asset to the community—not only as the county’s largest employer, but also through providing easements to the county and state for road improvements and public space.
The letter also states that many NIH employees work shifts that run late into the night as well as shifts that can start or end at 11 p.m.—making mass transit less ideal for these employees compared to personal vehicles.
The NIH response comes on the heels of the National Capital Planning Commission declining to approve NIH’s 20-year master plan earlier this month. The commission, which reviews federal planning projects, issued the advisory decision because commissioners did not believe NIH was doing enough to reduce parking availability to meet federal guideline of one parking spot per three employees at federal buildings near Metro stations. Currently NIH uses a ratio of approximately one spot per two employees for its 20,000 employees.
Under NIH’s proposed master plan, parking spaces providing one spot for every three employees would be built for the estimated 3,000 additional employees that the center is planning to add to the campus over the next 20 years. This would result in an additional 1,000 parking spaces at the facility, but would only raise the current ratio to about one parking spot per every 2.4 employees, still below the federal guidelines.
The elected officials who opposed NIH’s parking ratio—which included U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, state Sen. Susan Lee and state Dels. Bill Frick, Ariana Kelly and Marc Korman, all representing the Bethesda area in District 16, and Montgomery County Councilmember Roger Berliner—said they were pleased by the commission’s move.
The officials contend that adding more parking to the facility will exacerbate the already congested traffic situation on Rockville Pike, which they described as “a quality of life issue, an environmental issue and an economic competitiveness issue.”
Testimony from the NCPC hearing, which was recorded, included NIH’s director of facilities planning, Ricardo Herring, stating that it’s not possible for NIH to reduce parking at the center. “We’re talking about a bunch of high-ranking scientists,” Herring said. “This is not your regular people.”
Herring said a culture existed at NIH in which upper management was most interested in adding more parking to the facility and not willing to charge employees to park on the campus. At the hearing, the commission noted that the nearby Walter Reed National Military Medical Center maintains a 1 spot per three employees ratio at its location on Rockville Pike.
Collins wrote in his response to these issues that the commission’s “adoption in 2004 of a parking ratio goal of 1-3 came as a surprise to the NIH, as it was developed unilaterally, contained no evidence of feasibility, was oriented toward office facilities (as opposed to the NIH’s 24-hour operations), and was implemented after contracts for the NIH’s two new parking garages had been awarded.”
The parking garage contracts were awarded in 2003, when the 1-2 ratio was in effect for federal buildings, according to Collins.
Other problems to limiting parking at NIH were brought up in the response:
- NIH estimates that 53 percent of its workers are not served by MetroRail.
- Its employees would experience a delay once per week when riding Metro, based on Metro statistics that on-time performance had dropped below 80 percent in 2014.
- The awkward U-shape of the Red Line in Montgomery County keeps many employees who live in the Silver Spring and Glenmont area from taking Metro to get to the campus due to the amount of time it takes. (An estimated 40 minutes by car round-trip compared to 132 minutes by Metro).
- By 8 a.m., the Red Line at Shady Grove often experiences overcrowding, forcing riders to stand.
NIH also noted that a majority of traffic on Rockville Pike is not directly related to NIH and posited that luxury apartment buildings and other high-density development in Friendship Heights and downtown Bethesda is generating the traffic.
The letter states that these “numerous high-rise construction projects [that] boast luxury apartments… will be unaffordable for nearly all NIH and Walter Reed employees.”
