Councilmember Roger Berliner says Montgomery County should change the way it evaluates traffic when it comes to new development.
Berliner said the county’s focus on how quickly vehicles get through an intersection leads only to wider roads and larger intersections, instead of what he described as more progressive options for decreasing commute times and getting people living closer to where they work.
In a letter to Planning Board Chair Casey Anderson, Berliner said he hopes planners can incorporate new traffic tests into their update of the county’s Subdivision Staging Policy.
The policy, which planners will begin working on this year, sets traffic standards for areas throughout the county.
For example, planners working on a new master plan for the Westbard section of Bethesda say any new development can’t lead to a Critical Lane Volume mark surpassing 1,600. Critical Lane Volume (CLV) measures rush hour congestion at the point where the most vehicles pass through an intersection.
“And by testing levels of service and critical lane volumes, we in turn then focus on changes to our roadways that create wider roads and larger intersections,” Berliner wrote.
He said he would like the county to adopt a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) standard. California made the change last year.
Streetsblog, a news website about “sustainable transportation and livable communities,” described it this way:
In short, instead of measuring whether or not a project makes it less convenient to drive, it will now measure whether or not a project contributes to other state goals, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing multimodal transportation, preserving open spaces, and promoting diverse land uses and infill development.
Berliner also said he’d like to see planners incorporate Person Hours of Travel (PHT), a measure meant to reduce the amount of time people travel, “regardless of the mode of travel.”
He said the county should also measure Accessibility, which would measure how much employment or how many residential units are a certain travel time away from new development. That test would obviously reward mixed-use development.
“The bottom line appears to be that if we measure the right things, we will move towards true multimodal solutions that give residents and businesses the traffic relief they need and a quality of life that we aspire to,” Berliner wrote.
The Subdivision Staging Policy is set to go before the County Council in 2016.
Flickr photo by thisisbossi
