The Road Code

Note due to the size of this article it will be continued in comments.

Montgomery County Council recently introduced a sweeping change in its road code. While it had many good intentions it failed to meet those intentions. The following comments are a worthwhile read for any transportation planning as well as any environmentalist who would like to see the transportation network more environmentally friendly.

RE: Bill 48-06, Streets and Roads - Comprehensive Revisions, and SRA 06-04, Streets and Roads - Design Standards

Dear President Praisner and Honorable Councilmembers:

Please accept these comments on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a regional organization focused on ensuring transportation and development decisions are made with genuine community involvement and accommodate growth while revitalizing communities, providing more housing and travel choices, and conserving our natural and historic areas.

The Coalition for Smarter Growth supports the general intention of these bills. We commend the Council for its consideration of corrections that are needed for road design standards that originally were written largely for the exclusive benefit of the flow of motor vehicles - as if that should be an end in itself. We strongly concur with the basic premise of the bills - streets are generally built too wide, and this has many negative effects on safety, walkability, and attractiveness of business districts and neighborhoods. These bills embrace many of the changes emerging from professional transportation planners' thinking that recognize that most streets and public rights of way are multi-modal and need to better accommodate non-motorized users.

We have several major concerns about the proposed bills, however. First, the bills fail to appropriately treat bicycling as an important part of the transportation system. Second, the bills miss opportunities to adopt more proactive and state-of-the-art stormwater management practices. Third, we remain concerned that the drafting of such regulations should be done with the extensive input from the transportation professionals who are transforming outdated streets standards throughout the country. We have provided a list of such professionals as an attachment and strongly urge the Council to seek and contract with experienced professionals who have successfully transformed outdated road codes around the country. This contract might best be managed in collaboration with the Department of Transportation and Public Works, the Planning Board and Planning Department in order to fully recognize the link between transportation and land use.

Overall, we appreciate that the bills rightly propose narrowing travel lanes for motor vehicles, tightening curb radii, shortening block sizes, and other measures to better accommodate pedestrians and support more walkable commercial districts. Many of these kinds of measures will improve safety for pedestrians and increase the vitality of business districts and the attractiveness of residential neighborhoods. However, greater emphasis should be placed on posting speed limits below 30 miles per hour in order to support comfortable pedestrian and bicycle use. Also, extensive use of on-street parking should be encouraged through the road code. On-street parking has many advantages: it encourages slower and safer vehicle speeds; provides a buffer between pedestrians and moving traffic; offers valuable front-door parking to support businesses; and is the most cost- and space-efficient way to provide parking.

Bicycling needs to be carefully accommodated

Regarding the accommodation of bicycling, it is first important to recognize that bicycling is an essential part of the transportation system. Bicycling can and must be successfully incorporated into a "narrow streets" approach to creating slow speed residential and business districts. While bicycling may only enjoy a small share of overall trips today, the potential of bicycling to serve many of our transportation needs is tremendous and almost entirely untapped. In Northern Europe, bicycling represents a major share of all trips, even among older age groups. This is not an accident or a cultural or genetic pre-disposition; it is an intentional policy backed by financial investment and allocation of street space and storage facilities to make bicycling a safe and convenient mode of travel. While we strongly urge the Council to contract with an experienced transportation firm to provide detailed street design standards, we propose the following recommendations in case this is not pursued.

The primary reason for narrow travel lanes in urban centers is to create a pedestrian-friendly (and bus-user-friendly) environment by reducing crossing distances at intersections and slow vehicle speeds. For multilane arterials and collectors posted for 25 MPH within urban centers, bicycles can be fully accommodated as vehicles in the outer lane within narrow lanes as prescribed in the bills. The prevailing travel speed in the curb lane is often significantly less, especially with curbside parking, frequent right-turn opportunities, and/or frequent bus service. We encourage the conversion of four lane roadways to three motor vehicle travel lanes and bicycle lanes in each direction.

On arterial roads posted for 45 MPH or above, space for bicycling to the right of motor traffic should always be provided, as either designated bike lanes, wide paved shoulders, or wide (14-ft minimum) outside lanes. We prefer designated bicycle lanes wherever possible to better indicate the roadway space that should be yielded to bicyclists. Without such bicycling accommodations, such roads would simply fail as "complete streets."

On roads that will be posted for 30 or 35 MPH, a Context-Sensitive Solutions (community involvement) approach should be used to balance the inclusion of bicycle facilities with every other need for the street, unless a bike lane is specified in an adopted plan [or it is a two-lane road]. Traffic volumes, adjacent land uses, right-of-way constraints, and the nature of the surrounding street grid should all be considered in evaluating the need for on-road bicycle facilities on these streets.

Overall, the road code should specify that every street construction project shall improve the Bicycle Level of Comfort/Service.

Green Streets Standards

We concur with the bills that street design should be improved to reduce stormwater runoff. We recommend incorporating green streets standards as a part of this legislation. Green streets concepts integrate a system of stormwater management within the public right of way and reduce the amount of water that is piped directly to streams and rivers. We recommend the City of Portland Oregon's Green Streets program and publications by Portland's regional government Metro, "Green Streets: Innovative solutions for stormwater and stream crossings." It is crucial to recognize the need to use green design approaches that do not conflict with creating a good urban walking environment. Portland provides many examples of achieving both goals - reduced stormwater runoff through innovative design while offering high quality built urban environments.

We also recommend that on-street parking be used as instead of off- street parking. On-street parking consumes about half the space needed for parking because the access to the parking is shared with the through traffic function of the street. Reduction of off-street parking lots would significantly contribute to overall reduced imperviousness.

Conclusion

Overall, we greatly appreciate the Council's leadership on the necessary updating of our outmoded road code. Again, we reiterate our belief that the details of such important changes to the road code need the input of experienced experts. This can only be gained through contracting them to work with the County to achieve its goals. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

Cheryl Cort
Policy Director

The following is the testimony of John Fauerby and Lynne Rosenbusch regarding the