Here is another way to look at the census population estimates I posted yesterday. Out of the 273 cities in the United States with a population over 100,000, Arlington and Alexandria were the 18th and 20th fastest-growing between 2007 and 2008. That’s pretty darn impressive, considering they’re both land-locked core jurisdictions with no way to grow except infill. Washington itself, for the record, ranks as the 160th fastest growing city. That’s not quite the top half, but it’s a long, long way from the bottom.
National rankings aren’t available for all incorporated cities (only those over 100,000), so we can’t rank growth in the likes of Gaithersburg and Rockville on a national level, but we can get an update on the always-exciting race to be Maryland’s second largest city from the state list. Baltimore is far and away Maryland’s largest incorporated city, but after that it gets dicey, with three cities in close proximity to each other vying for second place. In recent years all of them have ranked as high as second, but what about this year? Gaithersburg is 4th at 58,744, Frederick is third at 59,213, and Rockville is second at 60,734 - having become just this year only the second Maryland city to break the 60,000 mark. Fifth place Bowie is relatively distant from the pack with 52,544, but still far ahead of numbers six and seven Hagerstown and Annapolis, which have only 39,728 and 36,524, respectively.
Not to be outdone by DC’s new central city buses, Baltimore will soon launch a circulator service of its own. Yesterday Baltimore Mayor Shelia Dixon unveiled the hybrid electric buses shown at right, which will soon begin running on three routes: Federal Hill to Penn Station, Poppleton to Little Italy, and Jonestown to Johns Hopkins Hospital via Fells Point.
Like their DC cousins, the Charm City Circulator will arrive every 10 minutes, is a unique brand apart from normal city buses, and connects to all the other transit modes in the city (in Baltimore’s case including subway, light rail, MARC, and water taxi). Unlike their DC cousins, the Baltimore service will be completely free to ride. The service is slated to start sometime in “late summer”.
With massive amounts of Maryland transportation dollars sunk into the ICC, and with the (more deserving) Purple line and Baltimore Red line competing for the measly transit money that does remain available, the Corridor Cities Transitway is most likely to be the odd one out. The decision to do BRT in Gaithersburg is probably a good one *if* it means we get light rail in Baltimore and Silver Spring.
Why is the CCT less deserving than the other two? Because it’s in a far less dense, less transit dependent area and because the planned route is terrible. I grew up in Gaithersburg and deeply hope that it can be a great city one day, with great infrastructure, but even I can’t seriously argue that rail there should come before rail from Bethesda to Silver Spring or across downtown Baltimore. In a better world we’d have enough money to do everything, but in the real world tough decisions have to be made and sometimes worthy projects have to be cut.
All that having been said, if Maryland spends one cent on this baloney, then you can ignore everything I just said because the state’s priorities are clearly out of whack. You don’t waste $3.8 billion on a highway widening then turn around and say there’s not enough money for light rail.
Montgomery County’s Planning Board last week approved a 500-unit 18-story apartment building in downtown Bethesda (pictured at right). They had to approve the building quickly, because the Board is legally mandated to enact this month a building moratorium in downtown Bethesda. Montgomery County, it turns out, has an adequate public facilities ordinance that halts approval of new development any time crowding is predicted in the public schools.
In other words, Montgomery County has enacted into law a regulation that requires growth to be pushed away from existing, dense, transit-accessible locations like downtown Bethesda, and towards… well… anywhere else. Nothing about a public facilities ordinance stops growth; it merely sends it further away, to somewhere less urban, less well-served by existing infrastructure, and less capable of handling development.
Isn’t that the exact opposite of Smart Growth?
If Maryland is really serious about focusing investment and growth into places like downtown Bethesda, and for goodness sake the state should be, then public facilities ordinances that result in nonsense moratoria smack in the heart of the best places for development will have to be the first thing to go.
Strike this garbage law from the books, Maryland, and do it soon.
WMATA’s NextBus system is up and running, just days after the launch of DC Circulator’s Where’s My Bus application. This brings the current list of regional bus systems with available real time arrival information to:
Driving is not a basic right guaranteed to all. Cars are not the only legitimate form of transportation. Deaths and injuries by car are not simply the price we pay for living in contemporary civilization. It’s time to adopt Vulnerable User Regulations, and codify into law that no, drivers do not in fact own the road.
@T4America Obama: There is no longer a question about whether the jobs and industries of the 21st cent. will be centered around clean, renewable energy
Avent responds to the height/density debate. The crux of our disagreement seems to be that Avent wants to put more of the growth in downtown proper, which is the one place in our region that can’t get more dense without more height. Meanwhile, I’m happy with growth anywhere that’s urban, walkable, and well-served by transit. Avent sees downtown proper as the most urban, walkable, and transit-accessible place in the region, while I see potential for other parts of the city to become equally so if more infill took place there.
To support putting more growth downtown rather than elsewhere in the city, Avent’s main arguments are that 1) there are few opporunities near the core to transition from low or medium to high density, and places like Brookland will never be upzoned sufficiently because their existing character is not supportive of tall buildings, and 2) there’s no other place in the metro area with downtown’s transit coverage, so downtown is where we can best put transit-oriented development.
The first point is a bit odd, since he’s suggesting that “existing character” should be a factor in places like Brookland but not downtown, and also because in my original post I offered several downtown-adjacent locations that are ripe for redevelopment, have tremendous potential capacity, and aren’t full of single-family houses. While it may be true that getting political buy-in to redvelop East Potomac Park, National Airport, the Pentagon’s parking lots, and Bolling Air Force Base would be difficult, it would certainly be no more difficult (and probably less so) than getting political buy-in to raise downtown’s height limit. I will clarify that outside of downtown I wouldn’t necessary oppose taller buildings. Where raising the height limit can help to spur development in underdeveloped parts of the city, I fully support raising the height limit.
Avent’s second point, that downtown has the best transit service, is true today, but it ignores two key issues: That we have a lot of underused capacity around many outlying Metro stations that could be used more efficiently at much less cost than expanding capacity downtown, and that with existing transit capacity downtown topping out anyway we will soon be faced with the choice of where and how to expand the system. Avent didn’t dispute my contention that a grid-like transit network is better for residents who both live and work in the city than a single-hub commuter-oriented system focused on getting people in/out of one small area, so I assume there’s no disagreement there. If our downtown capacity is tight but we have excess elsewhere, and if investing in more capacity elsewhere would produce a better result than investing in more capacity downtown, why focus on downtown?
Long story short: Our city is going to change one way or another. Given the choice of how to change it, I would prefer to adopt a plan that retains downtown’s special character and brings the rest of the city up to its level, rather than a plan that would produce a really great and dense downtown, but would leave the rest of the city to a less dense, less mixed-use, less urban fate. Maybe some day we will have to raise the height limit, but given the current availability of drastically underused land near the core, availability that absolutely does exist, raising the height limit today would be a bad move.
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