Bad Urban Planning: How Do We Cure It?

Rockville, Maryland, my adopted home town, is an example of how poor planning, centered on the automobile, has ruined community living in many parts of the United States. Urban and suburban areas are sliced up into disparate zones that make walking unpleasant and unsafe, perhaps even impossible. Poor planning has resulted in cities that are socially and physically unhealthy. This is not just some curmudgeon's view, but has become the consensus of city planners and citizens alike.

Rockville is trying to change that, with a series of public meetings based around the theme "Rockville's Pike" working on plans to return the area to the local community.

At the kickoff meeting, transportation planner Troy Russ spoke about the numerous problems with Rockville's situation: too much traffic, poor aesthetic, long blocks with no crosswalks, seas of concrete surfaces. To understand the problem, he explained, you must begin by looking the street layout, the skeleton around which all else is organized. Unfortunately, for the past 40 years the philosophy has been to move cars as if nothing else matters.

With key transportation infrastructure already in place, across the U.S.A. the question is how much can be done to alter the situation. Rockville is a prototypical example of how a place, despite many nice parks and neighborhoods can become ugly and unfriendly at its center. The city is organized around Rockville Pike, a major commuter highway that slices through the heart of the community. Indeed, Rockville is in an especially bad situation, cut off by a raised external metro line on one side and a country club on the other

By striking contrast, Rockville is situated near some of the most innovative of the new urban and suburban planning, practices which have spurred the DC metro area to being ranked most walkable in the United States. The best of the new is a few miles to the east, Silver Spring Maryland, noted for its Smart Growth innovations such as a new downtown with an outdoor mall and a mix of business and housing that reduces car trips.

To the south, though much further away, is Arlington, Virginia, perhaps the premier Smart Growth area in the country, which has implemented change on a much wider basis. Arlington has the good fortune to be atop an underground metro, giving it fantastic public transportation that, unlike Rockville, doesn't divide the community it serves.

Imitating these innovations on a much smaller scale, Rockville has recently opened a new downtown similar to Silver Spring's, with a beautiful outdoor pavilion surrounded by restaurants, stores, condos, and apartments. Yet downtown Rockvilleremains isolated and the stores are expensive and impractical, with the exception of a CVS and Giant, both located somewhat on the fringe. Currently, this new downtown amounts to an oasis surrounded by rushing rivers of cars. Although the downtown is close to a metro stop, the walk across Rockville Pike is forbidding, which means that most visitors are still likely to arrive by automobile.

Attendees at the kickoff meeting, beginning with the new mayor's opening remarks, were disparaging of the current situation. The audience, to a person, agreed that the area is hazardous for strolling and that this hurts local businesses. Suggestions for change were also copious. Creating pocket parks, adding a shuttle or light rail, building parking lots upward, getting rid of outlying parking lots and moving isolated businesses, connecting hiker-biker trails, planting trees and other vegetation, adding more crosswalks with lights, creating larger medians for pedestrians who get stuck in the middle, were among the storm of ideas. A large department store and a hardware store were also suggested for local accessibility.

Perhaps the most vexing issue is the country club, which adds some lovely green space and also acts as something of a wildlife sanctuary, its trees swelling with vast flocks of birds during migration season. On the other hand the country club is inaccessible to many, and cuts a large portion of West Rockville in half. I personally would like to see a way that a nearbye street could be extended to provide an alternative to Rockville Pike, while leaving the rest of the country club untouched.

The question is how to find creative work-arounds to the limitations imposed by existing transportation and other infrastructure. Participants in the kickoff meeting remained skeptical, worried that this effort was merely today's fashion, that funds could not be found to make the changes needed. I am more optimistic, since the will to change is much in evidence, from the local government to the business community to the residents.

Rockville is only one small city overly spread out, overrun by cars and parking lots, one manifestation of what much of the U.S. has become. Its situation, and that of thousands of other localities, has broader environmental affects, on air pollution, water runoff, and habitat fragmentation. Its effort to change is only one of many, part of a movement still in its early stages, likely to grow, to change and improve our communities and environments, locally and nationally.

Ethan Goffman, Politics and Environment Correspondent:

Ethan'scolumn, Environmental Connections, published on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdayof every month to Gather Essentials: Politics is a discussion ofenvironmental matters from local to global, covering transportation,smart growth, environmental justice, green buildings, climate change,energy independence and other topics.

Ethan is a writer and editor based near Washington, DC
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