The Pike, Part I: Hearing Highlights Hope and Hesitation

Envision a Rockville Pike with streets that are safe for bicyclists and pedestrians. With bus rapid transit. With housing built around Metro stations. With room for retail to grow up. With room for auto dealerships. With many changes. With few changes.

Forty-two people testified during two public hearings held earlier this month. They told the Rockville Planning Commission their vision—and their concerns—for the future of the Rockville Pike corridor 

The hearings were part of for redeveloping Rockville’s long, traffic-clogged, strip mall-saturated main street.

Rockville Patch attended the March 16 hearing, during which 27 people testified. Many of those who testified were land use attorneys representing developers and addressing issues specific to new zoning codes spelled out in the draft plan.

Today we bring you highlights of the testimony of a few of the people who are not land-use attorneys. They offered the perspective of a resident, a businessman, an environmentalist and—though she did not testify—a city councilwoman. On Monday, we’ll bring you highlights of the discussion that the attorneys, developers and other business people presented related to the plan’s zoning proposals.

If you’d like to learn more, video of the hearings is available online at http://www.rockvillemd.gov/rockvillespike/ .

It is “hard to find much in the plan to recommend,” said Susan Prince, the president of the West End Citizen’s Association.

“The plan is primarily a transportation plan,” Prince said, calling its proposals “somewhat schizophrenic.”

“Do we want the pike to serve as a transportation corridor with people speeding to their destination—perhaps to the new shops at White Flint? Or are we trying to create a walkable boulevard where people stroll along window shopping and sipping lattes at sidewalk cafes, a la Paris? The plan seems to want us to have both. And I would argue that by trying to achieve both of these goals we’ll actually end up with neither,” she said.

Prince cautioned against transforming the pike into trendy stores, like at Rockville Town Square. The pike, as currently used by Rockville residents, is “a fabulous utility” with stores that attract people from inside and outside of the city, she said.

Today, people shop on the pike for big items, Prince said.

“Whether it’s furniture from , a big screen TV from , reams of paper from , bicycles and canoes from , many of the stores are not places where you would want to walk home with your purchases,” she said. 

The pike draft plan shows retail on the ground floor of mixed-use, multi-story buildings, similar to the Ballston corridor in Arlington, VA, Prince said.

“If you look carefully at the stores along this [Ballston] corridor, there are no s, no s, no car dealerships," she said. "Where do people in Arlington go to buy these items? They get in their cars and drive to Tysons [Corner].”

Prince asked: “Do we really want to send all of our residents to Germantown to shop?”

If changes to the pike force residents to drive to other parts of the county to shop for big items “we’ll lose a large part of the value the pike offers our residents,” she said.

Prince also asked who would pay for the plan, saying that she worries that the city will have “to make initial capital investments” in order to realize the plan’s transportation components.

The draft plan raises a number of questions, said Brian Barkley, an attorney with an office in Rockville and a member of the Rockville Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors.

Among those, Barkley said, are “how to preserve Rockville as a regional retail destination” with national chain and anchors stores, specialty retailers and mom-and-pop shops—many of which are chamber members.

The answer, he said, may lie in continuing to provide what has made businesses on the pike successful, including visibility, accessibility, signage, customer traffic and parking.

Barkley briefly addressed zoning changes called for in the plan, urging that the city “eliminate the burdens created by labeling existing [tenants] and centers as nonconforming [uses].”

That includes not limiting land use to the types of streets called for in the plan, he said.

“Don’t down-zone the pike where appropriate up-zoning may be necessary and appropriate so the plan will be more realistic and strengthen the tax base,” he said.

[Editor’s note: Read more about testimony on the plan’s use of the form-based code approach to zoning on Monday.]

“I think there is a middle-ground approach where there is a meeting place between the right kind of density and the right kind of uses,” Barkley said.

City Councilwoman Bridget Donnell Newton sat in the audience listening to testimony. In an interview, she said that she agreed with points raised by both Prince and Barkley.

“We’ve got something that’s working, let’s not do something that destroys that,” Newton said.

But the cost of doing nothing can be seen on U.S. Route 1, she said.

Development has stagnated along the long, strip mall-lined commercial thoroughfare in Prince George’s County. 

The issue for the pike—and for the city—is how to make “thoughtful progress,” Newton said.

Ethan Goffman, a member of the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Montgomery County chapter, said that the group “strongly endorses” the pike plan, saying that it “matches our goal of creating multi-modal transportation [and] gets people out of cars and into walkable neighborhoods boasting a variety of uses.”

The club would like to see greater emphasis on creating residential development—especially apartments, said Goffman, a Rockville resident.

More apartments clustered around Metro stations “would allow people to live much closer to work and retail, greatly shortening commutes from the East County and Prince George’s [County],” he said.

It would also foster more walking, biking and transit use, he said.

Rockville’s plan must coordinate with the White Flint sector plan approved by the county a year ago this week, Goffman said.

That means aligning bus rapid transit along the median of the pike in both plans.

“BRT—like other transit—works best as a network and the ‘Rockville’s Pike’ plan needs to account for this,” he said.

Make your voice heard

The Planning Commission will hold work sessions on the plan on April 27, May 11 and May 25. It will not hear oral testimony.

Written testimony should be submitted by April 15 in order for the commission to review it during their work session.

Written testimony will be accepted through May 27.

For more information go to http://www.rockvillemd.gov/rockvillespike/ .