Image by Dan Reed

Weekly, Regional Policy Director Dan Reed and DC Policy Director Alex Baca will share with you an action you can take in the immediate future that has the potential, sometimes great and sometimes small, to increase the number of homes in our region, decrease the trips people take by car, make all of it safer, and not screw people over in the process. This week: upzoning in Chevy Chase DC; it’s not just about bike lanes on Connecticut Avenue; how to get safer streets and social housing in Montgomery County; and getting ready for the primary in DC and Virginia.

If you have any questions, email dreed@ggwash.org about Maryland and Virginia Do Somethings, and abaca@ggwash.org about Washington, DC, Do Somethings—or, about whatever you want to talk about.

DO-SOMETHING SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!: Tickets for GGWash’s birthday party—our sweet sixteen!—are almost sold out. Buy yours here to join us on Tuesday, April 30, 2024, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm at Pearl Street Warehouse.

DC

I am very excited that responses to GGWash’s questionnaires for candidates running for council seats in the District’s 2024 primary election are in, and are up on our website! Go to our 2024 elections page to see them. I’m really thankful to the candidates who took the time to fill out our questionnaire; it’s long, and I know that not everyone shares our views on land use, housing, and transportation. But I refer to questionnaire responses constantly, even outside of elections, and I’m always really happy to hear from our supporters that GGWash’s endorsements work, which includes publishing and analyzing candidates’ responses to our questionnaire, is valuable to them. Seriously, to candidates and their campaigns who filled out the questionnaire: Thank you for filling out the questionnaire. We’re aiming to publish our endorsements by early May.

The zoning commission will meet to consider increasing density on parts of Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase on Monday, April 29, 2024, at 4:00 pm. If you live near the “civic core,” you should submit a personal, individual, not-click-to-send comment to the record and, if you can, testify in person next Monday. The proposed new zones will enable more housing, and more affordable housing, to be built on public land. You must submit your testimony, or sign up to testify, 24 hours in advance; do so by emailing zcsubmissions@dc.gov, and email me at abaca@ggwash.org if you need any help. There’s more detail in this Do Something post, from April 10, 2024.

Also previously on Do Something, I wrote quite a bit about the District Department of Transportation’s removal of a bike lane from its plans for Connecticut Avenue, and how I feel that the only reasonable path forward is for the Committee on Transportation and the Environment to sweep the funding for any budgeted “improvements” to Connecticut Avenue in the FY25 budget. I invoked $9 million as that figure, but that’s actually what Concept C, the bike-lane project, would have cost. So, I should clarify: DDOT is still, apparently, planning a $26.3 million corridor project on Connecticut Avenue. I am willing to bet that, should funding remain for this project, it will be the domain of DDOT’s Infrastructure and Project Management Administration, which fifteen years ago and also ten years ago we were saying was the agency’s greatest obstacle to its ability to make it better for District residents and visitors to bike and walk. Many of DDOT’s teams have shuffled around in the past decade-plus, and IPMA no longer has a grip on the whole agency, but I think it’s reasonable to say that projects by IPMA are some of DDOT’s most expensive and least impressive, like the reconstruction of 14th Street south of Florida Avenue that did not remove any vehicle-travel lanes.

Last Friday, I hung out with one of my dear friends, a fellow veteran of the local-politics posting wars. He was, like, “Tell me why I don’t care about Connecticut Avenue,” and I was, like, “I am pretty sure I can,” because, honestly, I’ve been feeling that way, too. Before you recoil at what might come off as flippant wine-and-takeout-fueled crankery, let me explain: I’ve worked in and around transportation advocacy in DC for about 15 years, and I still don’t know how to get bike lanes—really good, protected bike lanes, with signals appropriately timed, that are comfortable to ride on and connect to other protected bike lanes—reliably built here, or anywhere. I want to blame Mayor Bowser, of course, but I think, honestly, she’s neither a help nor a hindrance, and that she would just like the bike-people drama to go away. That’s my best guess as to why DDOT has thrown out Concept C in favor of a $26.3 million IPMA special (which, yes, the council should defund!!): Protests about Connecticut Avenue broke DDOT containment, and its opponents captured too much of the Executive Office of the Mayor’s airtime.

I am desperate to move our discourse beyond whether there is or is not a bike lane, on any given road in the District. That’s what I don’t care about, or for. When I heard that Concept C was done for, I was upset—but not about Connecticut Avenue, per se, and not even necessarily about bike lanes, built or unbuilt. And I think we are all, rightfully, mad about something bigger, something more greatly unfair, something that’s much harder to articulate. “It’s the mayor’s fault,” or “IPMA will make it worse,” or, “DDOT’s senior leadership doesn’t have a vision,” or “I feel unsafe doing this thing that the city’s own plans say that more people should be doing,” are all true, but don’t quite nail it. I’m very tired of individual projects as microcosms for something bigger, and, as much as I want a bike lane on Connecticut Avenue, there’s a whole lot more that is vexing me about DDOT. Perhaps “I don’t care” is all you can say when you care too much. —AB

Maryland

I built a patio last weekend. It took eight trips (and counting) to the hardware store, 18 bags (and counting) of gravel, and a lot of flipping through DIY blogs and YouTube videos, but I did it and I learned a lot and it feels good. I’m building a patio so I can build stairs off my deck, which is literally two feet off the ground, thus allowing me to go out the back door of my house, which means it’ll be easier for me to carry my heavy e-bike outside. But I’m also doing it to change the things I can, as the saying goes.

I live on a little, hilly one-block street with a lot of kids and pets, and drivers love to speed through on their way to somewhere else. The sightlines at either end are poor, and people love to illegally park at the corners. A man died in a crash at the end of my street in 2022, and there have been more close calls since. I go out to walk my dog, navigate sidewalk gaps, missing crosswalks, and reckless drivers, and come home fuming. With an assist from Councilmember Kate Stewart, my block got a crosswalk and a curb extension, but Montgomery County DOT officials have turned back our requests for speed bumps, stop signs, or more sidewalks.

It’s hard not to feel like we’re less of a priority than speeding drivers. While the county has a very good Pedestrian Master Plan, when it comes to my neighborhood and others like it, MCDOT is working from a very old playbook. The master plans for neighborhoods around downtown Silver Spring were written in 2000, when Silver Spring had a significantly smaller population, downtown was largely abandoned, and streets were designed to move lots of cars really fast, not for safe walking and bicycling.

After completing the Silver Spring Downtown Plan in 2022, county planners promised that a plan for surrounding neighborhoods would follow, including recommendations for pedestrian and bicycle safety–not to mention zoning and housing, huge issues in an increasingly expensive, in-demand community. But a new Silver Spring plan isn’t in the Planning Department’s budget, and it may not be anytime soon since County Executive Marc Elrich, no fan of the agency, has proposed less funding than it asked for.

This month, the County Council can fix that and restore full funding for the Planning Department. It doesn’t guarantee that there will be a Silver Spring plan–the Planning Board has to make that decision, and I’ll let you know what you can do about that in a few weeks–but it helps. In the meantime, I’m going to keep working on my patio.

If you have a few minutes today: Send an email to the County Council asking them to fully fund Montgomery Planning’s budget request. The council has a new form you can use without typing out all their email addresses, which is very convenient. I’ll post our testimony here when it’s ready.

Also: Montgomery County’s Housing Opportunities Commission has made national headlines for building mixed-income, publicly-owned housing developments, aka social housing or public housing, and they need people who are jazzed about that and want to help. There are two openings on the HOC board, which is a commitment of a few hours each month and an opportunity to help build and maintain the county’s affordable housing stock. Here’s a link with more information and how to apply, and if you have any questions, email me at dreed [at] ggwash [dot] org and I can point you in the right direction.—DR

Virginia

Questionnaires for our Arlington and Alexandria endorsements are due today, Thursday, April 25! This is a Do Something specifically for people running in those places to finish your questionnaires so we can post them here for everyone to read. I’m looking forward to it, but you have to do it first!—DR

Your support of GGWash enables us, Dan and Alex, to do our jobs. Our jobs are knowing how development and planning works in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. If it’s appropriate to take action to advance our goals, which we hope you share, we can let you know what will have the most impact, and how to do it well. You can make a financial contribution to GGWash here. And if you want to see Do Something in your inbox, scroll down and sign up for our daily emails.