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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is so sad to see otherwise smart people be so dumb about planning and transportation.

I remember when 270 was 2 lanes in each direction. For 45 years, the county has expanded the number of lanes, the local lanes, the X crossover exchanges, and yet, we still have a lot of bumper to bumper car traffic with corresponding dirty air and health impacts.

Time to do something else, what has been happening since the 1970's clearly isn't working.[/quote]

Ah, but part of that is due to the bottleneck when the lanes go back down to 2 past Germantown.

What "something else" do you propose?  Just let it keep getting worse until the highways around here are as bad as I-95 in CT?[/quote]

This is where we say: transit and other ways to get around without a car, plus land use to enable it. And then you say: no, roads for cars. [/quote]

Most of us just want to get to where we need to go.  The problem is that suburbs were largely built around car transportation.  Expanding public transport to serve all neighborhoods in a way that is efficient enough to meaningfully reduce the number of cars on the road would be very expensive.  I metro to work, but I end up driving to the station because I need to drop one kid at daycare and the other at before care and its all too far apart to walk.  DH does not have a logical public transport option to work (would involve a long metro ride on two lines and an infrequent bus).  But his commute around the beltway takes longer and longer in the afternoon and there's no solution in sight.

The most "walkable" communities are often the most expensive, which is another reason why people end up living further and further out.[/quote]
Yes, one of the reasons why they say expanding highways doesn't work is because if they widen the roads , then more people will use it by moving further out. Well,yea, they move further out because they can't afford close in.  They say widening the roads just encourages people to move further out, but then the same people would complain that we don't have enough affordable housing, not enough room for green space, etc...

It's like you want your cake and eat it, too.

Public transit is super slow; you're in a tube with strangers (and their germs). I get motion sickness in buses and trains. Some people have daycare situations that doesn't work with public transport. There are many reasons why the kind of public transport we have doesn't work for people.[/quote]
I am curious to hear what your cockamamie plan is to get everyone to live within walking distance of their jobs.[/quote]
? what in my post does it seem like I'm telling people to live close to their jobs?

I posted up thread that a lot of people actually don't live near their jobs, in part, because they can't afford it.
[/quote]

DP, but what’s the point if people can’t walk to jobs? The problem in Montgomery County isn’t lack of housing. It’s lack of jobs, even in Bethesda. It has more workers than jobs. No one drives 20 miles a day to get to the grocery store but they do drive that far for jobs. We need walkable communities centered around jobs, but all we ever from planning is housing. [/quote]

And also lack of housing.[/quote]

Near jobs, which Montgomery County doesn’t have enough of. If you want to be effective in reducing driving, lobby Montgomery County to attract more jobs and lobby other jurisdictions to buil,d more housing near the jobs already there. Fighting driving one milk run at a time isn’t going to cut it.[/quote]

Have you seen all those new residential buildings in Bethesda where people can live and walk to thousands of jobs that are....also in Bethesda?[/quote]

How many more working age residents does Bethesda have than jobs? Did you know that Bethesda tore down office buildings while it was adding housing?[/quote]
I just think back to the fact that Montgomery County had a Fortune 500 company HQ’d in downtown Silver Spring and did nothing to invest in that area to improve it until eventually they left. It is the story of the county, over and over and over. A long history of not caring at all about the conditions to promote the conditions for positive feedback loops in private sector employment. Just attract one employer and bleed them dry until they leave and then try to win the lottery with another company and over and over.[/quote]

The gap between jobs and workers is even bigger in Silver Spring.

A lot of us would like to see growth in both jobs and housing in Montgomery County. The people whose tunnel vision doesn’t let them see beyond housing and bikes are wasting our time. Unfortunately, that’s who ran planning for most of the last decade. [/quote]
When I think about it, it makes me think that the county was insane to let that buffoon make such consequential decisions.

The fastest growing sector in the economy over the past decade was warehousing and light industrial. The idiot spent the last decade purposefully converting light industrial areas to residential too!

Apparently there are only two types of places that people can work, in an office building or in a service job serving that arrogant *ss.

And in turn, the county has lost small businesses who are the primary users of those spaces.[/quote]

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