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Below are the comments that I sent to the www.planning.dc.gov website a while ago; it seems that WMATA is bent upon getting relatively little more of what we have a lot of, at the expense of giving up that which we have relatively little of.

Douglas Willinger
at 911 Larch Avenue
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Takoma Central District Plan; October, 2001
The Second Re-Unification of the Takomas, or Takoma Re-Unification II

Douglas A. Willinger

Takoma Park Highway Design Studio

The plan as it exists is well-intended, but short-sighted. Its goals are worthy, but its implementation is questionable.

It seeks to make a D.C. gateway that would serve as a local focal point to better tie the local neighborhoods together. It would create more of a mixed use neighborhood around the existing Takoma Metro rail station with a new supplemental entrance from the west, buttressed by hundreds of new residences within walking distance plus some new retail establishments. WMATA favors this to increase Metro Rail rider-ship.

It would add relatively little of what we already have relatively much, while taking away relatively much of what we have relatively
little. It would provide a 0.02% increase of what the area has a relative abundance of, with 500 residences in an area with 5000 to
500,000- depending upon that area's scope. It would take some 2% of what this area has relatively far less, taking the northern portion of the green space at the Takoma Metro properties to the east, towards Eastern Avenue. Furthermore, it would make it less feasible to significantly increase open green space (read on).

It would severely infringe upon northern Washington, D.C.'s ONLY existing express north-south transportation facility: the B&O
Metropolitan Branch Railroad, today consisting of a pair of tracks apiece for the Metro Rail Red Line and the C.S.X. freight tracks. As it would lack the necessary setbacks by placing costly buildings almost immediately adjacent to this existing berm, it would make future upgrades to this transportation corridor less feasible, such as adding extra tracks for improving speed and safety via additional tracks to separate passenger and freight train, nor for providing an alternative to narrow local roads that will not be widened, such as Blair Avenue. In line with its lack of regard to long term transportation planning, it assumes that all of this new traffic will not result in increased vehicular traffic, a somewhat potentially dangerous assumption given the railroad's local bisection of the street grid.

In the name of tying the local fabric together, it increases the likelihood that Takoma will perpetually be bisected by this wall of
railroad by removing that highly useful swath of rail-side parking lots and industrial cinderblock (and things like the liquor store just
west of the Metro underpass) that would facilitate ultimately underground this corridor, via constructing a true subway parallel to
the existing surface and elevated railroad which would be removed once the train traffic was diverted to this new underground railroad. Just imagine Takoma D.C. without that wall of berm-way railroad over Carol and along Blair Road. Imagine certain portions of this railroad pushed some 25 feet down into a fully tunneled roadway facility, all beneath a new linear park! Imagine this railroad crossing over its existing historic overpass at Georgia Avenue to descend into a fully encased tunnel, with a fully contiguous greenway, starting in the vicinity of Montgomery Community College and Blair Park, and extending southward
to a point south of Whittier and Laurel Streets, featuring a Takoma Station Town Square

RECOMMENDATION:

Takoma Central District Plan objectives of constructing new residences in a newly revitalized Takoma Metro neighborhood - near term and long term -- can be met via design modifications addressing concerns of preserving and creating open green space, while preserving options for far greater additions of open green space.

First and foremost, planning must adopt the goal of creating a linear greenway along, and ultimately via this railroad corridor. This would start with preserving existing park-space. This would continue by connecting these parks via a newly created more or less contiguous space alongside the existing tracks developed as a new miniature greenway (primarily replacing lightly developed industrial properties with limited building removal). It would feature a series of small pedestrian parks, connected by pedestrian and bicycle pathways.

This miniature green way would provide the necessary setback for ultimately bringing this transportation underground and creating a new linear Mall like greenway with Takoma Station Town Square, featuring a replica of the original 1880s Takoma Station (which was destroyed by fire in 1967), as an entrance to an undergrounded Metro.

Place railroad underground in cut and cover tunnelway with extra space for additional tracks separating low speed freight from higher speed passenger rail, along with a land-mark friendly underground replacement for the un-built North Central Freeway with state of the art electrostatic precipitation filtration for trapping vehicular emissions. With underground ramp connections with the 4 lane sections of Maryland Route 410 (East West Highway) at Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, and at the PEPCO power line right of way in Langley Park, this new primarily underground road link would serve as a 410 bypass.

Specifically, this would divert traffic AWAY from the sole remaining 2 lane (1 lane per direction) segment of MD 410, through Takoma Park Maryland's via the 20 foot wide, Philadelphia and Ethan Alan Avenues. As each are lined with sidewalks, big trees and old homes, often dating back to the late 1800s, adding lanes would have a politically unacceptable price, and hence be about as unlikely as reviving the October 1964 recommended route for the North Central Freeway "Route #11 "Railroad East -Sligo," which would have left the railroad near the Silver Spring/Takoma Par line slicing an all new separate swath paralleling Philadelphia Avenue and passing through the site of the later (1972) constructed Takoma Towers at Carol and Westmoreland, before entering the District and rejoining the railroad at North Capital Street.

Developing the properties alongside this corridor in manner conducive to this broader picture of green-space and transportation is fully compatible with creating the desired number of new residences, AND the historic aura of if we dare to think creatively. A Takoma Station Town Square, with a re-embodied Victorian Train Station, faced with Victoria in style and Victorian scaled Takoma development buildings in the style of such original and long demolished local Takoma landmarks as the Takoma Hotel, would offsetting increase of open space preservation with higher densities.

Placing this corridor underground would also be an invaluable opportunity to correct the severe deficiencies in the local street
grid that are largely a result of its bisection by this surface railroad, and for diverting traffic from narrow surface streets, not
only Takoma Park, Maryland's Philadelphia and Ethan Allan Avenues, but also Takoma, D.C.'s Blair Road. Both existing and future development would be served with the pair of local surface streets ultimately created above this new land tunnel that would frame its surface linear greenway. This pair of surface streets, fashioned after those alongside the walls of Washington, D.C.'s Union Station which would frame this new linear greenway, could serve as a set of boulevards that would provide the extra capacity. This could be accompanied by a judicious widening of Carol Avenue eastwardly to Eastern Avenue. This would be taken entirely at the expense of the existing parking lots of a truck rental business and an auto repair shop on one block, along
with a swath of the CVS parking lot on the other. Additionally it would achieve a goal that opponents of the current CVS building lot design were unsuccessful: placing the building closer to the street by eliminating the parking lot area between building and street.

Takoma Central District Plan can ultimately serve a shorter or a longer list of social concerns, with a short sighted or long sighted
design approach.

Douglas A. Willinger
Takoma Park Highway Design Studio

© 2001-2004 Mark Freedman