A Vision for Long Branch

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Wednesday night, planners held a community workshop and guided about 25 residents in using visual building blocks to express the characteristics they’d like to see in their community. The future Purple Line stations will change the neighborhood’s character and opportunities. This workshop and upcoming workshops are a chance for the community to define its future.

They began with maps, markers, and photos—the visual building blocks—and after talking about what they want their community to be—a place where you can walk to a hardware store or ride your bike to the park, they started to put their ideas on paper.

Planners Kathy Reilly and John Marcolin said the people here know their community and all its issues, an even though … Continue reading

Rethink Food

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Do you know where your food comes from? Probably not from Montgomery County, even if you shop at one of the County’s 14 farm markets, and even though nearly one third of the County’s land is in the Agricultural Reserve.

At last night’s 3rd Rethink event, the panel of two longtime farmers, Wade Butler and Ben Allnut; the County’s Agricultural Services Division Manager, Jeremy Criss; and community garden activist, Gordon Clark, discussed the difficulty of farming in Montgomery County.

Soil health is a challenge, but one that an experienced farmer will learn to deal with. More challenging are the regulations that require an expensive special exception for facilities that allow on-farm food processing. So, local meat and dairy are … Continue reading

Catherine Mohr: Building Green

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Ever feel like you’re being watched by the Green Police? Have a loved-one who thinks that tossing a newspaper in the trash is the equivalent of clubbing a baby seal? Tired of transparent marketing campaigns for products with dubious environmental benefits? You’re certainly not alone.

In this video from TED Talks, Catherine Mohr rightly calls out the insanity of nitpicking over every paper towel or coat of paint, and identifies the real elephant in the room: embodied energy. Embodied energy is the total amount of energy necessary for an entire product lifecycle, including everything from transportation to installation to decomposition. When used as a metric to evaluate sustainable construction construction practices, it can reveal the real opportunities for … Continue reading

Montgomery Rewriting 33-Year-Old Code

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Guest Post: Matt Johnson Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washingtion

Zoning, the main tool to enact land use plans, is perhaps the most important part of planning. By specifying what, where and how new structures can be built, zoning gets things done.

In Montgomery County, a three-year project seeks to greatly simplify an unwieldy, outdated code and achieve strategic growth in a largely built-out county. The zoning rewrite won’t dramatically rezone the county to change the land use patterns, but the zoning code could improve the quality of development in Montgomery County by encouraging more sustainable and compact development and better public amenities.

Noon today, at the Rockville Library, the Planning Department will shed light on the rewrite project to … Continue reading

FAR is Your Friend

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As mentioned in the first Rethink event, the blogger panel, FAR (never pronounced far, but each letter: f-a-r, standing for floor area ratio) is one of the more obscure bits of planner patois.

FAR determines a site’s allowed development as a ratio of building area over lot area. For example, an FAR of 1 would allow a one-story building that covers the entire lot or a two story building that covers half the lot or a three-story building that covers a third of the lot. Regardless of a site’s size, it will have the same allotment of building density as its neighbors.

In urban areas, FARs tend to be high, around 6 or 7 in downtown Washington and around … Continue reading

Details Matter

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Pedestrians can have it hard enough getting from place to place, building access to the wrong dimensions shouldn’t exacerbate the problem. The set of steps I used to take from the Metro/Marc station in Silver Spring – from 2nd Ave up to Fidler Lane, next to the McDonalds – are a prime example of bad design. The details of such things shouldn’t be overlooked: you can’t build steps to fit grade, you need to fit human scale. Well, you can, but then you haven’t designed anything, you’ve conceded to expediency.

Steps should follow a simple couple of rules: twice the riser height plus the tread should equal about 26 inches; landings should match this stride length – but … Continue reading

The Fun Theory: Musical Stairs

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For all of the beauty of downtown DC’s Metro stations, subway culture in DC has always felt a bit austere. The rare mural or artwork feel forced, intended not to offend rather than uplift or enliven stations. Street buskers aren’t plentiful either, though I’m not sure it would matter. When the Washington Post had world famous violinist Joshua Bell play during rush hour at the L’Enfant Plaza station, seven people stopped to listen. Only one recognized him. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a lineup. All of this seems to suggest that we treat our stations as through-puts rather than informal cultural venues, or momentary sites of entertainment. Yet their potential is immense.

… Continue reading

Rethink Infrastructure

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At the second event of the Rethink speaker’s series, Casey Anderson of WABA and Richard Layman of Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space talked about making (or trying to make) the suburbs more bike friendly for cyclists, both commuters and recreational riders.

Anderson has interviewed 10,000 federal employees about their attitudes and experiences and found some not surprising stats—potential riders are afraid of car traffic, and some surprising ones—even those who would never consider riding a bike think it’s worthwhile to invest in bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Anderson says the take-away for policy-makers and politicians is that this is not flaky, the community will support this investment.

Layman is seeking to make cycling “irresistible,” and emphasized that a bike-friendly … Continue reading

MRO’s Own Edible Estate

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Tina Schneider, who works in Park and Planning’s Environmental Division, was talking with Planning Director Rollin Stanley about ways to “green” our site. They came up with a number of ideas, which will become our sustainable landscape plan, that include a few bee hives on the roof (starting in mid-May) and turning our flower beds into a vegetable garden rather than planting and replanting them with annuals through the season. About a dozen employees (from neophytes to experts) have volunteered to help design, plant, maintain, and harvest the garden.

Today, Mohammed Turay’s crew of the Parks Department generously got us started by removing the mulch, tilling the soil, and adding some amendments. We’ll have the soil tested this week … Continue reading

On Libraries and Books … and Connections

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One of the first things I did when I moved recently was to find the local library.  When I lived in Rockville, I had gotten used to being able to walk to the Twinbrook library and was hoping that my new place was equally library accessible.  It turns out that Long Branch library is about 6 blocks away – across from my two grocery stores, bank, and various other shops and restaurants that I am beginning to explore.  If it hadn’t been nearby, I still could have used the Silver Spring library near my office, but for weekends – why take the bus into Silver Spring … unless I’m going to the gym….

When I got to the library, … Continue reading