{"id":8252,"date":"2022-02-17T09:42:28","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T14:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/montgomeryplanning.org\/blog-design\/?p=8252"},"modified":"2022-02-17T09:44:27","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T14:44:27","slug":"how-montgomery-county-can-increase-equitable-access-to-transit-by-improving-walkability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montgomeryplanning.org\/blog-design\/2022\/02\/how-montgomery-county-can-increase-equitable-access-to-transit-by-improving-walkability\/","title":{"rendered":"How Montgomery County can increase equitable access to transit by improving walkability"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece was originally published on brookings.edu<\/a> on February 16, 2022.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Jesse Cohn McGowan (Transportation Planner Coordinator), Lauren Pepe (Senior Planning Associate), and Juan Jose Castro Cerdes (Senior Planning Associate), Montgomery County Planning Department<\/em><\/p>\n

Transit has the potential to connect people to places in a sustainable, affordable manner\u2014but only if riders can access it. Transportation planning must take into account not only where <\/em>transit services are located, but how<\/em> people traverse the built environment to access such services. Lower-income, majority-minority neighborhoods often lack the basic infrastructure for walking<\/a> (such as sidewalks and crosswalks) and are more likely to have had their neighborhoods cut off by highways<\/a>\u2014resulting in disproportionate numbers of pedestrian crashes, injuries, and fatalities in these areas compared to other communities<\/a>. Given that residents from these same neighborhoods are also most likely to rely on public transportation<\/a> to get to work, it\u2019s clear that deep spatial inequities exist in both transit access and safety.<\/p>\n

As members of the Montgomery County Planning Department<\/a> in Maryland, we have a front-row seat to these challenges during the development of a new transit line: the Purple Line light rail<\/a>, which will connect Montgomery County to Prince George\u2019s County. Below, we highlight our efforts to study and tackle pedestrian access as a fundamental equity issue across the communities the rail line will serve.<\/p>\n

A data-driven approach to understanding disparities in pedestrian safety<\/h3>\n

When the Purple Line opens in 2026<\/a>, most passengers will arrive at stations by foot, bus, bicycle, or train, as the stations were intentionally designed without new parking to promote walkable, transit-oriented development. Comfortable pedestrian access to the stations is therefore a top priority for our organization, with a goal to ensure that all residents benefit from this significant new transportation investment.<\/p>\n

\"Woman

There are no marked crosswalks across Lyttonsville Road at Brookfield Road.<\/p><\/div>\n

Unfortunately, comfortable pedestrian access to many of the planned Purple Line stations is lacking\u2014particularly in neighborhoods with spotty walking infrastructure and overlapping equity concerns. For instance, there are no marked crosswalks across Lyttonsville Road near the Lyttonsville station (Image 1)\u2014a historically Black community located between Bethesda and Silver Spring that includes one of the county\u2019s few industrial districts inside the Capital Beltway.<\/p>\n

To quantify \u201ccomfortable\u201d pedestrian access, identify disparities in access across places, and recommend improvements to the walking environment, we developed the Purple Line Pedestrian Connectivity Report<\/a>. For the 11 Purple Line light rail stations serving Montgomery County, we assigned comfort levels to each pedestrian pathway and crossing using our department\u2019s Pedestrian Level of Comfort<\/a> tool. The tool evaluates the pedestrian network using factors such as sidewalk width, speed limit, or crosswalk type, and assigns a score ranging from \u201cvery comfortable\u201d (Comfort Level 1) to \u201cundesirable\u201d (Comfort Level 4). We then used these scores to determine how much of each home-to-station pedestrian trip was \u201ccomfortable\u201d (Comfort Level 1 or 2) and developed an overall comfortable connectivity score for each station based on all the trips to that station.<\/p>\n

Our results reveal that, in general, stations located in downtowns (such as Bethesda and Silver Spring) already have high comfortable connectivity to the proposed Purple Line stations. In contrast, proposed Purple Line stations located on major highways with higher posted speed limits are currently not well connected to the surrounding communities, indicating the need for pedestrian improvements in these areas to provide a comparable transit experience.<\/p>\n

Based on these results, we made a series of recommendations to make walking to Purple Line stations more comfortable. These included short-term improvements (such as reducing speed limits and installing crosswalks) as well as medium- to long-term improvements (such as the installation of wider sidewalks and sidewalk buffers). Figure 1 highlights the connectivity improvement for each station if all recommendations from our report are implemented\u2014illustrating that there is not one a one-size-fits-all solution to improving station access, and that unique interventions will be required for each place.<\/p>\n

Figure 1. Pedestrian Connectivity by Station at Purple Line Opening and with Additional Recommendations<\/h5>\n