All over the region, consulting organizations are going through the legal requirements for Environmental Impact Statements, necessary for any major project: convening public scoping meetings, collecting input, evaluating alternatives, and so on. They’re doing this in downtown Columbia, along Rockville Pike, and on both sides of the 14th Street Bridges, used by I-395, the Metro Yellow Line, and the VRE tracks.

These studies have the potential to transform these areas (all built up in the highway heyday) into significantly more pedestrian-friendly, bikeable, transit-oriented, mixed-use areas. Or, if guided by traffic engineers still stuck in the mindset of moving as many cars as possible, they could brush real improvement aside in favor of adding more and more travel lanes. Community input could significantly improve these areas, or could stall any change at all.

Columbia. Columbia was built as a planned community with a diversity of housing types and income levels, though the town center is dominated with a large mall. It’s governed by an elected group that’s basically a large homeowner’s association, though the commercial areas area outside the association’s control. The company that basically purchased the downtown wants to redevelop the area.

A charrette process over the last few years generated a community vision document which has a lot of great themes around creating a “diverse, mixed-use, livable” place, though it’s also short on specifics, some of which can be gleaned from a traffic study that reveals more elements, some of which look good and others that worry community activists there.

Rockville Pike. This major commercial strip is almost entirely full of the classic strip mall (a rectangle of shops facing a central parking lot), yet the Red Line runs under it and in recent years condo developments have sprouted up. There’s definite potential to turn the area into something more like the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor (which it could have been from the start, but for short-sighted decisions by Montgomery County in the 1970s).

Rockville is conducting community meetings to solicit input on the corridor; the presentation makes it clear they are thinking in the right direction. As usual, residents had a mix of perspectives; “suggestions ranged from encouraging mixed-use development to stopping it altogether,” and while many people wished to make the Pike more pedestrian-friendly, others wanted to solve traffic congestion by adding lanes and separating modes, which is harmful to an overall sense of place.

14th Street Bridge Corridor. This looks mainly like a standard department-of-transportation study to fix some ramps and improve some pedestrian and bike access (mostly good things). The original public comments included some requests to go further, including exploring congestion pricing, which did make it into the alternatives presentation, and converting some of the freeway into at-grade boulevards (especially a good idea in Southwest/Southeast DC, but also could be very nice in parts of Arlington), which didn’t. The inclusion of congestion charging is interesting, though I wonder if it’s just there for completeness and won’t actually get much serious thought right now. Nonetheless, I include it as one to watch for this reason.

But even if it doesn’t go beyond small changes, they’re mostly good ones, including bus-only lanes, expanding HOV lanes, connecting bike lanes and pedestrian paths across the bridges, improving bike signage (a big problem on federal lands where many bike routes aren’t marked at all), and parking management (though there are few details here). There are also some classic though minor traffic-flow changes, like reducing bottlenecks, that could encourage even more driving as well.