Consensus and controversy in Rockville’s Pike

Last night I attended a community meeting in Rockville about “envisioning a great place” for Rockville Pike, specifically the segment from Twinbrook Parkway to Richard Montgomery Drive (just north of Wootton Parkway). This section is almost entirely filled with strip malls behind large parking lots—the cookie-cutter suburban retail that makes Rockville’s main street “Anywhere USA,” as the consultant team running the meeting put it. It’s the retail where, as Christopher Leinberger writes,

During the last fifteen minutes of design, the architect will ask, “Where will this center be located?” If he is told it will be in southern California, a Mediterranean tile roof and stucco will be specified. If it is to be in Washington, D.C., it will have an eighteenth-century Federalist-style brick façade with white pillars.

Can the Pike be more? All citizens of Rockville at the meeting thought so. But more how? Does it need more free parking, more through lanes, and more places to turn in and out of the shopping centers? Or should it be a walkable district with mixed-use development, a shuttle bus or trolley, stores built to the sidewalk edge, public spaces and cafes? Which one people supported depended on whether they saw the space used as it is now, or as it could one day be.

We were randomly assigned to tables, with each table tasked with marking good and bad places on a map of the Pike, around one of five factors: walking, driving and parking, living on the Pike, commercial areas, or community appearance. At my table was a 35-year resident, a retired teacher and 37-year resident, a zoning attorney and former city planner, an owner of a car dealership on the Pike, and two hairstylists with salons on the Pike, one of whom does not own a car and travels entirely by walking and public transportation up and down the pike. There was also a moderator and myself.

Our table was assigned the topic of driving and parking. By virtue of the topic’s wording (about making driving easier and safer), it steered much of the thinking toward classic car-oriented solutions like adding lanes and parking garages. But the group resisted just thinking in those terms, also strongly desiring a free shuttle between the Metro and the shops.

I promoted the “park once” concept, where design development to encourage parking a single time and walking to multiple stores, or even schools, offices, and houses, rather than driving between a series of separate parking lots for each store. “Park once” districts lead to significantly than traditional design. Some members of the table liked the idea, while others felt that the area was unchangeably oriented toward large purchases at large stores, a pattern less conducive to walking between stores.

When each table presented their ideas, there was a large degree of overall consensus around building more mixed-use, walkable development on the Pike. Still, some table presenters revealed clear divisions within their own tables: one said that they’d had a “difference of opinion” between one member “more into the freeeway aspect” of the Pike, while others “were more into the pedestrian environment and boulevard-type feel.” At my own table, one participant insisted that our notes supporting walkability be qualified by language that walkability must not interfere with the current traffic movement.

It’s great that Rockville citizens agree on making the Pike more walkable. It’ll be tougher when the city must make trade-offs. Will the community be willing to slow the traffic to increase pedestrian safety? If stores can’t or won’t pay to replace giant surface parking lots with garages, will the community be willing to pay a moderate fee to cover the costs? (Ironically, in the conversations about shuttle buses, several people said that while they’d like to make the shuttles free, they’d understand if a nominal fare were necessary; but nobody suggested that perhaps the garages might by anything other than free.)

It’s true that people today buy bulky goods from Trader Joe’s or Bed Bath and Beyond, and expect to park near the store for this shopping, as one person at my table insisted; it’s also true that “our mindset makes it that way” and shopping patterns need not always be the same, as another table member pointed out. Even BusinessWeek agrees that the best way to improve cars is to make them unecessary. Will Rockville be willing to make the tough choices to make the Pike a 21st-century metropolitan space? Early signs are promising so far.