People boarding a bus in Briggs Chaney. Photo by Dan Reed.

The Transportation Planning Board’s proposal for a regional network of Bus Rapid Transit lines holds a lot of promise for the region as a whole. But it’s most significant in Montgomery County’s District 4, where voters will pick a new County Councilmember next week. While this area has very little transit, save for a Metro station at Glenmont and two of the most-ridden Metrobus routes in the region, it was developed under the pretense that rapid transit would be built there, leaving residents to grapple with infrastructure that can’t handle the traffic burden.

TPB’s larger proposal includes no fewer than seven lines serving East County along Georgia Avenue, 16th Street, New Hampshire Avenue, University Boulevard and Veirs Mill Road, plus an express line on the Intercounty Connector. It also includes a line along Route 29 between Silver Spring and Briggs Chaney, which might be the closest we ever come to the light rail line once planned along the corridor several decades ago.

Under the concept of “transit serviceability” — today’s Transit Oriented Development — thousands of apartments and townhouses were built in White Oak and Briggs Chaney in anticipation of the line. The master plan for eastern Montgomery County included the light rail line as late as 1981. That year, planners considered a rapid transit line between Wheaton and Burtonsville via Route 29, University Boulevard and an unbuilt “Route 29 Spur,” thus bypassing traffic going into Downtown Silver Spring. On Route 29, which is a limited-access freeway north of White Oak, the line would have run in the median, with “stops at major intersections, fringe parking lots, major employment centers, and other appropriate locations.”

With a price tag of $350 million ($1 billion in today’s dollars), the line’s projected low ridership made it a non-starter for the Planning Department. “Although projected peak period ridership was in the range considered appropriate for light-rail transit, projected patronage, on a day long basis could not justify the expenditure of capital and operating costs,” read the 1981 plan. The Planning Department saw that light rail could actually be viable along Route 29 were it not for a lack of mid-day ridership. When the Fairland Master Plan was revised again in 1997, the concept of “transit serviceability” was removed altogether, taking away any provisions to expand transit even for the development that had already occurred, let alone what was to come.

The result has been a major shift in development on the east side. Hundreds of acres of land were downzoned for single-family homes, reducing the supply of affordable housing. Local civic activists contend that this area was already a “dumping ground” for affordable housing, noting that the construction of apartments in Briggs Chaney and White Oak has created congestion and overcrowded the local schools. Meanwhile, the people who live in those apartments built to be served by rapid transit must to make do with far less.

As development patterns along Route 29 slowly begin to justify additional transit services, any kind of rapid transit here seems more of a possibility. A Bus Rapid Transit line between Silver Spring and Burtonsville has been on the county’s Move Montgomery plan for nearly a decade. On their scorecard for the District 4 County Council election, the Action Committee for Transit found that all but one of the eleven candidates expressed some interest in a Route 29 line.

Responding to their candidate survey, Democrat Nancy Navarro noted that development on the east side has been and continues to be tied to public transit. “Without transit in District 4, there is no opportunity for transit-oriented development or smart growth,” she wrote.

Past and present proposals for rapid transit along Route 29, including my own proposal from 2003.

What would make rapid transit along Route 29 more feasible today? Here are a few reasons:

  1. By 1981, only a portion of the Briggs Chaney and White Oak areas targeted for dense development had been built out. Today, there are literally thousands of people living within a half-mile of the median of Route 29, where stations would have been located. The downside is that these neighborhoods were not designed to be pedestrian-friendly, meaning that few people are actually a half-mile walk from anything.
  2. Shopping centers have been built at Burtonsville, Briggs Chaney, Cherry Hill Road and Tech Road, beginning to provide the mid-day trips the 29 Line needed to be economical. East County still isn’t nearly the shopping destination that Wheaton or Rockville Pike is, meaning that people running errands would still make up a small part of the potential ridership.
  3. A small but growing job sector means that some people could make “reverse commutes” from the District, Downtown Silver Spring or other parts of Montgomery County. The arrival of 7,000 jobs at the FDA campus in White Oak and 3,000 jobs at the new Washington Adventist Hospital in Calverton are building a potential market for transit.
  4. The industrial parks, garden apartments and shopping centers built during East County’s first wave of suburbanization in the 1960’s are all showing their age. That means there are opportunities for infill development. Many of these projects, like the abandoned Francis Filbey Building at Route 29 and Tech Road, are adjacent to the highway, making them ideal candidates for TOD if a transit line ran in the median.
  5. Route 29 has a large but underserved transit-riding population. There is only one Metro station, but the seven Z routes between Silver Spring, Ashton, Burtonsville and Laurel had a combined weekday ridership of 223,961 last July, according to WMATA, making it one of the highest-ridden lines in the entire Metrobus system. But other lines, like the C routes on Randolph Road, have been threatened with service cuts because of low ridership. Given the congestion on Randolph, an east-west artery that’s one of the area’s few connections to the Rockville Pike corridor, low ridership seems like a reason to improve service, not remove it.

Several issues in East County still prevent it from becoming a model for transit-oriented development. Most notably, there is a huge imbalance between jobs and housing, requiring most residents to commute out of the area to begin with. On top of that, Route 29 is still basically a freeway north of New Hampshire Avenue. Routing a BRT or light-rail line down the middle would place transit stations on a freeway, like the Orange Line in Fairfax County, which is in the median of I-66. Such sites hinder walkable development immediately around them.

Nevertheless, County leaders have long promised rapid transit for this area. They should give eastern Montgomery County a shot at remaking itself with improved public transportation.

Dan Reed (they/them) is Greater Greater Washington’s regional policy director, focused on housing and land use policy in Maryland and Northern Virginia. For a decade prior, Dan was a transportation planner working with communities all over North America to make their streets safer, enjoyable, and equitable. Their writing has appeared in publications including Washingtonian, CityLab, and Shelterforce, as well as Just Up The Pike, a neighborhood blog founded in 2006. Dan lives in Silver Spring with Drizzy, the goodest boy ever.