Keep Beach Drive car-free on the weekends

On a recent Sunday morning, people were making their way up and down Beach Drive between Kensington and Rockville in Maryland, where the road has been closed to cars and open to people who want to walk, ride or roll their way up and down the paved street. Serious cyclists were there, but so were grandparents with babies in strollers, wheelchair users, and children learning to ride their own small bikes without training wheels. “I love roller skating here,” one young woman told me. “Until the parks offered this I had no place to put on my skates and really fly.”

Earlier this month, Montgomery Parks leadership announced that they would like to make this innovative use of paved parkland permanent, with a few changes. They have asked citizens to weigh in with comments on this portal before Thursday, May 30.

Their proposal would ensure that the weekend car free days remain in place year round, permanently. It would also slightly shorten the length of the closure by a little more than half a mile in order to accommodate the requests of some nearby residents who want to drive through the area in cars. But Parks is also recommending a slightly longer car-free time overall by bringing back Fridays as a car-free day.

Noting that they had taken several years of data on usership and done several years of outreach, Miti Figueredo, Montgomery Parks director, said in a press release that she “she is excited to move forward with a project that makes more parks space available for recreational uses like biking, walking, and skating.”

A successful experiment

Since 2020, Montgomery Parks has been running the wildly popular Open Parkways program on Beach Drive and in two other locations – Little Falls Parkway and Sligo Creek Parkway. Over the last year, the open parkway on Beach Drive was used more than 135,000 times according to the Montgomery Parks trail counting devices.

By proposing to make this program permanent on Beach Drive, our local park system is doing what many other land use agencies have done all over the world and around the US, and for good reason. Closing roads to cars either sometimes or all the time can reap huge benefits for communities that are starved for places to play. This includes many cities large and small, including Paris, New York and Bogota and San Francisco. It also matches a similar decision made in 2022 by the National Park Service on the southern side of Beach Drive in Washington, DC.

The decision to close Beach Drive on weekends in Montgomery County also perfectly matches the goals of the county’s new Thrive 2050 plan, which emphasizes getting people outside, social and active. As their own Parks, Recreation & Open Space Plan also states, “parks, recreation, and open spaces provide active, social, and leisure opportunities that are essential to the high quality of life for Montgomery County residents.”

Montgomery Parks should be commended for taking this step. This kind of creative adaptation of pavement especially makes sense along Beach Drive, which is nestled like a long green belt of relief inside an intense amount of urban development. The road is just a short distance from many apartment buildings and condos in Rockville. It is also a very short bike ride away from Bethesda and Wheaton, both of which are now experiencing building booms and huge increases in multifamily homes.

Building in our urban core makes sense both fiscally and environmentally, as it encourages residents to use existing infrastructure like Metro. Making those areas livable by providing access to green space like Rock Creek for exercise and relaxation is an important component of that livability.

We also shouldn’t just think of parks and parkland as valuable to those who live immediately adjacent to them. Rock Creek Park in particular serves as valuable open space for millions of people in our region. It is close, accessible and available to a huge chunk of the population. It is best realized as a park, not a parkway.

Lean into what’s working

I consider the open parkways program to be a key amenity to living in the downcounty area. As someone who lives just south of Wheaton and next to the Capitol Beltway, I often take advantage of the shady ride afforded by Beach Drive and Sligo Creek Parkway. It is just a few short miles and minutes from my house. I only really began seriously riding a bike when I turned 50 in 2019, and was horribly intimidated by riding on streets near cars when I began. As the pandemic burned on, I found I was drawn to the safety and security of a closed parkway and was able to gain confidence there. Now, more secure in my skills, I ride there because I love the community feeling it brings to exercise with so many of my neighbors all around. It is truly one of the best parts of this community.

Some may chafe at losing a favorite shortcut for driving via car to Rockville Pike a few days a week. But our parks shouldn’t be serving as just commuter shortcuts, and Montgomery Parks leadership should be congratulated for thinking innovatively and adapting to changing times and needs of all of its residents.

Residents have been asked to comment on this proposal and I hope that many will visit the Parks portal before the May 30 deadline and state their support for making this open parkway permanent and available to all every week Friday-Sunday.