Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #527: W&OD bridge?

Two of the W&OD road crossings in the Town of Vienna will be updated, based on suggestions in the Town’s Maple Avenue Multimodal etc. study.  The W&OD road crossings at Park Street and Church Street will get raised crosswalks, turning them more-or-less into speed humps.  And they’ll get new signs.

It’s tough to say why, of all the things in that study, the Town decided that those two W&OD road crossings were a priority.  For sure, there was no formal cost-benefit or risk analysis done.  I think they just sort of liked the idea, and it was cheap to do.  So they’re going to do that, and that’ll be the tangible outcome of that study, along with filling in a right-turn lane where Mill and Church intersect.

This seems to have stirred up some interest in a W&OD bridge for the Mape Avenue/W&OD crossing in the Town of Vienna.  To be clear, we’re not getting a bridge there, and nobody is talking about paying for a bridge.  And in this post, I’m briefly going to explain why that is — why this was ignored in the Town’s Multimodal study, and will it will likely remain a low-priority issue.  My conclusion is that the stoplight we have now for the W&OD Maple Avenue crossing is probably good enough, given the size and cost of a bridge.

 

But other crossings have bridges …

Sure, but those crossings tended to be ones with significant problems and traffic, often where a new traffic light would not work, or where there are problems, despite a light, due to heavy traffic.

The closest large dedicated bridge on the W&OD is the Citizens’ Bridge in the People’s Republic of Falls Church.  This is where the W&OD trail crosses Route 7/Broad Street.  This bridge dates to 1992 or so.  Falls Church citizens agitated for a bridge because bicyclists and pedestrians were crossing Broad Street there, rather than walk/bike to the stoplight-controlled intersection at West Street.

That bridge is an object lesson in the nature of bicycle and pedestrian traffic.  At the time, the bridge was lauded as an example of effective small-town government.  But one could just as easily say it’s there because various bicyclist and pedestrian scofflaws routinely jaywalked rather than walk an extra 200 feet to cross with the light (while getting their exercise along the W&OD trail.)

More recently, the influx of new tax and toll monies means that all kinds of marginal and low-value projects are now being funded, as long as they plausibly help people get around without a car.  This includes a spate of new bridges for the W&OD.  These tend to be for intersections where the road crossings were an annoyance to bicyclists and/or motor vehicles, though not particularly dangerous (at least in my opinion).

There’s a bridge going up for the Route 29 crossing just east of Falls Church, and a bridge is planned for where the W&OD crosses Wiehle Avenue in Reston.  Neither of these is a particularly difficult crossing now, although Weihle is awkward because it’s so close to a stoplight with no place to stop in the median.  Both of these crossings, though, apparently have fairly high automobile accident rates, as cars stopping for bicyclists get rear-ended with some frequency.

Above:  Route 29 W&OD crossing just east of Falls Church, and Weihle Road crossing in Reston.

In essence, right now, these are just crosswalks used by a lot of bikes.  Not unlike the W&OD crossings in Vienna.  But soon those simple crosswalks will be replaced by some fairly large and obtrusive bridge structures.  Here’s a “before and after” view of Weihle Avenue where it crosses the W&OD trail.

Above:  Wiehle Road crossing now, and Wiehle Road showing artist’s conception of bridge.  (Orient by trees in background).  Source for Weihle bridge:  FCDOT via restonnow.com

So why not Maple Avenue in Vienna?

It boils down to need, cost, and size.  And all of these argue against a similar structure at the W&OD crossing on Maple Avenue.
First, the existing light-controlled crossing works well.  We have the occasional bicycle scofflaw crossing against the light.  But in my experience, those are few and far between.   And that’s because that current path is in fact the shortest distance.  So we do not have the problem that Falls Church had, with a constant stream of jaywalkers who were unwilling to walk to the nearest light-controlled intersection.
Second, a bridge there would necessarily be fairly large.  And it’s not that you need a massive structure to move the bicycles.  It’s that VDOT requires a minimum 17.5′ clearance (I just looked that up), and bike paths are never supposed to have more than a 5% slope if that can be avoided.  When you combine those two (17.5′ tall, 5′ slope) you realize the bridge would have to span Maple Avenue and 350′ on either side of Maple.
The upshot is that the entire bridge structure (including earthworks at either end) would have to span about 750′ (350′ + 350′ plus the width of Maple).  No coincidence, this is roughly the length of the Citizens’ Bridge in Falls Church.  So, if you look at that (above), that’s more-or-less the minimum size of structure that you can get away with.  Not due to the load of the bicycles, but due to the combination of clearance and slope limits on the structure.
So the very smallest it could be, built to those standards, would be a span from almost Church Street at one end, to almost the end of the Whole Foods market at the other.   This would cut Maple Street off from the trail and make trail access difficult.  (In fact, some of the opposition to the Falls Church Citizens’ Bridge came from local merchants who saw the bridge as discouraging bicyclists from stopping (and spending money) in Falls Church.  See the newspaper article cited above.)
It will also cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $6M to $12M.  Or so.
 
A internet search shows the cost of steel pedestrian bridges runs about $2000/linear foot for a prefab steel footbridge such as the Falls Church one. Of the 700′ length, the Falls Church Citizen’s Bridge is roughly 400′ of steel bridge, and the rest earthworks.  At that price, the steel bridge alone would cost about $8M.   So call it $10M or so, based on that.  
A second data point comes from the bridge slated for Weihle Avenue in Reston, which has a preliminary cost estimate of $11.4M, per the newspaper article cited above. 
 
A third data point is a reported cost of about $6M for what looks like a roughly-similarly-sized intersection (W&OD crossing four lanes of traffic).
Caveat:  The reported cost of the Falls Church Citizens’ Bridge, just under $1M, is vastly less than $10M after accounting for inflation.  Adjusting that circa-1992 cost for the Consumer Price Index change to 2020 yields about $2M in today’s money.  On the other hand, that initial cost estimate may have been in error, as the $11.4M Weihle Avenue bridge was originally supposed to cost under $3M.
So, maybe not exactly $10M, but somewhere in that ballpark seems likely.
In summary:  The current Maple Avenue W&OD crossing appears safe, appears to have relatively few bicyclist scofflaws, and in general provides easy on/off access to the W&OD in the heart of Vienna.  Any bridge there would necessarily be large and fairly expensive.  It’s easy enough to see why other intersections have gotten bridges before anyone would think of funding a bridge for the Maple Avenue W&OD crossing.

Post #526: Our assets become our liabilities, part 4: Beulah Road Park Industrial Zone

File this one under “aren’t you glad you don’t live there”.  Or maybe under “don’t get in the way of the Town bureaucracy.”  But certainly under “nobody else does this, and hey, I bet there’s a reason for that.”

First, walk a mile in their shoes.

Suppose you’d lived in a home in Vienna since the 1960s.  Or bought one of our many ’60’s-era houses.  Like the one pictured above.  It’s in a nice, quiet neighborhood with mature shade trees.  And all the land for half-a-mile in every direction is zone RS-12.5, for single-family houses on modest lots.

But there’s a problem.  There’s a large piece of vacant property abutting your back yard.  Historically, some Town of Vienna documents marked that tract as park land.  So you may have been foolish enough to consider that vacant land a real asset in your neighborhood.

Then, surprise:  An industrial waste processing facility moves in and takes over that lot.  This facility runs noisy machinery for hours a day.  At various time of the year, streams of diesel dump trucks move onto and off of the property, unloading and loading the materials to be recycled.  In years past, the property was littered with construction debris, until you complained to the Town about it.  And the recycling operation generates large mounds of pungent rotting organic matter.

Well, complain to the Town, you might say.  Nobody has the right to operate an industrial facility in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Nice thought.  Except that it’s the Town’s industrial facility.  Welcome to what the Town of Vienna refers to as the Beulah Road Mulch Yard.

While it’s (almost) inconceivable that the Town would grant someone else the right to use property in that location that way, the Town granted itself a conditional use permit for that mulching operation back in 2004.  You can read some of the contemporary press coverage in this link, or this link, and by following the links at the bottom of those stories.

Member of the Northeast Vienna Citizens’ Association (NEVCA) did their research on this when the issue first came up in 2003.  That’s the year the Town bought a large (and loud) tub grinder for grinding up leaves, and roughly the time the Town moved mulching operations to the current site.  Here’s their timeline for how that property was classified and used by the Town of Vienna, from the November 2003 NEVCA Notes:

Source:  NEVCA Notes, November 2003.

Why bring this up now?

OK, so that neighborhood took a beating in 2004, and has been taking that beating ever since.  Why bring that old news up now?

You may or may not recall that the Town bought a house on Beulah Road, back in 2018.  The house was directly adjacent to the Town’s Beulah Road property.  And, at the time, the official line of the Town government was that they bought it with no purpose in mind.  Even at the time, that was pretty clearly a prevarication.  That was almost surely bought with the construction of the new police station in mind, as I documented in this post, with a link to a news article by Brian Trompeter.

The Town just recently moved to reclassify that small parcel of land on which that house sites as land for “government use”, in the Town’s Comprehensive Plan.  That zoning — for government use — is not something you can see on the Town’s zoning map.  (We don’t have a zone for that.)  It’s only something that exists as a land use category in the Town’s strategic plan.

But apparently that doesn’t quite tell the whole story.  Exactly what the whole story is, it’s kind of hard to tell.  But that building and the Beulah Road property will now be used as part of the building of the new police station.  As I understand it, the Town needs somewhere to park the fleet of 20-some police vehicles, and apparently that unimproved Beulah Road property is the place they’ve chosen to do that?  Tough to say, as all I am running on at this point is rumors.

The point is, this has opened up an old wound for residents of this neighborhood.  It’s not enough to have the Town’s leaf mulching facility in their back yards.  Now, in addition, that’s going to become parking for the police fleet? which I would guess entails some use of sirens at some point?  And so, graveling or paving enough of that lot to allow for such parking?  And, maybe, as in the past, storage of the odd bit of construction debris and such, as the Town apparently did when it redid the sidewalks along Maple?

Who knows?  And that’s pretty much the point.  At one point, the Town apparently considered that to be a neighborhood park.  But over the  years, they have slowly peeled back part of the tree cover as they turned it to various other uses.  The Town turned a deaf ear to the residents of that neighborhood when it decided to use as more-or-less an industrial site, mulching all of Vienna’s fall leaf litter there.  And now, in addition, it’s to become a police vehicle parking lot, and it’s not clear what else.

If I lived there, given the history, I’d be a little worried too.  Makes my problem with cut-through traffic from 444 Maple West seem like small potatoes.

Does anyone else do this?

This, being, get their fall leaf litter converted to mulch or otherwise disposed of?  This turns out to be a fairly difficult question to answer.  But near as I can tell, nobody in this area runs an industrial-scale leaf mulching operation in the middle of a residential area.  Except the Town of Vienna.

City of Alexandria.  They maintain a leaf mulch site at 4215 Eisenhower Avenue.  This is in an industrial area, adjacent to (e.g.) self-storage facilities, ball fields, and similar.

Fairfax County:  From the look of it, my guess is that Fairfax does its mulching (for this part of the county) at the Ox Road solid waste transfer facility.  That’s in the heart of a large industrial/governmental use area.  But I could not find documentation to prove that.

Town of Herndon.  Some earlier work by NEVCA suggests that Herndon does not perform these operations within its Town limits, but I could not verify that (on-line) using current information.  (Historically, they filled roll-off containers with leaves, then trucked those out for composting.)  Herndon also does not appear to offer free mulch to residents (as Vienna does).  Presumably, Herndon residents would have to rely on Fairfax County free mulch.

City of Fairfax:  Fairfax City directs residents to the County’s free mulch, which suggests (but does not prove) that Fairfax City doesn’t do its own mulching.

City of Falls Church.  They offer residents free locally-produced leaf mulch, but provide no clue on their website as to where they produce that mulch.

 

Is this a good use of scarce land?

Fairfax County currently values that 8-acre tract at about $2.5M, but it’s not clear what, exactly, that valuation reflects.  Certainly not the value of the land for use as housing.  But that’s roughly the same value that Fairfax puts on the 11-acre Glyndon Street park.

Putting aside the impact on the neighbors, it seems to me like running a mulch pile is a fairly low-valued use of a scarce resource such as Town of Vienna land.  You have to wonder if this practice started back in the days before Fairfax County itself became so invested in recycling.  I can’t help but wonder what it would cost the Town to turn that tract of land into another useful Town park, instead of using it for what amounts to refuse collection (and, going forward, vehicle parking).

Finally, I should make it clear that a) as a homeowner, you don’t have to participate in the Town’s leaf mulching operation and b) current environmental thinking actually discourages you from doing that.  The point being that the heat generated by mulching on an industrial scale kills off eggs of beneficial insects that might otherwise overwinter on your leaf mulch, such as various species of butterflies.  If you have the room and the inclination, mulching your own leaves probably makes more environmental sense than having the Town mulch them for you.

Post #525: Last night’s Town Council work session

My wife attended, I did not.  This write-up is based on her notes from the meeting.

The meeting lasted about 2.5 hours.   (Maybe you want to listen to the meeting for yourself, if you have the time, because at some point in this, I got tired of doing the writeup and started skipping details.)  The Town will presumably have its audio recording posted shortly.  (Right now, if you click the apparent link for audio, you get a “network error”).    In the meantime, if you want to listen to the meeting, I’ve placed a copy of my wife’s recording at this this Google Drive link.

The meeting materials are on this Town of Vienna web page.  Apparently there was also a set of comments on the new version of (what used to be called) the Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming, but those comments were only available to Town Council, not to the public.

The meeting had two parts:

  • Town right-of-way issues.
  • Replacement for the Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming.

For those who want to listen to the meeting, the traffic calming section starts about 1:05 into the recording.

Continue reading Post #525: Last night’s Town Council work session

Post #524: Some topics at public meetings this week

Things change.  For more than a year now, I’ve sent a weekly email (to individuals who signed up for it) noting any Town of Vienna public meetings dealing with MAC zoning issues.  I typically cc’d the content here (e.g., Post #516 and many prior posts).

It’s starting to look like there probably won’t be any more such meetings devoted to MAC zoning topics.  The last project under the existing MAC zoning has been approved (Sunrise at 380 Maple West).  The Town has subsumed any further discussion of MAC into its two-year-long rewrite of all the zoning in Vienna.  Possibly, Vienna is going to do away with MAC zoning entirely, probably in favor of allowing MAC-like construction “by right” in parts of the existing commercial zone.

So here are a few non-MAC items that the Town will consider this week, along with some brief commentary.

  • Redoing the process for citizens to request traffic calming measures.
  • Dealing with the Wawa tree cutting and other Town right-of-way issues.
  • The new $15M police station.

Citizens’ Guide to Traffic Calming (Tonight 2/10/2020, 7:30 PM Town Council work session).  This guide defines the process by which citizens petition the town for traffic calming and safety measures on their streets (e.g., speed humps, signs, marked pedestrian crossings, and similar).  ‘

The Town government is in the process of changing that procedure.   And, in the Town government’s usual citizen-friendly fashion, if you want to see some simple summary of what is being changed … you’re out of luck.  The only way to get any type of side-by-side comparison is to read both documents, get a clear grasp of the old and new methods, and then write that up yourself.  You can see the current guide here (.pdf).  You can find the new “Street Safety Guide” with the meeting materials for this work session.

A few things that caught my eye, as I compared the old and the new, are the following:

  • You would no longer be able to petition directly to your fellow citizens on the Transportation Safety Commission.  Instead, the process for starting a request for traffic calming or safety measures would be controlled by the Town bureaucracy (Department of Public Works).  If they didn’t think your request had merit, then it would stop right there, and the request would never been seen in public.
  • Right now, you can sign a petition in favor of some change (e.g., a speed hump on your street).   Under the proposed change, if you sign, you are agreeing to have that traffic calming measure (e.g., as speed hump) directly in front of your house.  Under the new proposal, you can’t sign the petition unless you agree to that.
  • Some measures — such as street closure — appear to have been removed from the document.

Is this an exhaustive list of changes?  Heck if I know.  Probably not.  Because the only way to know what’s been changed is to happen to notice it, as you read through and study both documents.

Fallout from the Wawa tree cutting and other issues with the Town right-of-way (Tonight 2/10/2020, 7:30 PM Town Council work session).  This is, I think, the “after action” report that the Town Manager was to bring to Town Council, and I think it’s also the Town government’s response to Councilman Majdi’s request to have all these right-of-way issues (e.g., Wawa, plus the loss of 4′ of right-of-way from Wade Hampton, and others) into a single effort.

You can find the meeting materials on this page.  I’m not seeing any action item for the Town Council to decide, nor am I seeing any sort of comprehensive strategy.  But you will at least get the final official Town of Vienna word on what actually happened at Wawa, on Wade Hampton, and how the Chick-fil-a-car-wash transformers ended up located right next to the sidewalk.

The new police station will be discussed in a Planning Commission work session (Wednesday 2/12/2020, 6:30 PM).  I have now been briefed in this, and there appear to be a lot of fairly tricky zoning issues that the Town has to get past.  Among those are the setbacks from the adjacent residential property.  In any case, this is all part of an ongoing effort to get certain pieces of land in Vienna rezoned so that the Town can legally construct the new $15M police station.

Post #523: Crowd-source the library design.

As I was walking along Maple the other day, I noticed the inscribed bricks in the sidewalk in front of the the Patrick Henry Library.  I could only vaguely recall how those came to be there, and could find almost nothing on-line about them.

This post has three parts.  1) Dig up the history of those bricks.  Turns out that the only on-line reference I could find is in an old Town of Vienna newsletter.  2) Ask what will happen when they literally dig up those bricks, as the Town goes ahead with the parking garage (plus attached library) planned for that site.  3) Suggest that maybe the town ought to ask the citizens what they’d like to see built there, before they start digging.  Otherwise, we’re relying on the MAC-derived design produced by the Town’s consultants.  The garage will have been designed to match a downtown that may never be built.

Brick history

The Town’s old newsletters are quite a hoot, as I noted in (Post #388).  You can find the entire archive on this page on the Town website.  But they are not searchable — the .pdfs are images (pictures, scans) of the paper-copy newsletters, so you can’t search for text.  You have to pull them up and read them if you want to know what’s in them.

In this case, the Town’s October 1997 newsletter (.pdf) was the sole on-line reference that I stumbled across for those bricks.  I reproduced the article at the top of this posting.

These bricks were not sold by the Town of Vienna, but instead, selected charitable organizations in Vienna had the right to sell these for $100 each*, as a fund raiser for those charitable organizations.

* The $100 cost in 1997 works out to an inflation-adjusted $162 in today’s money (per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator), for an average annual rate of inflation of about 2.4% per year.  That seems modest to most people of my generation, who lived through the post-Vietnam Arab oil embargo inflationary shocks.  During that period, the one-year rate of inflation hit double digits in three separate years: 1975 (12%), 1980 (14%), 1981 (12%).  

Their fate?

And it’s not clear what promise the Town made regarding the long-term fate of these bricks.  Was there some implicit promise that those bricks would be there in perpetuity, so that the Town is legally responsible?   For sure, nobody would have had a sales pitch that said “until we tear that all up in 2022 or so”.

I don’t have a count of the number of bricks in question.   I have not stopped in at the library to see if they could locate the book showing the location of each brick.  For sure, it doesn’t look like they reached their stated goal of 10,000 bricks.  That would have filled the entire sidewalk in front of the library with those bricks.  (At 7 bricks per square foot, 10,000 bricks would pave 185′ of 5′ wide sidewalk.)  Given the spacing of the bricks on the sidewalk, I’d guess they sold maybe 2000 bricks.

So that’s the first interesting question:  What’s the Town going to do with those when that all gets torn up for the new parking garage?  How much does the Town owe to the original purchasers, either legally or morally?  Is it even going to retain brick sidewalks in that area?  (Those are not friendly to anyone who needs to roll over them, or to individuals who otherwise have mobility or visual impairment issues.  Particularly as the sidewalks age and the bricks become unlevel).

If the Town isn’t going to put them back down where they got them from, then what’s the plan?  This might be something to address to the Town’s Public Art Commission:  What can you do with about 2000 bricks of some modest historical significance?

Maybe we could crowd-source this.  That is, have Town-wide contest, and see who has the best idea for preserving those bricks, in some fashion, as the Town moves ahead with its parking garage.

More generally, the Patrick Henry Garage (and library).

Let me briefly recap all the things I find odd about the proposed garage/library.  I’ve discussed these at length on this site, and I’m not even going to reference the postings.  1)  We’re asking agencies who deal with mitigating traffic congestion to pay for our shopper/diner parking, using the pretext that this new Patrick Henry garage will be used by Metro commuters.  2)  If we don’t get somebody else to pay for it, it’s going to be a scramble to cover the cost, as we are pretty much maxing out our capital budget.  3)  The design was clearly intended to match all the MAC buildings that were going to go up on Maple, but now … it’s not clear that’s a smart move.  4)  In our standard ready-fire-aim fashion, the Town is going to do a study of how much parking is needed — after they’ve funded this and another garage.  But mostly, 5)  It’s a GARAGE, with a library tucked in among the thick concrete pillars on the first floor.   I’ve already said my piece about putting the parking underground and creating a small park next to the library.

Maybe this would be another opportunity for crowd-sourcing.  The Town could specify the required number of parking spaces, and the square footage of Library floor space, and ask Vienna citizens to suggest some designs.  At the minimum, we’d get some new thinking on this.  And in addition, we might get a feel for how many people think the current design of library-under-garage is a good idea.

 

Post #522: The 2/3/2020 Town Council meeting

The Vienna Town Council met last night to consider a few items of business.  You can find the agenda and meeting materials on this web page.

Land at 440 Beulah and 114 Locust converted to government use.  The main item on the agenda was to get the ball rolling on legally allowing a couple of parcels of land in Vienna to be used as part of the new police station project.  The properties in question are the area directly adjacent to the existing police station (114 Locust) , and a house out on Beulah Road (440 Beulah), adjacent to the “Beulah Road Mulch Yard”.  The Town bought that Beulah Road house back 2018, but refused at that time to say why it had bought it.

Unsurprisingly, that proposal passed unanimously.  That was pretty much a given, as they’ll have to rezone at least the house next to the police station in order to build the new one there.

As I understand it, this was just the first step – amending the Town’s comprehensive plan to allow this.  I have the vague impression that they’ll have to come back and redo this, for the rezoning proper, in order to satisfy all the legal requirements.

Town account balances.  A second item of business was one that I think I haven’t seen before, which was a report on the Town’s financial assets — its investment balances.  Given the property values and incomes in Vienna, it should come as no surprise that the Town is in good financial health and has tens of millions (30-ish million?) of dollars invested in various interest-bearing accounts.

I still have not quite puzzled out why I haven’t seen this before, and why I’m seeing it now.  Either I wasn’t paying attention when I researched the budget last year, or this is a new report.  I can recall looking for and being unable to find information on account balances, but simple incompetence on my part could easily explain that.

Councilman Noble will not run for re-election.  The only surprise in the meeting was that Councilman Noble will not run for re-election, citing (I believe) the need to care for a relative.  I think everyone of a certain age can empathize with that.  And those not yet of that age can be glad they haven’t had to deal with it yet.

To me, the right context for this is the controversial vote to approve 444 Maple West, against considerable citizen opposition.  The vote was 5-2.

Of the five voting in favor:

  • Three have chosen not to run for re-election.
  • One was defeated in the last election.
  • One is running for mayor.

Of the two voting against:

  • Both are running for mayor.

In hindsight, that vote, plus the simple passage of time and the occurrence of life events, appears to have been as much of a watershed moment as you are likely to see in the politics of a small town.  But only in hindsight.

As an aside:  I assume the Town will have its recording of this up soon, so I do not plan to post my own recording of the meeting.  I also have to admit that I didn’t much pay attention during the discussion of the police station item, and maybe I’ll replay the tape and see if there’s anything else worth reporting about that.

 

Post #521: The cost of sidewalks

Source:  Google maps.

The point of this post is pretty simple:  The cost of installing new concrete sidewalks various enormously.   And the cost of the sidewalk itself — i.e., the 5′-wide ribbon of concrete — is the least of it.  The bulk of the cost is in everything else that has to be done — curb, gutter, curb cuts, ramps, and, most importantly, drainage including storm sewers.

To make this point, I identified four sidewalk projects in the Town of Vienna, and estimated cost per linear foot.  (Detail given below.  This is a “sample of convenience”, being the first four projects I ran across.)  The costs were $100, $150, $445, and $666 per linear foot of sidewalk.  Presumably, if I’d looked at a larger sample of projects, I would have seen even more variation.

In the Town of Vienna, a) there’s really no meaningful “typical” cost for putting in sidewalks and b) in any given situation, the cost might be a lot more than you’d think.

The high costs of sidewalks — and the fact that literally “the sidewalk” is typically the smallest part of the cost — has some important implications for a couple of items that I’ve mentioned recently.

Robinson bequest for sidewalks.  At the last Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting, I found out that the Robinson estate bequest for sidewalks in the Town of Vienna was being interpreted as literally that:  payment for the concrete sidewalk, period (Post #518).  Depending on the project, then, the Town would have to pay for everything else to make that sidewalk possible.  That’s certainly going to tilt the use of those funds toward simple projects where (e.g.) there is already curb and gutter in place, with no need for extensive modifications for site drainage.

Sidewalks versus road closure for the neighborhoods behind Sunrise/444 Maple West.  At the last Town Council meeting, citizens offered some things the Town could do to address pedestrian safety and traffic in the neighborhoods adjacent to the proposed Sunrise facility (Post #517).  Among those was the idea of putting in sidewalks on (among other) Glen Avenue.  But Councilman Potter suggested that simply closing Wade Hampton at Glen would be a less costly solution.  And based on these per-foot costs, that seems like a plausible statement.  Based on those four costs per foot, 1400′ of sidewalk for Glen Avenue (pictured above) might cost anywhere from $140,000 to more than $900,000. 

Continue reading Post #521: The cost of sidewalks

Post #519: The tear-down boom and increased residential share of Town property assessments

This is just a quick back-of-the-envelope spurred by a presentation made by the Town’s Director of Finance at the 1/27/2020 Town Council meeting.

One statistic that caught my eye is that the residential share of total property assessments in town rose over the last decade, from 77.5% in 2011 to 81.0% in 2019 (Page 9 of this document (.pdf)).  The Director of Finance suggested that this was one possible justification for hiring the new business development officer for the Town of Vienna.  That is, to help bolster Vienna business and hence assessments.  Conversely, Councilman Majdi suggested that the tear-down boom might account for it, with small houses being torn down to make way for much larger ones.

So, that’s the question here:  Does the increase in residential share of total property assessments mean that commercial real estate in Vienna showed poor price appreciation, compared to residential?  Or is that plausibly just a consequence of the tear-down boom, with small, lower-cost houses in Vienna being systematically replaced by larger, higher-cost houses?

Here, in the crudest way possible, I want to test that.  Can the tear-down boom plausibly account for this change?  In keeping with the idea of a round-numbers calculation, I’m going to do a crude cut at this.  Basically, is the impact of the tear-down boom anywhere near large enough.

So:  My recollection is that, of late, the Town has averaged about 100 tear-downs per year, based on building permit data.  Further, based on a couple of observations, property value for a tear down typically increases by about a million dollars (in 2019 terms), from (say) $0.7M for a small house, to $1.7M for the typical mansion that replaces it.

So, 9 years x 100 houses per year x $1M/house = $900M in additional residential property values, in 2019 dollars, from the cumulative effect of the tear-down boom from 2011 to 2019.   Roughly speaking then, if I net out the crude impact of the tear-downs, I get this table:

Crude impact of tear-down boom on Vienna assessed real estate values
Residential Total Residential %
Actual 2019 4,251,761,320 5,204,854,490 81.7%
Less tear-down impact 900,000,000 900,000,000
2019 less tear-down 3,351,761,320 4,304,854,490 77.9%

And the answer is that the (crude estimate of the) impact of the tear down boom is more-or-less the right size to explain the shift in assessment share in the Town of Vienna.  The difference between the two red numbers, in the table above, is roughly as large as the difference between the two red numbers in the opening paragraph.

In other words, this shift in assessed values in the Town of Vienna doesn’t show any particular problem with our commercial real estate.  Plausibly, it just shows the impact of the replacement of small, lower-cost houses with much larger ones.

This is consistent, I think, with repeated mentions of high rental rates for commercial property along Maple (e.g., in the new Town economic development officer’s “listening tour”).  The complaint is that high rental rates are driving businesses out of Vienna.  But if so, that’s just an indication that business is good along Maple.  Nobody likes paying rent, but if property owners along Maple think they can get (e.g.) $60/square foot/year, that means they expect that business opportunities are such that some business can afford to locate on Maple and pay that kind of rent.

Post #520: Converting fraud to good government

source:  Image courtesy of Vectorstock

My wife tells me that some people object to my use of the word “fraud” in a recent posting (Post #515, but Post #446 does a better job of explaining the issue).  Fair enough.  If everybody is happy about what I write, I’m doing something wrong.

In this post, I’m going to explain how I got to that point.  Briefly, a year and a half ago, I was just sincerely trying to make sense of puzzling behavior by the Town w/r/t the Mill Street garage.  But as the Town’s claims got nuttier, I amped up the rhetoric correspondingly.

I’m going to end this post with a suggestion that would guarantee that this entire taxpayer-financed transaction is above-board, with no hint of fraud.  This suggestion would be cheap and easy to do.  It embodies the essence of good government.  And I am quite sure the Town will never, ever do it.

My suggestion:  Monitor the outcome.  That is, measure and report on Metro commuters’ actual use of these garages, once they are built.  I’m not even saying that the Town should give the money back if it turns out that this was a fraud mistake.  I’m just saying that the funding agencies should demand to know how effective their spending was, at achieving the stated goal of creating a commuter garage.  And if it turns out that this was a complete waste of money from their perspective, then at least they will learn something.  With luck, they will know better the next time somebody tries to pull the same scam make the same implausible argument.

Caution:  high horse ahead.  We can tolerate the occasional wasteful spending decision by a local government entity (NVTA or NVTC).  But we shouldn’t tolerate willful ignorance about the level of waste.  Instead, we should require that these government entities acknowledge and learn from their mistakes.  Just like any real business.  And that feedback loop needs to be built into the system.  And so, anyone receiving tax funding to build a “Metro commuter” garage ought to be required to provide an accurate measurement of the extent to which Metro commuters actually use it.  That’s all I’m saying.  I hope that makes sense.

Some history on this issue

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Town’s actions in this area for more than a year and a half.  That’s when I first found out just exactly how the Town had convinced the NVTA to fund half of the (now defunct) Mill Street garage (see this post dating to June 2018).

I was such a do-bee *, **, *** on this that I actually researched and developed a suggestion for how that garage might best serve Vienna commuters (as the basis for a slug line).  That’s how hard I was trying to make sense of this, at that time.

* Sadly, I find myself sincerely and without irony quoting Romper Room.  Youngsters in the readership here (meaning, anyone under about 60 or so) will have no idea what I’m talking about.  Think of it as reactionary propaganda — religious, patriotic, and social — aimed at the most vulnerable and gullible segment of the population, broadcast over the public airwaves.  It was as if  Sesame Street had been conceived by the John Birch Society.  Clearly, it succeeded at its insidious task, as I will probably remember the phrase “Do be a do-bee, and don’t be a don’t-bee” long after I’ve forgotten the names of my children. 

** This “do-bee/don’t-be” dichotomy is a widely-used method for embedding conventional social norms in literature aimed at young children.  For example, it was later adopted by children’s author Richard Scarry in his classic religious propaganda Busy Town series.  There, the (presumed) brothers Pig Will and Pig Won’t take the place of the gender-neutral Do Bee and Don’t Be, and are repeatedly used to demonstrate behaviors deemed socially acceptable and unacceptable, respectively.   By portraying Good and Evil in a concrete fashion, such authors directly impress their notions of right and wrong onto their target audience.  The sincerity of these characters (as propaganda tools aimed at the vulnerable pre-school popoulation) should be contrasted to the frankly tongue-in-cheek Angel/Devil imagery aimed at older, more rational children, such as the shoulder angel/shoulder devil debate in the animated classic “The Emperor’s New Groove“.

*** Upon close examination, other characters in Scarry’s “Busy Town” series were even more disturbing.  For example, the town butcher was portrayed as a pig, and yet had clearly identifiable hams hanging in his shop window.  I still wonder what message the author had in mind with that.

For the Mill Street garage, the Town only pretended that half the spaces would be for commuter use, and only asked for half the money to build the garage.

But in later iterations, for the proposed Patrick Henry garage, the Town’s story grew more absurd.  When the Town applied to the NVTA for money, it proposed that 100% of the spaces be used by commuters, prompting me to write my “absurdum” post (Post #446).  My point being that if this actually worked out as the Town suggested — if all the spaces were in fact used by commuters — then the garage would do the Town no good.  There’d be no spaces left for its actual use, which is to provide shopper/diner parking for local merchants.   But by saying that 100% of spaces would be used by commuters, it could then ask for 100% of the cost of the garage to be covered.

And in this most recent round (applying to NVTC for money), the Town is proposing that fewer spaces be used by commuters, but it’s still asking for 100% of the cost of the garage to be covered.

My guess is, the request that 100% of costs be covered is driven by our capital budget, where the Town is planning to borrow and spend vastly more in this year’s cycle than it has ever done in the past.  So much so that it had to assume the Patrick Henry garage would be “free” in order to get the numbers to work out (e.g., Post #488, Post #504).

Now, with that as perspective, surely you can put that all together the same way I have.  So far, the Town has done the following:

  • Claimed that half of one garage, on Mill Street, would be used by Metro commuters, and asked for 50% of the cost of that garage to be covered.
  • When the Mill Street garage fell through, blithely moved the money for that, to a different proposed garage on Church street, where the money would cover 59% of the garage.
  • Claimed that 100%, of a different, larger garage (Patrick Henry) would be used by Metro commuters, and asked for 100% of that garage to be covered.
  • Claimed that some smaller share (?) of spaces (certainly, a smaller count of spaces) would be used by commuters, in that same garage, and still asked for 100% of the cost of the garage to be covered.

This is in a Town that, prior to this, has done very close to nothing for Metro commuters.  (Well, they built bus shelters, starting back in 1977.  But not a lot, lately, for sure.)  And a Town where, if people were of a mind to park and catch a bus to Metro, there are copious opportunities for street parking right now (detailed in Post #447)****.

**** “… I count at least the following residential areas, with street-side parking, within walking distance of a bus stop for the 463 Fairfax Connector bus:  Kingsley-Meyers; Tapawingo; Roland-Mendon-Ceret; Moorefield-Princeton-Princess; Wade Hampton-Millwood-Glen; Pleasant; Berry; East; and virtually all the residential streets beyond East that connect to Maple.  That isn’t even counting the other bus routes that have some Metro connection.”

When I put that all together — the totally implausible story about commuting, the existing market test that shows people do not park/bus to Metro despite ample current opportunity, the repetition of the story for two different garages, and the morphing of the story over time — I come to the firm conclusion that the Town’s story is just that — a story.  It’s an untruth told for the purpose of achieving financial gain.  And that’s the definition of a fraud.

A simple fix:  Just come clean about the results

The introduction says pretty much all that needs to be said about this.  Given that nothing will dissuade the Town from doing this, and given that the Town has already gotten millions of dollars (for the Mill Street) garage with this story, it’s clear that this is the Town’s story and they are sticking with it.

My sole suggestion, then, is that the agencies providing the funding actually measure the effectiveness of their spending.  Require that the Town accurately count the number of parking spaces actually used by park-and-bus-to-Metro commuters.  This is the only way to close the loop, and force the funding agencies to admit what they have done — mis-spent funds that were intended for congestion relief, to give Vienna shopper/diner parking for local merchants.

Fill in your favorite aphorism here:

  • Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
  • Better late than never.
  • Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes.

My point is that, like anyone else, governments need to learn from their mistakes.  And in the case of government, that feedback needs to be built into the system.

If you really don’t think the Town is committing fraud here, then there should be no objection to building in that feedback.  If we are proud of getting taxpayer funding in this fashion, we should be proud to measure the results and to make that measurement publicly known.

Post #518: The 1/28/2020 meeting of the Transportation Safety Commission

You can download my recording (.mp3) of the roughly 30 minute meeting at this Google Drive link.  The meeting was short, I took no notes, and the following items are a handful that I noted when listening to the tape.  Approximate times into the recording are given in mm:ss.

Scooters! (01:15).  The Town has posted its rules for rental scooter contractors who wish to offer scooters in the Vienna.  So far there have been no takers.  The Town Council modified the original TSC recommendation to a) reduce speeds to 6 MPH along Maple and Nutley (with the understanding that scooters would likely be on the sidewalks there), and b) asked that similar reduced-speed zones be set up around schools, parks, and (I think) the library (?).

Chick-fil-A drive-through exit pedestrian safety issue (03:08).  This issue is my reason for attending.  You can read the background in Post #423 and thereabouts.

Briefly, the transformers in front of Chick-fil-A prevent prevent persons exiting the drive-through from seeing pedestrians or bicyclists approaching from their right.  I raised this as a safety concern at the last TSC meeting.  The upshot is that a) Town staff and at least one TSC member agree that this is a hazard and b) Town staff are working with Chick-fil-A to get a mirror in place so that drivers can see pedestrians and bicyclists approaching from the blind side.  This is about as good an outcome as I could have hoped for.

Improvements to W&OD bike crossings (05:25).  They summarized the Town Council proposal for changing the W&OD bike crossings on Park and Church to make them, in effect, a raised crosswalk — like a speed table.

Bicycle Month (06:40).  This is a series of bike-related events sponsored by or with participation of the Town of Vienna government, slated for May 2020 this time around.   It sounded like the Bicycle Advisory Committee may be looking for sponsors for some of those events, and if so, presumably the chair (Beth Eachus) would be the person to contact.  They also discussed need for signs on the W&OD to direct bicyclists to businesses near there.

Revised Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming Measures (09:25).  This was a description of what is being planned to finish off the revised version of (what used to be called) the Citizen’s Guide, that is, the handbook that laid out how neighborhoods could apply to have traffic calming measures (e.g., speed bumps, signs) installed on their roads.  Later in the meeting, a citizen raised some questions about comments on the Citizens’ Guide to traffic calming (29:25).  At that point, they did a recap of the likely schedule moving forward.

Apps that direct cut-through traffic onto neighborhood streets (10:20).  This was a rather cryptic item, but apparently Fairfax County has noted that widely-available traffic apps are directing more traffic through neighborhood streets, to avoid slow arterial roads.  I’m not sure what the upshot of this is.

Plans for a Town of Vienna self-directed walking tour or historical sites walking tour (11:00).  This was just presented as a concept, no details.

Extensive discussion of the Robinson estate sidewalk bequest (12:10).  This is a sum of several million dollars, for use in sidewalk construction in the Town of Vienna, but it comes with numerous restrictions.  It’s to be used for concrete sidewalks only (not, e.g., for any associated storm water management), it’s to be used within a reasonably short time frame, it’s to be used to fill gaps in the existing sidewalk network, and so on.

Specific issues with Tapawingo (potholes), Marshall Road (pedestrian light), (15:40)

Followup on Tapawingo and Kingsley meetings with citizens regarding traffic calming (19:50).

School-zone 25-MPH flashing signs in 25-MPH zones (20:40).

Dealing with excess signage on some streets (23:50).

Timeframe for study of the neighborhood bounded by Maple/Courthouse/Nutley (28:15).  Upshot is that the study will be several months away, as they wanted to get traffic counts only after winter has passed.