Author: chogan@directresearch.com

There is a protest rally planned for 8 AM tomorrow (Saturday, 11/23/2019).  Show up at the Wawa site at that time if you wish to express your opinion about this unfortunate event.

Above:  The back of the Wawa parking lot, when it was Coldwell Banker.  The large maple trees were supposed to remain.  Wawa said that in testimony, and they included that in the landscaping plan approved by the Board of Architectural Review.

Below:  Here’s what it looked like yesterday.  The wooden fence visible in the picture belongs to the neighbors who live in the house adjacent to the Wawa lot.  Wawa basically clear-cut the alleyway right-of-way that exists between the neighbor’s lot and the Wawa lot.

Correction:  As of now, this is officially being blamed on Wawa’s contractor.  Apparently there was “confusion” as to which trees were to be taken down.  (This seems kind of astonishing to me, as in, you’d think that somebody would have said something like “not all of them”.) But the official story is that this was an unfortunate mistake, Wawa accepts responsibility for it, and they’re going to plant replacement trees with about a week.

So, despite what I said in an earlier version of this, I cannot say that Wawa got permission from the Town to remove those trees from the alley right-of-way.  That part of it has to be dismissed as rumor.  Officially, this was due to a contractor’s mistake.

Continue reading Post #467: CORRECTED: Wawa what the heck?

This post is sponsored by the Department of Way Too Much Time on My Hands.  It is a followup to Post #460.

I sat in the Suntrust (east) parking lot during yesterday’s afternoon rush hour.  I counted cars going into or out of the lot.  (Each such vehicle movement — either into or out of the lot — is a “trip” in traffic parlance.)  Starting at 4 PM, I counted trips for successive 15-minute intervals, and from those, calculated the trips in the peak hour that occurred between 4 PM and 6 PM.

I counted 36 trips during the peak PM hour.

This should be contrasted with the 381 trips that the Town’s contractor, Kimley-Horn, assumed as part of their estimate of the impact of MAC on Maple Avenue traffic. 

The discrepancy is, in fact, more than a factor of 10 (order-of-magnitude).

Science, my ass.

By overstating the existing traffic by ~350 cars, Kimley-Horn understated the increased traffic from MAC development by ~350 cars.  That’s how the traffic projection methodology works.

Just in passing, I’ll note that this error, alone, for this one building, is on-order-of half as large as the entire estimated impact of MAC on traffic, per the Kimley-Horn study.  In case I need to translate that, it means that, officially and professionally, we still have no clue what MAC zoning is likely to do to Maple Avenue traffic.  With just this one whopping discrepancy, we have simultaneously spent our tax dollars and ensured that anything our contractor gives us in return will be deeply suspect.

And there isn’t just this one discrepancy.  I’m not even going to bring up the minus 1 again (Post #364).  Or the implausibility of the estimates for several other properties.

I’m so depressed by this whole scene that I’m not even going to editorialize about it.  I’m just going to make one comment about real science.

On this particular issue, I think it has reached the point that if I want an credible estimate of this key item, I’m going to have to buy the ITE trip generation manual and do it myself.   The calculation itself really ain’t rocket science.  And that way, I could make the whole thing open-source, instead of a black box, and we could all examine the reasonableness of the results.  We could do what real scientists call a “sensitivity analysis”, that is, test how much the results change if key assumptions are changed.   We could directly test the robustness of the results, so if they really are a shot in the dark, we’d at least be aware of that.

Instead of turning over one rock at a time.

Those of you who have been following this issue don’t need to know any more.  For the rest of you, a brief summary of the story follows.  As well as a full explanation of why this was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Continue reading Post #465: Suntrust Bank, PM peak hour trips: 36, not 381.

Post #456 was a heavy lift.  I spent all my time finding the facts about Chapter 527 and the Fairfax County 527 filing for Tysons.  That left no time for putting that 527 filing into a larger context.  If you want facts, read that post.

This one is the first of a series of posts about the larger picture.  I’m going to end up with the phrase “What do we want Maple Avenue to be?”.  But for now, I’m starting with a flat-footed comparison of the Fairfax County 527 filing and the Town of Vienna Multimodal transportation study.

The point of this post is how peculiar the Town’s “Multimodal” study seems, compared to the Fairfax 527 filing, where the two overlap.  And then secondarily, how peculiar the Town’s “Multimodal” study is, period, from the standpoint of cars as a mode of transportation.

At first, I thought that maybe the consultants for that study were just not very good.  But in hindsight, I’m pretty sure that the problem lies with the Town of Vienna.  With no hard evidence whatsoever, I’m willing to bet that the consultants had been told that they could not consider adding any lanes to Maple Avenue.  As is usual in Town of Vienna government, that would have happened with no public debate or even any public mention of that constraint.

It’s either that, or the Kimley-Horn consultants were absolutely incompetent, which I think is not even remotely plausible.  This will become clear when I compare the two proposed solutions (527 vs Multimodal) for traffic congestion at the Maple/Beulah intersection (below).

And once you make that observations, much of the rest of the apparent peculiarity of the Vienna Multimodal study comes into focus.  Much of what was proposed in the “Multimodal”  study would have made it somewhat harder to use a car in the Town of Vienna.  I don’t necessarily think that was the point.  I think it was a byproduct of what the consultants were charged with doing.  But I do think the consultants went well out of their way to downplay that.  It was implicit, but that’s all it was.  And that point brings me to the last section, “Road Diet”, where local governments have an up-front explicit strategy of making it harder to use cars for transportation.

---

The Maple/Beulah intersection

Both the Fairfax 527 plan and the Town of Vienna Multimodal study contained proposed fixes for traffic congestion at the Maple/Beulah intersection.  The 527 filing predates the Vienna Multimodal study by about a decade.  The contrast of the two proposed fixes could not be sharper.

First, examine the Fairfax proposal (below).  This seems like a fairly normal road-widening project.  Add some turn lanes to get from Maple west-bound onto Beulah.  In addition, where the very short Beulah turn lane fills up (between Branch and Beulah), add enough width to the road that you could have double turn lanes there.

All told, that intervention appears to address very directly the main problems with that intersection.  It was estimated to have cost $1.9M in 2009 dollars.

Fixing the Beulah/Maple intersection, from the Fairfax County Tysons Chapter 527 filing.

Now look at the two proposed solutions in the Vienna Multimodal study, the next two pictures.  They include brand new road segments, plowing new roads through private property, closing road segments and turning them into linear parks, and eliminating either the Beulah or Branch light on Maple.  Note that individuals traveling west on Maple would be forced to backtrack to get to Beulah.  Individuals traveling west Branch would be forced to backtrack to get to Maple westbound.

All told, that’s a) really odd, b) far more radical, and c) estimated to cost anywhere from $2.1M to $9.9M to implement.  And, as Councilmember Springsteen pointed out, the second of the Multimodal options shown above literally could not be implemented with the buildings as they currently stand.  You’d have to knock down a shopping center to do that one.

So, now, ask yourself this question:  Are the Kimley-Horn traffic engineers really that incompetent? No.  Surely they knew of the 527 filing.  Why, given that, would they propose a far more costly, far more destructive, and far less functional solution?

They could have started from the 527 solution, and tried to make that better.  Why didn’t they?  In engineering terms, what they proposed was inferior to the 527 solution along every dimension:  Cost, functionality, and private property destruction.  

There must have been some additional constraint on what they were allowed to do.  What they presented was the best they could come up with, given the limitations imposed on them.   So, what constraint would yield these solutions?  No new lanes on Maple.

So I think that, one way or the other, they were given the instruction that they were not to add any traffic lanes to Maple Avenue.  To me, that’s the only thing that explains totally ignoring the existing 527 solution, and coming up with something that is inferior in every engineering aspect.  Except for the fact that it “fixes” the intersection without adding lanes to Maple.

Then, if you read through the rest of their recommendations, you will note the following.

• No new lanes on Maple, anywhere.
• Removing lanes from other intersections in the interest of pedestrian safety.
• Reducing total green-light times on Maple traffic lights (“leading pedestrian interval”) in the interest of pedestrian safety.
• Removing parking on church, in the interest of bicycle mobility.

And so on.  Outside of Maple, most of those proposals would make it harder to use a car in Vienna.  Not as an explicit goal, but as a side-effect of what was being proposed.

So, outside of Maple Avenue, you have a bunch of solutions that would make life easier for pedestrians and bicyclists, at the expense of motorists.

Only, the way it came across was: make life easier for pedestrians and bicyclists at the expense of motorists. 

On Maple, you had any solution that might work … except those that involved additional lanes.   There, as presented, they never even hinted that the second clause was part of the equation.

And so I get back to Councilman Springsteen’s comment on the proposed Beulah intersection fix.  He directed his comments to the consultant, and stopped just short of saying that the proposed solution was totally crazy. 

And I agree.  But it’s not the consultants who are were crazy.  It was the Town of Vienna government.  If you want to know why the consultants came up with those expensive, invasive, and impractical solutions, ask them why they didn’t just do something like the Fairfax 527 proposal.  And at that point, I’m pretty sure that, if they are honest about it, they’ll point the finger where it belongs:  At the Town of Vienna government, the people who gave them their marching orders for this study.

---

Road diet

I want to sharpen the focus on cars-vs-other-modes by bringing in the term “road diet”.  Google it and you’ll immediately get hundreds of entries.  And most of those will embody a whole lot of anger.  Which may well explain the stealthy aspects of the Town of Vienna Multimodal study as it relates to car use in Vienna.

Road diet.  Crudely put, this is shorthand for purposefully reducing the vehicle carrying capacity of a roadway.  Removing a lane, say, or otherwise reducing the ability of a road to move cars.  Sometimes, this is done solely to reduce the number of cars traveling past some point, or reduce their speed.  It can be cast purely as a safety measure, for example.  More typically, it is done in order to favor (or allow) some other mode of transport, such as bike lanes, sidewalks, bus lanes, or similar.

The point I am trying to make is that with a “road diet”, the local government is up front about what they are trying to do.   They will have open debates on the merits of reducing vehicle capacity (safety, neighborhood quality-of-life, more sidewalks and bike lanes) versus drawbacks (greater traffic congestion).

My wife clued me in on a local road diet going on right now along Seminary Road in Alexandria.  You can read the Patch article at this link.  In an nutshell, they reduced it from two car lanes in each direction to one lane in each direction, a center turn land, and bike lanes.  With the predictable result that you have stalled traffic sitting next to empty bike lanes.  And a lot of angry commuters.

I have no opinion on whether this is a good idea or not, on Seminary Road.  It’s none of my business.  But what does this have to do with the Town of Vienna, and Maple Avenue?

First, the Vienna Multimodal Study is more-or-less a stealth road diet.  OK, it’s more of a maintenance diet for Maple.  Instead of taking away lines, the Town has just (quietly?) decided that they will never consider adding lanes to Maple anywhere.   It’s a diet in the sense of not being allowed to gain weight, no matter what.  And then, for the rest of the Town, it was more a question of cutting out a few snacks:  A turn lane here or there, a few extra seconds of green-light time, maybe some parking places, and so on.

I guess I’ve run the diet analogy into the ground at this point.

Second, near as I can figure, this issue — cars versus others — is a big part of what Town officials mean when they say “But what do we want Maple Avenue to be?”.  That’s not all of it, but I think that’s about half of it:  How far are we willing to go to accommodate traffic?   They never seem to have any concrete discussion of that catch-phrase, so that’s going to be the subject of my next post, to try to sharpen up just exactly what Town officials mean when they say that phrase.

In this article I’m just reporting two things that were recently pointed out to me by my wife, who in turn was clued in by friends.  The issue is whether or not people are going to use the “gathering space” in front of the Chick-fil-a-car-wash as a driveway.  We have our initial evidence, thanks to a sharp-eyed colleague.

Recall Post #431, where I asked whether the Chick-fil-a-car-wash “gathering space” was a sham.  The idea is that the drive-through there literally cannot function unless some cars are allowed to drive across the brick patio in front of the store.  Briefly, unlike a normal drive-through, there’s no place to go if there’s a problem with your order, unless you can drive across that front patio to get back to a parking place.

Observation #1:  Look carefully at the little green car.  Off to the left.   Driving across the plaza.

Source:  Catherine Douglas Morgan, “Two Story Flagship Car Wash Now Open in the Town of Vienna”, Tyson’s Reported 11/18/2019, accessible at this link: https://www.tysonsreporter.com/2019/11/18/two-story-flagship-carwash-now-open-in-town-of-vienna/

OK, so that’s somewhat amusing.  Plausibly, that’s an old rendering, before the Town got them to agree to a “No Left Turn” sign at the exit to the drive-through.

Observation #2:  Less amusing, drivers have already figured out to use that plaza in the other direction when traffic is heavy.  A colleague reported that during a particularly bad back-up last week, on that section of Maple, she saw a driver who was heading toward Vienna drive down the McDonald’s access road, across the plaza, and exit onto Maple at the Chick-fil-a drive-through.  That put them about a dozen cars ahead of where they would have been, if they’d driven up the access road (toward Oakton) and exited onto Maple at the McDonald’s.

Northern Virginia, traffic backup, you can get a dozen cars ahead if you use that plaza as a driveway?  In hindsight, of course somebody’s going to do that.  I never would have guessed it ahead of time.  I’m not sure there’s a “No Entry” sign there.  But of course they are.

Commentary:  All it would take is a couple of large moveable objects, and Chick-fil-A could block vehicular access to that brick patio/gathering space.  They could prevent cars from using it, will still allowing their delivery truck to use it to drop off their freight.

My bet is, they aren’t going to do that.  For exactly the reason stated in Post #431.  Seems to me that they need to keep it open, to handle botched orders in the drive-through line.

In the grand scheme of things, this hardly matters.  That area is so close to the road that you’d have to be kind of desperate (or deaf) to try to use it as any sort of community “gathering space”.

But the fact that the “gathering space” is also going to be a driveway raises the idea that maybe the benefits of MAC have been a touch over-sold.  It’s hard for me to look at that structure and say what useful or beneficial things the citizens of Vienna got from that, that they would not have gotten from by-right construction under the existing commercial zoning.

 

Suntrust Bank, Maple and Berry.

At the last Town Council work session, one of the more disturbing exchanges involved traffic counts.  The immediate issue was the implausibly high traffic volume that the Town’s consultant had assumed for the current use of the Suntrust Bank.  The consultant assumed that bank building generated 381 trips during the peak hour of the evening rush hour. 

This sort of thing matters, as I explained in Post #364.  If you overstate the existing traffic, then you understate the impact that MAC development will have on traffic.

Councilman Majdi questioned that figure.  And eventually they shut him down with the claim that this estimate was Science.  You can hear that about 1:18 into my recording (see Post #450).

As a person who has on rare occasion actually done science, that nonsense claim really got under my skin.  You can read Post #364 to see how crude the basic ITE ratebook methodology is.  In this case, because this is a very large bank building, and has a (two-lane) drive-through window, the consultant took a figure out a rate book, multiplied by the bank’s high total floor area, and came up with that number as the estimate of current traffic.

So, instead, I’m going to do some actual science.  I’m going to count the trips there, during evening rush hour, on a day to-be-determined, next week.  Part of actually doing science is announcing that ahead of time, so that I can’t discard the information if it doesn’t match my expectations.  (This avoids “publication bias”, in which negative results never see the light of day.)

Is one day’s observation perfect?  No.  Can I guarantee that counting by hand will be error-free?  No.  And blah blah blah, for those of you who want to trash-talk this ahead of time.

Will this be good enough to make my point?  Yep, I’m fairly confident of that.  My point being that the ITE ratebook methodology can be wildly off.  To me, the only question is whether the consultant’s estimate is off by more than a factor of ten (“order of magnitude) or not.

Why am I so confident about this?  Because I can do simple arithmetic.  Check the face validity of 381 trips by doing some long division.  That works out to a car going in or out of Suntrust every 10 seconds, steadily, for an hour.  Have you ever seen that happen?   At that bank?  Heck, at any Vienna bank?  Double heck,  at any Vienna business establishment, period?  Maybe one of the busier shopping centers, in its entirety.  But at a bank?  Not a chance.  I walk Maple at evening rush hour all the time (I did so yesterday).  Ain’t no way that bank does anything like that amount of business.

The point being that not only is the number wildly incorrect, it was not subjected to even the simplest check of face validity.  And if you find one like that, it’s a pretty fair bet you’ve got some other zingers in there as well.

(Need another face validity check?  Peak traffic on Maple is something like 2400 cars per hour.  The Suntrust 381 trips (in and out) equates to about 190 vehicles.  So, Suntrust, by itself, accounts for 8% of the traffic on Maple, during rush hour?  Nah.)

I think maybe everybody involved here has lost track of what the ITE ratebook methodology actually is.  It’s an agreed-upon methodology used to satisfy certain legal requirements.  It’s not science.

This number — and others like it — are why Majdi pressed for using actual (“hard”) counts of traffic in any further analysis.  Sure, for the future, we have to rely on some sort of projection.  But for the traffic we have now, we can actually count that.  And, if the 381 is an indication, we clearly should.

And as an extras-for-experts, I’m going to take apart the ill-defined notion of “bypass trips”.  Beyond the counts themselves, the subtraction of assumed “bypass trips” is the next-largest potential source of error in that traffic projection.

 

 

Google Earth view of the Giant Food shopping center parking lot.  Maple Avenue is at the top of the image.

When I was first introduced to MAC zoning, I assumed that, somewhere, somebody had done some hard analysis of how MAC was supposed to work.  Much later, I came to realize that often was not true.  Much of the analysis never went much beyond using current urban-planning phrases, combined with the hope that somehow those things would happen here.  There really wasn’t any analysis of how, exactly, that would work on Maple Avenue.

I could list a few, but if you read this blog, you can fill those in on your own by now.  If you want to see one, look at Post #302, on “destination shopping”.  The last graphic in the post is a stark contrast between actually creating a true destination shopping district (in this case, the Mosaic District), and just saying those words about Maple Avenue.

In this post, I’m going to drill down into two related concepts:  “Park once, shop many” and “mixed use trip reduction”.  These are routinely touted as advantages of mixed-use development.  My point is that if you actually look at the details, on Maple Avenue, you quickly realize that there’s not much there, there.  Quantitatively, the impact of these factors, on Maple, is apt to be quite small. Continue reading Post #459: Park once, shop many and mixed-use trip reduction.

380 Maple Ave W - Sunrise view of four sides

Source:  Plans posted by the Town of Vienna for the 11/8/2019 meeting of the Vienna BAR (.pdf), by Rust | Orling Architecture, Alexandria VA.

There is no doubt in my mind that when it comes time to vote, the Planning Commission will approve this building.

All the rest is commentary.  What follows is a handful of items that I thought might be worth noting. Continue reading Post #458: The 11/13/2019 Planning Commission work session on Sunrise at 380 Maple West