Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #398: Per VDOT, traffic isn’t getting worse in Vienna, or on I-66, …

This post is more-or-less a continuation of Post #396, traffic trend on Courthouse.  I had to download all the VDOT traffic counts to do that, so I figured I might as well package those numbers up in some form that people could access easily.

What I found when I did that is that, per VDOT, traffic counts are stable-to-declining throughout Vienna.  So it’s not just Courthouse where VDOT shows no increase in vehicle counts.  It’s pretty much all of Vienna … including I-66.

Hmm.

The data file below is an Excel workbook (.xls) summarizing 2006 – 2018 Town of Vienna traffic counts on the VDOT website.

VDOT traffic counts 9-27-2019

Here are a few things to note.

  • VDOT only routinely measures traffic on a handful of Vienna streets.  Various other entities (the Town, or developers) will do ad-hoc counts on other streets.
  • VDOT has detailed data for a few years prior to 2005, but that’s only publicly available as .pdf files.  If you have a particular interest in a particular road, for 2001 – 2004, you can look that up on the VDOT website.
  • VDOT shows a traffic count for every year, but it only actually measures traffic roughly once every three years.  In between measurements, it extrapolates based on an assumed rate of growth.  The workbook above only shows the years in which VDOT made an actual traffic measurement on a street.
  • VDOT typically measures traffic for just a few days, so there will be some random variation from year to year based on exact traffic conditions during those two days.

My main takeway is that there has been no strong upward trend in cars on the road more-or-less anywhere in Vienna.  Or, at least, that’s what VDOT says.  This assumes that VDOTs methods are consistent across years.

Here are two ways to see that, both telling the same story.  The first is a count of “vehicle miles traveled” in Vienna, excluding I-66, per VDOT.  This is a VDOT estimate of all the miles, that all vehicles combined, traveled on Vienna streets in any one year.  The second is a simpler way to get at an aggregate, totaling the vehicle counts across the 24 street segments in Vienna that were reported consistently over the entire period.  Either way you do it, there’s no trend to speak of.  Both of these graphs exclude I-66.

Post #397: Our assets become our liabilities, round 3.

At the 9/24/2019 Transportation Safety Commission meeting, one citizen said that the Parkwood School is likely to close, following the death of its founder and long-time director.  That little private school is located at the corner of  Marshall Road and Ware Street.  For all appearances, other than for the extensive on-site parking, it looks like handful of 1950’s houses on a spacious lots.  In the picture below, the Vienna Aquatic Club pool is in the background, and most of the foreground is Parkwood School.

That citizen was hoping the Town might buy the land and make it a park, rather than let it be developed.   So that prompts the re-run of a point I made in this prior post and this prior post:  Our assets become our liabilities.

In Vienna and the rest of Northern Virginia, a significant piece of open space used to be an asset to a neighborhood.  It kept residential or commercial density down, it might have added a nice bit of greenery, and so on.  Always harmless, typically beneficial.

But now any significant bit of open space is a potential liability as well.  If redeveloped in the current economic climate, the result will be larger structures and higher density than the surrounding neighborhood.  A neighborhood without such open space is stable.  Change occurs one small lot at a time.  But a neighborhood with some large open space risks leap-frogging from its current state to … whatever is most profitably built these days.  And, in general, for a larger piece of land, that means some form of higher-density housing.

Per the Fairfax County tax maps, the school in its entirety sits on about 4.3 acres of land.  (All five lots circled above are owned by the same trust.)  To put that in perspective, the new six-house development across from Westwood County Club occupies 2.7 acres.  The Tequila Grand/444 Maple West development occupies about 2.75 acres.

If not rezoned to higher density, but merely subdivided under the current RS-16 zoning (minimum lot size of 16,000 square feet), the three current structures could be replaced with eleven new houses.  Given market conditions, there is little doubt that the houses would be as large as could be fit onto the lots.

I’d like to think that a developer would not try to get it rezoned to higher density, given the land area involved.  But these days, you just can’t tell.  The school is, after all, directly across from a large church, not other houses.  It backs to a swim club (Vienna Aquatic Club), not houses.  And it’s a very convenient commute to Metro from there.  If rezoned for townhouses, a quick reading of the zoning law suggests they could squeeze in maybe 30 or so under our current townhouse zoning of 8/acre, plus a bit of required open space.

Anyway, Vienna is totally unprepared to buy new park land.  At least as far as I can tell.  There’s no plan for parks and no contingency fund for purchasing such land.  (In fact, oddly enough, much of what we have as park land today used to be the locations of our local sewage treatment plants.  Those areas were converted to parks when sewage treatment became centralized in the 1960s.)  The idea of preserving this fairly significant piece of land as open space for future generations is appealing.  But it ain’t gonna happen.

 

Post #396: Courthouse traffic trend?

At last night’s Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) meeting, there was a lot of complaint about rising levels of traffic on Courthouse.  And I have to say, that matches my perception.  I see afternoon rush hour backups at the Maple/Nutley light that reach past Meadow Lane playground.  And … I just don’t recall seeing that a few years ago.

Long story short, VDOT data show no upward trend in traffic on Courthouse Road.  This probably comes as a surprise to the people who live on Courthouse.  It certainly goes against my perception of traffic on Courthouse.  But the numbers are what they are.

VDOT traffic counts are available on this page.  Please note that while they show a count for every year, for every monitored street, it looks like they only do an actual measurement (for Courthouse) every third year.  In-between, it looks like they just just gap-fill by trending the data forward.

Here’s the VDOT count of average weekday traffic, every third year from 2003 to 2018, in cars per day:

So I just thought I’d throw that out there.  I have a few ideas of what might be causing this, but it’s hard even to guess as to how to support or refute any proposed explanation.

Just to forestall one possible argument, the peak hour traffic is no more concentrated now than it was back in 2003.  Throughout this period, just under 10% of the daily traffic occurred during the peak hour of the day.

So what’s the explanation? One way to explain it is that everybody is wrong.  Traffic hasn’t picked up.  Traffic was actually worse in 2003, on Courthouse, than it is today.  Perception and memory can be flawed, so you can’t rule that out.

Otherwise, I’m stumped.  I just can’t quite picture a plausible scenario where an increasing number of cars is getting onto that street, but evading the VDOT traffic counter.

Perhaps traffic is more concentrated for very brief periods of time, leading to brief (but extreme) backups.  Those “micro-bursts” of traffic would then make an impression that we would tend to remember.

Could the recent (2016?) re-timing of the Maple Avenue lights have anything to do with this?  Could that have bunched traffic up more effectively on Courthouse?

 Here’s my best guess.  I noted earlier that we really have a large number of tear-downs going on in the Town of Vienna (Post #308).  Could the deep PM backups at the Courthouse/Nutley light be a “quitting time” phenomenon?  In effect, we now have a large local workforce of construction workers.  My vague recollection (from one summer working as a carpenter’s helper) was that, come 5 PM, that’s quitting time.  And everybody knocks off.  So I wonder if we have enough of a local construction labor force now that it is affecting the “peakiness” of traffic on Courthouse.  Not enough to materially raise the daily counts, say.  But just enough, added at around the same time, into the existing PM rush hour, that it materially boosts the length of the backup at the Nutley/Maple light.  And I then  perceive those long (but short-lived) lines of cars as “traffic sure has gotten a lot worse”.

No way to validate that one way or the other.  But for sure, the hard numbers in this case are strongly at odds with the common perception.

 

Post #394: Tonight’s Transportation Safety Commission meeting: Please don’t boil the frog. Update 2

Tuesday, 9/24/2019 at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, Transportation Safety Commission will meet and take public comment on traffic safety issues in the neighborhood bordered by Maple, Nutley, and Courthouse. This includes both current issues and “impact of future development on those issues”.

 Citizens are invited to speak, with a time limit of three minutes.

For background, see Post #389.  If you live in the area bounded by Courthouse, Maple, and Nutley, consider attending tonight’s meeting and speaking up.  The meeting starts at 8 PM.

In this post, I want to state what I hope to get out of this meeting.  Likely, I will be adding to this post over the course of the day.

Mainly, I hope that the TSC will consider what can be done to address the future impact that MAC development will have.  To me, that’s what makes this  inherently different from anything the TSC has ever done.

The TSC listens to citizen complaints about current conditions all the time.   There is a process in place for citizens to petition for measures to address existing  problems (the Citizen’s Guide to Traffic Calming in Vienna (.pdf).   The TSC occasionally has a town-wide review of extant problem areas,  most recently in 2008 and 2010.

But the TSC has never been asked to come up with proactive measures to address the expected future fallout from a change in Vienna’s zoning rules.  That’s new.  And to me, given the context, that’s the main point of this exercise.

There is a process in place for dealing with current problems.  For any current problem, if we who live in this neighborhood were sufficiently upset, and someone wanted to go to the trouble of collecting signatures from the required 75%/50% of all affected households, then we could go through the procedures outlined in the Citizen’s Guide (cited above) to deal with any current problems.

Aside:  Sidewalks, however, seem to be a separate issue, and not nearly as transparent as other safety measures.  Although sidewalks are never mentioned in the Citizen’s Guide (cited above), it appears that citizen requests for sidewalks must go through the petition process outlined in the Guide.  A revised version of that Guide (still in draft form) does, in fact, mention sidewalks.

But there is no process within Vienna for dealing with the likely future problems from redevelopment.  And yet (see below), a full build-out of Maple under MAC zoning will surely generate some significant traffic issues.  So, to me, this should be about how best to deal with the traffic impacts that are projected to arise as MAC zoning converts Maple Avenue into a high-density housing district. Continue reading Post #394: Tonight’s Transportation Safety Commission meeting: Please don’t boil the frog. Update 2

Post #392: BAR final review of Marco Polo/Vienna Market

The first item on the 9/19/2019 Board of Architectural Review meeting was a look at the final plans for the Marco Polo/Vienna Market development.   You can see them at this location.  This is a quick summary from the Town’s recording, which you may find on the Town’s Legistar/Granicus calendar.

The BAR took about an hour and fifteen minutes to tweak details of the design.    At the end, with a few caveats, the plans were unanimously approved.  My reading of this is that the only major item yet to be resolved is the exact design of the mural on the front of the building.  Presumably, that will be up to the Vienna Public Art (or Arts) Commission.

These three drawings below show the Maple Avenue view of: What the BAR passed originally; what was then handed back to the BAR as having been passed by Town Council (Marco Pologate); and then the final approved plan.

Weirdly, you can see that a ghost of the original building lives on in the final drawing.  The right side of the building, receding into the distance, remains a view of the original building.  (Plausibly, the right side of the left portion of the building, receding into the distance, is also a remnant of the original drawing.)

Here’s a close-up of the building at the left, in the same sequence:  what the BAR passed originally, what was then handed back to the BAR as having been passed by Town Council (Marco Pologate), and then the final plan.

At any rate, barring any other surprises, the bottom picture is what you will see going up over the next year or so, at the site of the former Marco Polo.

If I had to offer an epitaph for this, it would be the following:

A)  Kudos to the BAR for fixing this as best they could.   Just getting rid of the bricked-in windows was worth their review time, in my opinion.

B)  Did the Town learn anything about the review process here?  And is there any plan, by the Town, to change anything about how they go about this? In short, are they going to learn from their mistakes?  Or are they just going to shrug this one off and keep on doing what they are doing?

I have already made the point that there needs to be more communication between these bodies (BAR, PC, and TC) during the review process.  In particular, I called for the chair of each body to pass along a short written summary of the proceedings, to avoid the sort of internal inconsistency that occurred with the Sunrise assisted living review (Post #301).

But in addition, I would say that this whole affair points out the need for some checks and balances within the Town of Vienna government.  At the minimum, somebody in the Town government, outside of the Department of Planning and Zoning, needs to compare the plans between meetings, to see that they do not change between the time one entity approves them, and the next entity gets to review them.  Otherwise, having demonstrated that staff are willing to change the plans quietly between approvals, there’s nothing to stop that from happening again.

 

 

Post #391: Wade Hampton, Theorem-Proof

Theorem:  Potential parking spots on Wade Hampton = 11 + 1  = 12 (Post #238r)

Proof:  Photo 3:30 PM 9/19/2019

Lemma 1:  7 west

Lemma 2:  5 east

Q.E.D.

Bonus question, points awarded only if you can answer this without using internet search:

Who was Wade Hampton?

What is the connection to Gone With the Wind?

Best answer, courtesy of a reader:

“Wade Hampton was a civil engineer back in the early days of Vienna and designed out some of our roadways. He was known for designing especially tight and blind turns such as the current Wade Hampton/Roland Rd and Walnut Lane. He would often be quoted when people complained about this design as saying, “Frankly, my Dear, I don’t give a damn if you don’t like my roadway designs.”  The phrase was later ripped off by the writer of Gone With the Wind.”

 

 

Post #390, (that’s not a) retail vacancy rate

The Town of Vienna is asking Fairfax County for funds from the Fairfax Economic Support Fund.  They’d like Fairfax to pay for half of a $100,000 economic development study for the Town.  A brief presentation on that was given at the 9/17/2019 County Board of Supervisor’s meeting.  You can see the contents of the presentation at this link (.pdf).

The point of the Fairfax Economic Support Fund is to invest in development around the county, where the expected increase in Fairfax County taxes will cover the cost of the investment.  Fairfax County staff appear to judge that this study will boost tax revenues by more than the $100,000 cost.  So they recommended funding it.

For this posting, the purpose of the proposed study does not much matter.  Based on the bullet points, it sounds like this could be merely finding some justification for MAC zoning.  (“Placemaking” is a giveway there.)  But it might actually be a legitimate market analysis.  If so, I’d applaud that, because, better late than never.  It would be good to have some reasoned analysis of (e.g.) how much more retail space Maple Avenue can be expected to absorb, what types of new retailers are likely to enter that market, and so on.

The only point I want to make here is a technical one.  The Vienna proposal is cited as showing a “15% vacancy rate”.  And that is immediately interpreted as a retail vacancy rate on Maple.

First, that’s not a vacancy rate.  Or, at least, it’s not comparable to the way anyone else calculates a vacancy rate.  Vacancy rates — office, retail, or commercial — are always expressed as a percent of the available space.  (Vacant square footage over total square footage.)  The Town’s number, by contrast, appears to be a count of addresses (“spaces”).  The Town counted 138 vacant “spaces”, of which 68 were on Maple.

So, e.g., Giant Food counts as one space.  The Maple Avenue Market would have counted as one space.  Those two would be weighted equally in a simple count of addresses.

Second, it’s not clear that’s a count of retail spaces only.  That matters materially, because office vacancy rates in Fairfax County are quite high (see below).  My guess is that the Town’s records do not show which spaces are retail and which are office, and that in all likelihood, that’s a count of all commercial addresses in Vienna.

Third, that’s not Maple Avenue in isolation.  The overall fraction of addresses that are empty appear to be for the Town as a whole, not for Vienna.  (I can’t know for sure, because there doesn’t seem to be any copy of this study available on-line on either the Vienna or Fairfax County websites).

This is not a criticism of the number.  A quick-and-dirty throw-away number like that , that’s perfectly fine if it gets the Town the money it was seeking.  The Town took its records, counted addresses, and used that as part of its proposal asking Fairfax to cover half the cost of the study.   I doubt, for example, that the Town’s tax records list the square footage of each establishment.

This is a criticism of how that number is being quoted and used.  My only technical point is that you should NOT compare the Town’s number to any published estimate of retail vacancy rates.  Published estimates will be done properly, based on square footage.  The Town’s number, by contrast, equates (e.g.) a tiny shop space with Giant Food.

FWIW, here are some recent (2014) estimates of actual retail and office vacancy rates, prepared by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) using data from CoStar.  The numbers here will vary modestly from other estimates, based on the exact details of how they went about the calculation.

Source:  MWCOG, CoStar.

Finally, also FWIW, if you want to see how I calculated a ground-floor retail vacancy rate for Maple, showing data and methods, see this post.  Those numbers are a little stale at this point, but they still shouldn’t be too far off.  For further background on the mix of retail on Maple, see Post #201 and Post #208.