The Town of Vienna Planning Commission passed the proposed 380 Maple West building (39 condos plus retail, corner of Maple and Wade Hampton) by a vote of 5-2. Commissioners Baum and Miller were the only “no” votes. I should have the audio, with my Excel index, posted shortly.
Continue reading Post #233: The 4/10/2019 Planning Commission meeting
Tonight (4/10/2019), at 8 PM in Town Hall, the Town of Vienna Planning Commission continues its public hearing on 380 Maple West (40 condos plus retail, corner of Maple and Wade Hampton). The public is invited to speak for up to three minutes. You can find the meeting materials, including the current plans for the building, at this link.
I’m going to spend my three minutes talking about what this proposal is going to do to Wade Hampton. Briefly:
The Town has made good on its recent promise to make recordings of public meetings accessible in a timely fashion. I didn’t want to pipe up about this until I started seeing all of the public meetings showing up. But if you will go to this page on the Town website, you can see, for the first time, recordings of the Transportation Safety Commission (TSC) and associated sub-committees.
Mostly I want to say, kudos to the Town’s audio engineer. I sat in and recorded the bicycle portion of the TSC meeting. Those folks were not used to being recorded. It was a mess, from an audio standpoint. People didn’t use the microphones, they forgot to turn the microphones on, they banged the microphones — you name it. And as much as I may appreciate low-key soft-spoken people in real life, they are a right pain to deal with when setting sound levels in an audio recording.
Producing clear audio is not as easy as you might think. As I was recording it, I was wondering how the Town was going to deal with all that. And the Town’s audio is clear as a bell. Despite the absolute hash that the speakers made of their own sound levels. I have no idea how they managed that.
There are still various “work sessions” that the Town does not record, and so there would be some rationale for me continuing to record. But I believe that everything that is of official record — where people could in theory vote on stuff — is now recorded and posted on the Town’s website. At this point, for any of my recordings, it’s always preferable to use the Town recording if it exists. Their audio is much better than anything I can manage to do.
This is a boon for anyone who wants to know what the Town is doing. I did not stay for the TSC portion of this meeting, but I now know (in hindsight) that they discussed, in part, the process for petitioning for traffic calming in Vienna. I need to listen to that. And now I can. Without this, I would have no idea what went on in that meeting.
My only other comment, to the Town, would be to take this full circle and post the agendas for every committee, before each meeting. On this one, for example, I only realized after-the-fact that traffic calming was on the agenda.
You can watch this week’s Town Council and Planning Commission meetings live on Cox (channel 27) or Verizon FIOS (channel 38), or by streaming, at this website. (For me, streaming only works with Chrome, and not with IE or Firefox. YMMV.)
On Wednesday 4/10/2019, at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, there is a continuation of the Planning Commission public hearing on the proposed 380 Maple West development (40 condos plus retail at Wade Hampton and Maple). Public comment will be accepted, limited to three minutes per person. If you spoke at the least public hearing, you may speak again as long as you speak about a different topic.
Meeting materials can be found at this link:
https://vienna-va.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=688177&GUID=A0F9E221-B438-490B-80FE-BE64D1869A73&Options=info&Search=
Sometimes you just have to remind people of the obvious. Just so we can focus on the doughnut, and not on the hole.
The graph above summarizes May 2014 traffic counts, from a Town of Vienna study, at peak intervals during the weekday and on Saturday, at four key intersections on Maple: Nutley, Lawyer’s, Park, and Beulah. The detailed data can be found in this Excel workbook.Traffic counts, 2015 TOV study, selected intersections
Currently, along Maple, motor vehicles outnumber pedestrians by a factor of 100:1, and motor vehicles outnumber bicycles by a factor of 1000:1. Continue reading Post #229: The Town’s 2015 Traffic Light Timing Study
For those of you who are already confused, merely by the title, I’m talking about the Maple Avenue traffic study. That official title is why I keep referring to it as the (thing formerly known as the) Maple Avenue traffic study. For the official title, I literally cannot remember all the buzzwords in the correct order.
I’m eventually going to have a lot to say about this, but here I’m just going to say two things. First, the study, as scoped, is fundamentally inconsistent. Briefly, if taken at face value 1) it’s impossible to predict traffic 10 years ahead, so we’re not going to do that and instead 2) we’re going to talk about “multi-modal strategies” that could only have significant impact decades into the future. Second, I’m going to do my own analysis of these issues. That part will take a while.
Continue reading Post #228: Maple Avenue Corridor Multimodal Transportation and Land Use Study
I don’t encourage email. You can find my email address on the splash page for this website, and I occasionally include it in posts when I am looking for someone to correct me on the facts.
I got an email on Wedenesday, from a reader of this site. It was a classic example of why I discourage email. I hate having to be “that guy”, that guy who always has something mean to say.
But in this case, I don’t see much choice. There was nothing wrong with the email. It was perfectly pleasant. And I don’t need to say anything mean about the sender.
But it brought to my attention yet another thing the Town is doing. So now — yet again — I need to say something deservedly mean about Town government.
Here’s what set me off. My reader went to the Town’s “community workshops” last Friday and offered her comments. And in her email to me, she included this, about 444 Maple Avenue West (the Tequila Grande development), emphasis mine:
" ... The person with whom I spoke last Friday night said there was nothing the Town could do to reverse that. She did however indicate the Town had learned lessons from that venture. ... "
Oh, yeah, our Town government has learned some lessons, all right. But they are probably not the lessons you think. Rather than just quietly email her back, I’m going to lay out my view of the lessons the Town has learned. In a nutshell, rather than back off one inch in the face of public protest, the Town has done nothing but double down.
The Town has made much about closing curb cuts (parking lot entrances) along Maple, under MAC. And the consultants for the (thing formerly known as the) Maple Avenue traffic study (post #223) duly echoed this with extended reference to the many curb cuts on Maple.
At various times, these curb cuts have been blamed for a) slowing traffic, b) increasing vehicular accident rates, and c) endangering pedestrians on the sidewalk. For the moment, let me put aside truth versus fiction in these claims, and ask a simple question:
If these Maple Avenue curb cuts are such a clear public menace, why hasn’t the Town already started getting rid of them? The Town owns the sidewalk. How can our elected officials idly stand by, when the menace of excess curb cuts stalks the Town, threatening our prosperity and our very lives?
That was sarcasm. But it’s a legit question. It’s a question that I naively asked. Seriously, if curb cuts are so bad, why don’t they close some of them? And the answer to that shows you exactly how proponents of MAC zoning will tell you only what they want you to hear. And not the full story.
After some research, my conclusion is that, practically speaking, the only way the Town can close a curb cut is to stuff a whole bunch of high-density housing on the lot behind it (i.e., MAC rezoning). And so, the only practical way to close a curb cut is to have a more people turning on and off of Maple, during the rush hour periods.
Once you figure that out, then it’s clear that the full effect of “closing curb cuts on Maple” is not the rosy picture painted by the Town. You have to pay for that curb cut closure by adding to traffic turning on and off Maple. Anyone who tells you that “getting rid of curb cuts” is an unalloyed positive for the Town is pulling your leg. To put it politely.
In fact, I’ll up the ante on this. If a property owner voluntarily agreed to allow it, the Town could close a Maple Avenue curb cut. So, with all the mayhem now being attributed to curb cuts, has the Town done anything at all about them? Has the Town systematically pressured Maple Avenue property owners about closing Maple Avenue curb cuts? Has it offered (e.g.) a property tax incentive for closing off curb cuts? Has it identified the ones apparently associated with high accident rates and developed policies targeting those specific locations?
In short, if this is such a problem, then has the Town done anything whatsoever to address it? Other than to use it to flack MAC?
Detail follows.
I took the Fairfax Connector bus down Maple Street last night, to run an errand at the other end of town. I was pleasantly surprised, to say the least. I’m hooked. This is not your grandfather’s city bus.
In this post, I am first going to go through the mechanics of it. E.g., link to the website that does the real-time tracking of the buses. Then give you my impressions.
Continue reading Post #225: Take the bus, edited PM 4/3/2019
Find it here, at this Google Drive folder. I’ve done what I can with it. If people won’t use their microphones, and talk softly … well, not much I can do after the fact.
Excel file serves as the index for what was said when.
