Category: MAC zoning

Note:  This is not an actual survey.  I’m not collecting answers to these questions.

Question 1:

 

Above you see the Chick-fil-A-car-wash.  It’s a reasonable proxy for what MAC zoning will bring to Vienna.  The building itself stands 43′ tall; the tallest tower is 62′ tall.

The front of the building sits 24′ to 30′ off Maple Avenue.  That “setback” provides a private-property gathering space where Vienna citizens can socialize, as long as they buy something from the Chick-fil-A.

The Town of Vienna is considering allowing developers to place buildings like this all along Maple.  Most will have housing on the upper floors instead of a car wash, typically condos or apartments.

Citizens of Vienna will get a series of these private-property gathering spaces adjacent to Maple Avenue, similar to the front of the Chick-fil-a-car-wash, along with new mixed-use (retail and housing) buildings.

The initial wave of construction (approximately a dozen new buildings) will result in a one-third increase in the number of cars on Maple Avenue during rush hour.

Question:  Should the Town of Vienna proceed with this plan?

Yes

No

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Question 2:

Would you like to see the above-ground power lines along Maple removed (i.e., buried underground)?

Yes

No

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Question 3:

The Town of Vienna is considering whether or not to remove the above-ground power lines along Maple.  This will cost the Town approximately $20 million.  Only the lines running along Maple will be removed, not the power lines that cross over Maple (as illustrated above).  Power lines will not be removed on any of the other streets in Vienna.

Should the Town proceed with its plan to remove (i.e., bury) the above-ground power lines along Maple?

Yes, please spend $20 million to remove some of the power lines on Maple.

No, please find a better use for that money or don’t spent it at all.

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Question 4:

The Town of Vienna is going to survey its citizens regarding MAC zoning.  Should the Town use actual pictures of actual MAC buildings, or should they use pretty pictures of far nicer streets, as shown above.  That is, should the Town use pictures of streetscapes that are far nicer than Maple Avenue could possibly be,  in order to gather opinions about what to do with Maple Avenue?

Choose one:

Show me reality (actual Maple Avenue)

Show me fantasy (locations that are much nicer and more spacious than Maple Avenue)

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Question 5:  Bonus question.

If you laid $20 million worth of $100 bills end to end, in a straight line, starting at Maple and Center, how far could you get?

Gainesville, VA

Germantown, MD

Dale City, VA

Andrews AFB, MD

Any of the above

 

CORRECTION:  Tonight’s Town Council work session is in the Community Center, not in Town Hall as I stated previously

At the Town Council work session tonight (7:30 PM 10/22/2019), there will be further discussion of changes to our commercial zoning regulations, including MAC zoning.  For this discussion, each Town Council member wrote up (what was supposed to be) a list of the major issues they’d like to see discussed.  You can find those at this web page.  The current game plan then calls for proceeding in three steps:  Hashing out the the overall big picture first, polling the citizens of Vienna second (and perhaps adjusting the big picture as necessary), and then rewriting the statute third.

Continue reading Post #427: Tonight’s Town Council work session.

Marco Polo/Vienna Market townhouses

Front:

Back:

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It was an odd night.  That’s the only way I can describe it.

The MAC issue in question was a petition, by a citizen, to have the Town Council overturn the Board of Architectural Review’s final approval of the Marco Polo/Vienna Market development.  The particular point was the plain-looking backs of the Townhouses, clad in siding instead of brick, as the townhouse fronts were.  This disparity between the ornate brick front and somewhat plain siding back was was arguably inconsistent with Town of Vienna code.  For Maple and MAC projects, the zoning code calls for all sides of the building that are visible to the public to be consistent in look and materials used.

In the end, it looks like there was an agreement to add a small amount of brick to the otherwise-all-siding backs of the townhouses.  Basically, the pillars between the garage doors will be brick, and I guess there will be a line of brick over the garage doors.  But the issue will have to come back before the Town Council for final approval at the next meeting.

How they got to that decision, and two-and-a-half hours it took to get there, that was the odd part.

Continue reading Post #426: Town Council meeting 10/21/2019

         

This will be my final post, for now, on the Chick-fil-A-car-wash.

Recap:  The big surprise with the Chick-fil-A-car-wash is that the large transformers for the underground utilities sit in front of the building, adjacent to the exit for the drive-through, nine feet from the curb, directly next to the sidewalk.

At this point, I’m pretty sure that this is an oversight.  In other words, it’s not that key Town officials and staff were aware of and actively approved this.  It’s far more likely that it just slipped through the cracks, and got lost amid all the other details that had to be checked as part of the zoning and permitting processed.  If they’d noticed it, they’d have had them put the transformers in an underground vault.  Nobody intended to have this spoil the “MAC streetscape” at this location.

Some may care about the aesthetics of it, but I don’t.  I look at this for what it is.  It’s a grotesquely oversized fast-food joint on an urban arterial highway.  It’s across the street from a gas station and a 7-11, which, in case you’ve never noticed, has a dumpster right next next to the sidewalk.  In that setting, a couple of electrical boxes out front is not hugely out-of-place.  (Shoot, in that setting, electrical boxes practically count as decoration).  I realize the Town has higher aspirations, but it’s not as if these unexpected electrical boxes/transformers are some huge eyesore relative to what’s across the street.

In a nutshell, in terms of aesthetics, I’d say that this Chick-fil-A-car-wash achieves something I would have thought impossible:  It makes McDonald’s look great.  Side-by-side, next to the Chick-fil-A-car-wash, McDonald’s comes across as petite, unobtrusive and downright stylish.

Instead, I’m just concerned about the bike/pedestrian safety issue that the Town’s oversight has created.  As I believe I have shown in the just-prior post, this is now the worst driveway in town for pedestrian visibility, beating out the driveway next to the Vienna Mattress Firm (aka the former Sleepy’s).

 

  

The new driveway at the Chick-fil-A is a worse than the Vienna Mattress Firm/Sleepy’s exit for several reasons.

1. The sight lines between driver and obscured sidewalk are shorter at the Chick-fil-A than they are at the intersection above (Post #423).  A car driver who stops just short of the sidewalk will have less than one second to see and stop for an oncoming sidewalk bicyclist.
2. At the Mattress Firm (Sleepy’s) intersection above, drivers are actually looking at the obscured part of the sidewalk when they look at oncoming cars on Maple.  .  At the Chick-fil-A, by contrast, drivers will be looking away from the obscured part of the sidewalk when they look at oncoming cars on Maple.
3. The Chick-fil-A exit will predictably be busy.  At times (such as when traffic backs up past the driveway), we should expect there to be multiple cars waiting to exit.
4. Drivers will  predictably be distracted as they exit the fast-food drive-through, e.g., putting their change away, distributing food to their kids, eating, and so on.
5. Drivers will be predictably unfamiliar with this unique situation.    This fast-food restaurant is likely to attract customers from a wide catchment area.  And this drive-through exit, with it’s obscured sight lines, is unlike more or less anything else in NoVA.  No reasonable person would expect a brand-new building to have such an unsafely obscured sidewalk at the fast-food exit.
6. The new HAWK light makes this a route that can be (and is) used by Madison High School students.  (Note that Chick-fil-A serves breakfast, so it will be open as they walk to and from school.)

Since the Town played a part in creating this new (potential) hazard, my feeling is that, if the Town’s experts see this as the hazard that I believe it is, the Town should do what it can, before the Chick-fil-A opens, to mitigate it.

First, I don’t think it’s feasible to get those transformers moved.  Legally, I’m pretty sure the Town can’t require it.  And I’m also sure it would be hugely expensive to do that, at this point.  I think they are there to stay.

Second, the Town could put in signs and a convex mirror to make drivers and pedestrians/bikers aware of the hazard.  Seems like that’s a fairly minimal ask.  But, if  done properly, would make that intersection even less appealing.  Why?  Ideally, the convex mirror showing the view of the sidewalk would be in the driver’s field of vision as they look at oncoming traffic, i.e., it would have to be placed at the curb, to the right of the driveway (as viewed when facing the building). So you’d be adding a large stand-alone mirror, on a pole, in front of the building.

Third, given that this the 21st century, the Town could use a more active technology, such as putting in a pedestrian sensor and warning light.  The light would come on when pedestrians or bicyclists were approaching from the blind side of that driveway.  Obviously that’s a more expensive and extensive undertaking.

Finally, the Town could go back and correct the original sin here.  My understanding is that, originally, Chick-fil-A wanted the drive-through lane to exit across the front of the building, back to the access road that runs in front of McDonald’s.  Basically, to let drive-through customers leave that property the way every other customer does.  But the Town wanted/needed to claim the brick “plaza” in front of the building as open/gathering space.  Roadways can’t count as open space.  Hence the separate exit for the drive-through lane, and a pedestrian “plaza” in front.

I’ll note a couple of things.  First, I don’t think people are going to use that “plaza” because it’s too close to the 123 traffic to be pleasant.  So IMHO it’s there purely for looks.  And it’ll look the same whether people drive over it or not.  Second, the developers went ahead and put in protective bollards in front of the store front, as if to protect pedestrians from cars driving on that front “plaza”.  So it’s already set up to be a driveway.

In theory, then, the Town could tell Chick-fil-A that it could go back to its original plan, if it wanted to.  That would solve this issue for good, with some additional construction costs.  They’d close the separate drive-through exit where the transformers are, brick over that portion of the drive-through driveway, and have cars exit by crossing the front of the building, driving over what is now the brick “plaza”.

Anyway, at this point, I’m done.  I have no skin in the game.  I’m not going to shop there, my kids have graduated from Madison, and I have no reason to use that sidewalk.  I’m not a pedestrian safety expert, so it’s possible that I have made a mountain out of a molehill.  But I do bike and walk Maple all the time, and, in my considered opinion, this drive-through exit will take the prize as the worst entrance onto Maple.  At the minimum, I think it’s well worth having the Town have its own experts assess the situation, and, if the experts agree that this is a problem, do what they can to address the situation before Chick-fil-A opens.

I think this is now the single most visually-obstructed entrance onto Maple Avenue, by a slight margin.  I’ll present details on that below.  All things considered, I think the Town ought to consider adding a few safety measures proactively.  Detail follows.

Note:  My original posting exaggerated the difference between the Chick-fil-A exit and another visually obstructed entrance on Maple.  This post is more nearly correct, based on more careful measurement.

Continue reading Post #423: Town of Vienna, please add some pedestrian safety measures here (revised).

Regarding Post #421, yes, those are transformers.  They sit 9′ from the Maple Avenue curb, and the shorter one is a bit over 5′ tall.

They look like this:

They were marked on the plans (T is for transformer pad), and in fact, they were just about the first thing installed on the site, per Google Street View.

So this isn’t anything new, in the sense that anybody could have known about it if they had been sufficiently interested.

And this doesn’t bother me any.  I don’t eat at Chick-fil-A, I don’t wash my car, my kids won’t walk past that going to and from school, and in general I have no reason to walk that sidewalk.

And we have plenty of ugly utility boxes near the existing sidewalks.  Most are far smaller than these.  I believe all the traffic lights have such boxes.  Here are two in front of Tequila Grande.

I’m just surprised, for several reasons.

The first is the whole beautiful-broad-sidewalks schtick that Town staff use to promote MAC zoning.  I don’t recall seeing even one hulking 5′ tall transformer featured in any of the Town’s pictures of beautiful urban scenes with broad pedestrian zones.  So this doesn’t seem to fit in with the game plan.

Two, obviously, the Town isn’t planning to continue that broad sidewalk, at this location, if the other properties on the block redevelop.  The Town’s whole “walkability” thing has always struck me as kind of illogical and irrational.  So I guess it makes sense that nobody could be bothered to see that the new broad “pedestrian” zone could be extended at some future date.  As I said in the last post, our grandchildren will walk around these transformers.

Three, while we do have some ugly old electrical utility boxes on Maple, I’m frankly surprised that a Town that seems so prissy about how MAC looks would put in some ugly brand-new utility boxes.  And great big ones, to boot.

Fourth, I’d have thought something like this would have been nixed purely from the pedestrian/bicyclist safety aspect due to the lack of sight lines.  It’s a solid metal wall, 5′ tall, 9′ from the Maple curb, located maybe 2′ from the edge of the driveway where cars will exit the Chick-fil-A drive-through.  Drivers in full-size SUVs will plausibly be able to see over it, but drivers in sedans definitely will not.  Sedans will be well across the sidewalk before a driver would be able to see (e.g.) an oncoming bicyclist on the sidewalk.

So to me, it looks like drivers will have almost no time to react to (e.g.) a bicyclist heading down the sidewalk toward McDonalds.  I guess we will just have to rely on the cautious and courteous driving style for which Northern Virginia is so deservedly famous.

After using Google Street View, I don’t see another situation quite like this in Vienna.  The worst, I think, is the driveway next to the Vienna Mattress Firm (end of the row of shops attached to Panera).  But that sits 11′ from the road, and cars typically have four or five feet between the car and the wall of the building.

In summary, for a range of reasons, I did not expect to see the MAC streetscape in front of the Chick-fil-a-car-wash terminated by a couple of hulking transformers.  That wasn’t on the picture the Town (still) uses on its own website.  It’s not how the Town presents the beautiful MAC streetscape.  It bars any smooth continuation of that broad streetscape if the adjacent property redevelops.  And it looks like it creates a pedestrian/bicyclist hazard in our “pedestrian friendly” MAC zone.

But whatever.  It’s now a fixture in the Town of Vienna.  Those big green boxes are electrical equipment, and they are there to stay.

Here’s one for the “why do I have to be the one to point this out” category.  Remember MAC zoning’s promise of broad sidewalks, and a vibrant pedestrian walkable blah blah blah? Big selling point for MAC, right? Continue reading Post #421: Walk around them, our grandchildren shall.

 

 

 

The middle picture is the developer’s view, as provided to the town.  The other two are pictures taken today, with a 35 mm “normal” lens.  They should approximate how this would look, to the eye, if you were standing where the camera had been (eye level, in the median strip).  (And I have to remind you, the setback pictured above is substantially more spacious than the current MAC 20′ requirement for Maple setbacks, and 15′ for other roads.)

In fact, the middle picture is the view that the Town shows on its development map, for this project.  As shown in the screen shot below.

To me, that plaza certain appears a lot more spacious in the developer’s 3-D rendering than it does in reality.  It’s almost as if the developers used tricks of perspective to make that plaza appear far more spacious than it actually is.  And that’s exactly what they did.  It’s what developers routinely do.  In fact, Councilman Noble called out a different developer for doing exactly that, and wants to write standards into the MAC statute to prevent them from doing that in the future.

I will point out that there is, in fact, nothing technically wrong with the middle picture.  For example, both depicted vehicles are small, but not impossibly small.  Best I can tell, the blue car as depicted is 14′ bumper-to-bumper, or 2′ shorter than a Prius.  The blue car is tiny by modern standards, but it’s not flatly impossible.

The people are harder to judge, which brings us to what’s going on.  The problem is how your brain perceives the image, due to the perspective.  The people are also plausibly 5-ish feet tall, but they are foreshortened due to the perspective.  By eye, the “camera” for the developer’s rendering would have been located about 70 feet above the Shell station across the street.  That “camera” angle reduces the apparent height, but exaggerates breadth, in the picture, compared to what you are used to seeing at ground level.  Hence, your brain perceives the plaza as spacious, relative to the people.  But in fact, the images of the people are shortened, relative to the breadth of the plaza, in this perspective.

My point here is mostly that pictures can be manipulated.  Which is why, in my opinion, the Town should not base its next survey on pictures.

Note that manipulating your perception with a picture does not require outright fraud.  E.g., In the developer’s 3-D rendering above, the car was tiny, but not impossibly so.  I believe that all the dimensions (plaza, road, building) are correct.  Instead, just by choice of choice of perspective, surroundings, color, and (lack of) detail, you can make one scene appealing, and another less so.

Beyond the trick of perspective, look at that perfect blue sky, the empty road, the lack of trash, lack of clutter, and that perfect green landscaping.  No crabgrass there, that’s for sure.  It’s not real.  It’s better than real.

You think of pictures as being some form of hard evidence.  But what you actually perceive, when you see a picture, depends to a degree on what your brain expects to see.  You normally see people at eye level, not from 70′ above and across the street.  Based on that, you (mis-)perceive the plaza as spacious.  Separately, actual buildings and plantings show wear and tear, dirt and disarray, so you perceive the 3D rendered building as being beautiful in its lack of mundane imperfections.

These things happen way below the level of logic and reason.  You can tell yourself all day that it’s a trick, and that it won’t really look like that.  Meanwhile, your brain is telling you what a nice place that is.  And that’s how the Town has to make its decisions.  But we get to live with the reality of it.

EXTRA FOR EXPERTS:  Take a hard look at the far left edge of the Town’s depiction of this building.  It plays a feature role in my next, very short posting.

 

 

My wife brought this article to my attention, published yesterday by the organization Greater Greater Washington:

I strolled around Tysons with a walkability researcher. Here’s what he had to say.  By George Kevin Jordan (Editor and Correspondent) October 16, 2019 Continue reading Post #419: Tyson’s walkability assessment