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.
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.
CORRECTION: Tonight’s Town Council work session is in the Community Center, not in Town Hall as I stated previously.
There appear to be two public meetings this week relevant to MAC zoning.
Monday, 10/21/2019, at 8:00 PM in Town Hall, Town Council will hear a petition to appeal final approval of the Marco Polo/Vienna Market project. At issue is white siding covering the backs of the (otherwise) brick buildings. MAC statute “design criteria” appear to require that the front and back of a building match, when the back is visible to the public. A citizen filed a petition asking the Town to enforce that and so require that the backs be covered in brick, not siding.
Because this is a public hearing, I believe that citizens may speak for up to three minutes.
Tuesday, 10/22/2019, at 7:30 PM in Town Hall, Town Council will hold a work session to discuss draft amendments the Town’s MAC zoning and other commercial zoning.
Work session materials can be found here, including statements from each of the Town Council members.
The Town does not broadcast work sessions, but audio recordings are available after-the-fact in the “archives” section of this web page: https://www.viennava.gov/index.aspx?NID=567
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Post #413 is the overview of what went on. Post #415 is my rant about how not to do a survey. Both of those were pretty well-documented.
This post, by contrast, is just a set of opinions. These are mostly observations that I made, or that others who attended that meeting made, and passed along to me.
1: These meetings are needlessly disorganized.
And the corollary is, somebody needs to step up and keep this process organized. Hint: It’s not going to be done by Town staff.
Town Council meetings, in general, strike me as lacking in organization. It may or may not be obvious when you attend or watch a meeting. But when you (effectively) transcribe the meetings, as I do when I generate an “index” to match my audio files, it really stands out. For any significant issue, the discussion just wanders. Any one issue will be discussed half-a-dozen different times in a meeting — typically with no clear summary or wrap-up or conclusion. Time isn’t budgeted in any meaningful way, and a disproportionate share of time is spent on the minutia of an item.
I’ve said that before, most recently in a writeup on time management (Post #388). And I acknowledge that this must be a long-standing problem, given that Town Council was struggling with long meeting times back in 1969.
Source: Town of Vienna newsletter, February 1969, available from this archive of old town newsletters on this Town of Vienna webpage.
Weirdly, one thing that other local governments routinely do to streamline their meetings appears to be infeasible for Vienna. That’s Councilman Majdi’s suggestion to use a consent agenda (Post #404) to get minor, non-controversial items out of the way. I literally couldn’t find a local government that doesn’t use that approach (other than Vienna). Based on that, I would guess that something as radical as putting estimated times for agenda item would be beyond the pale. (Fairfax County does that, but none of the smaller local jurisdictions (Herndon, Falls Church, Fairfax City) does.)
But this last work session really brought the lack of organization to the forefront. Months back, when the Town Council et al. first started discussions of re-doing MAC, I despaired of the Town ever being able to get through it (Post #325). With every additional meeting, I continue to despair. These meetings just end up all over the place.
Here’s my summary of the structure of the 10/9/2019 Town Council work session on revising commercial zoning (including MAC) in Vienna.
It started down in the weeds. Town staff provided about 100 pages of “redline” documents. That is, a marked-up (edited) copy of the Town’s entire commercial zoning ordinance, plus supporting materials. Apparently, each Town Council member was supposed to provide comments on that 100 pages, and at least one of them (Councilman Potter) did exactly that.
Town staff surprised Town Council with brand-new and highly controversial material. Then Town staff started to provide an overview of key aspects of MAC, but this included issues that Town Council had never even seen before, such as raising the height limit to 67′ (plus parapets), and two (or three?) plans for reducing the applicable MAC zone to a subset of Maple.
A bit of a free-for-all ensued. So the presentation and discussion more or less broke down into an unplanned discussion of individual items. On which there was, may I mildly say, a lack of consensus among Town Council.
It eventually became apparent to some members that they needed to hash out the big-picture items first before they edited the 100 page document. Only at the end of the meeting did they decide that they needed to discuss the big picture first, and then get down into the weeds. The last 15 or so minutes of the meeting consisted of Town Council deciding that each individual would write out their “big ticket” items, and that Town staff would compile that list.
And they realized they needed to get feedback from the public, on these big issues, before proceeding to rewrite the law. Credit for Councilman Noble for insisting that the Town do a proper, random-sample survey, to see what citizens think about these changes to the zoning rules. (Town staff had planned to do another non-random internet survey, and it’s far from clear to me that Town staff are the right people to do a proper survey (Post #415).
The upshot is that they just sort of stumbled through it. And only at the end of the day did they realize they had not one, but two major steps to take before they got down into the details of editing the 100 pages of Town statute. But I will say that they at least, at the end, came away with two action items: Create a list of things to discussion, and do a proper (random-sample) survey of Vienna residents about those items.
I mean, by the end of it, I think they got the process right. They really do have to reach agreement on (e.g.) how big the buildings will be, and so on, before they can get into the details of rewriting the statute. And they probably ought to get some clean feedback from Vienna citizens. And (not mentioned above), the idea of getting some handle on the economics of redevelopment was a good one.
By the end, it was evident to many observers — not just me — that nobody was running the show. I’ve now had two people, at two different times, give me their own versions of this same observation. The meeting was not quite a random walk. It did eventually get to some sort of conclusion. But my gosh, if this is the pace of progress, it’s going to be years, if ever, before this gets done.
This meeting was the easy part. They didn’t have to try to reach consensus about anything other than what the next steps should be. When they start in on the actual details of the law, I can’t imagine how this laissez-faire approach can possibly work.
Maybe the Town needs to have a paid, disinterested consultant come in and run this process for them. Literally hire someone to run these work sessions. Not an expert in zoning, but an expert in running meetings with an eye toward reaching consensus on controversial topics. These meetings aren’t going to run themselves. But right now, that seems to be the plan.
Finally, I can tell you what I don’t want to see. I don’t want to see this go “underground”, and have the details worked out with another steering committee, ad-hoc committee, or other small, selected group of individuals. I just perceive too much potential for mischief. As I now understand it, the original MAC was presented to Town Council for a yes/no vote. Town Council, as a whole, did not have the option to modify the law as it was presented to them. However difficult it may be for Town Council to proceed in the current fashion, I don’t think they want to go back to the methods used for the original MAC development.
2: Additionality and compactness: Town Council still doesn’t “get it” regarding open/gathering/green space.
There are two basic, simple, and purely technical points that Town Council keeps walking around, rather than addressing.
The first is “additionality”.
The existing open-space requirement and the proposed “gathering space” requirement double-count spaces that already have to be kept open, by law. And, as a result, you can end up with no additional open space, beyond that which was already required.
For example, as currently written, MAC buildings must be set back at least 20′ from the Maple Avenue curb. All of that setback that is not literally in the Town’s right-of-way counts in the open/gathering space calculation. Even though the builder has absolutely no choice but to provide that 20′, by statute. In addition, any sort of walkway that is needed merely to service the building, counts as open space. But the builders would have to provide a way for people to get in and out of the building, in any case.
This is what led me to point out how ineffective the existing “open space” requirement was. In the case of 444 Maple West, it did virtually nothing. The “open space” requirement didn’t result in any additional open space — it merely counted a bunch of spaces that would have had to be open, either by law, or simply to allow the building to be used. Like this, from the post cited just above, on the then-current version of 444 Maple West.
Currently, our wily Department of Planning and Zoning has taken to evaluating existing MAC buildings and proposals against a new version of this, deemed “gathering space”. These new evaluations seem to show that this new “gathering space” rule would be effective. But that’s a trick, and nobody who has worked with legislation should be fooled by it. You are looking at buildings that had been built to satisfy the existing (“open space”) law. If the alternative (“gathering space”) law had been in effect, those buildings would have been built to satisfy the new law. Evaluating buildings structured to satisfy one law, by looking at them through the lens of a different law, shows nothing. My point is that these comparisons explicitly do not show that the “gathering space” rule would create additional open space. All they show is that building structured to satisfy one open-space rule would have had to have been restructured if they were to satisfy a different open-space rule.
Upshot #1: If you want a rule that creates additional open space, beyond that already required by law, then you need to write a rule that explicitly calls for additional open space. You have to eliminate the double-counting.
The second technical point is what Town Council keeps mis-labeling as “contiguous”.
Contiguous just means that all the parts of the area touch one another. So, for example, the existing sidewalk around the Tequila Grande site is contiguous. The sidewalk and mowing strip together are quite narrow at this intersection (only about 8′ wide), but those account for about 5500 square feet of contiguous open space.
“CONTIGUOUS”
You couldn’t hold a meeting on that sidewalk — it’s worthless as a gathering space. But it’s 5500 square feet of contiguous open space.
I think what the Town would actually like to see is what I term “compact” space. (But I made that up. There is no simple English word for “not stretched thin”.) I think that’s what the Town was after, in the “parks and plazas” phrase in the MAC statement of purpose and intent. Here’s the same 5500 square feet, but as “compact” space, in the sense of not stretched thin.
“COMPACT”
That space is about 75′ on a side (to within my drawing error). It is exactly as if you took all of that sidewalk/utility strip space, folded it up, and made something useful out of it. At that point, you do have some sort of “gathering space”. (Although, as I continue to state, it would not be very pleasant due to the noise.)
Upshot #2: If you want something like the picture above, to be “parks and plazas”, you’re going to have to write it into the law. Something like, x% of the open space will consist of a single area where the longest dimension is no more than N times the shortest dimension. You’re going to have to rule out “open space” that consists of nothing but (contiguous) long, skinny space, like a sidewalk.
A
3: Someone needs to draw the map that was outlined, live, during the meeting.
At this meeting, Town staff put up several options for restricting additional MAC buildings to the core of the Town. They presented two maps, but the Town Council asked them to sketch out a third map, on the fly. That third map was all the existing MAC lots that do not adjoin residential property. As it turns out, that looked to be just two blocks or so, of the oldest section of the Vienna downtown.
Please don’t let that third map be forgotten. If necessary, I can re-play that portion of the meeting, and sketch it in. But I think that the idea of a central business district is fairly classic, and I would hate to lose sight of the idea that some small part of the Vienna downtown could be rebuilt without directly abutting the surrounding neighborhoods.
I could keep going, but I’ve probably hit the TLDR point for most readers. Let me stop with just these three points.
