Category: MAC zoning

A colleague tried to ruin the last of the holiday weekend for me by asking about the Town’s proposed survey on … MAC-ish, development-ish stuff.  I decided it could probably wait until Monday morning.  In hindsight, I’d say that was the right decision.

You can access a draft of the Town’s proposed survey at the link on this web page.  This survey will be discussed at tomorrow’s (12/3/2019) Wednesday’s (12/4/2019) Town Council work session.

Formally, this item is listed as:

Discuss Draft Commercial Development Survey related to Town Council Directive to draft Amendments to Maple Avenue Commercial (MAC) Zone and Other Commercial Zoning Districts along with Related Amendments

Now, before we go one step further, I need to ask you a question:  Did you actually read all of that block of text above?  Honestly?  Or, by the time you got to the 4th or 5th dependent clause, did you choke and just skip to the end?

I think the agenda item itself sets a clear tone for what follows.

To cut to the chase:  Town Council has decided to ignore the cardinal rule of survey design (Post #415).  And so, whatever happens next, they own it.  This is the Town Council’s survey.

And I give up, meaning, I’m not even going to bother to talk about the details.  As with most of Town staff comportment in this area, all I can say is, if Town Council puts up with it, then, once again, they own it.

Instead, I’m going to stick to the basics, and just count stuff.  Turns out, counting to small numbers is a bit of a lost art in the modern world (e.g., see Post #465). 

The majority of people who read this website do so on phones (as opposed to tablets or computers).  The same holds true of most websites, including the SurveyMonkey website where the Town plans to host this survey.

So this next bit is aimed at you phone users.  I’ve taken the Town’s draft survey — all 2200+ words of it — converted to text, and copied it in below.   So this doesn’t include the graphics, and I haven’t bothered to format it.

What I would like you to do is to count the number of screens, in this ten-minute survey.  Not even asking you to read it.  Just asking you to scroll through, one screen at a time, and count the number of screens in this ten-minute survey.  And just to keep it real, if you don’t actually make it down to the last screen, I’m throwing your answer away and it doesn’t count.  Just as the Town will do with the actual survey.

Go:

Continue reading Post #475: Survey

I can’t believe this story still has legs, but here’s a summary of additional news coverage.

Here’s my proposed solution.  You’d like to have something at the back of the lot that blocks sound and light to the greatest extent possible.  You’d like to have something fill that alleyway to prevent it from becoming an attractive nuisance (e.g., a place for high-school kids to hang out.)  It would be nice if the results weren’t too ugly and required no maintenance.  Environmental benefits would be a plus.

You’d get that, less the environmental benefits, by replicating the wall behind the Jades shopping center.  The masonry wall reduces parking-lot sound.  The thick stand of bamboo blocks light, and provides some modest attenuation of sound.

This example is a little scraggly owing to it being a relatively thin stand of bamboo on a north-facing wall.  At the Wawa site, with a wall facing southeast, the entire face of the bamboo grove would be greener.

As the site is under construction, they’d have the opportunity to do this right, corralling the bamboo with a “rhizome barrier” to keep it from spreading.  If Wawa is now of a mind to put up a wall, the incremental cost of a rhizome barrier around  the entire alleyway area is the cost of ditching the rest of the perimeter to 3′, plus the cost of concrete to fill the ditch.

As wildlife habitat, in this climate, my observation is that bamboo is more-or-less sterile.   It doesn’t flower, produce seeds, or produce edible foliage.  The deer won’t even eat it, for goodness sake.  It crowds out almost all competing species.  (Seldom recognized, the leaf fall is toxic to many plants.  I found this out the hard way by using bamboo stems and leaves as mulch — don’t do that.)   It’s basically a toxic invasive exotic pest.

In short, the only reason to use bamboo here is to use one pest (bamboo) to repel another pest (drunken high-school students).

In terms of carbon sequestration, the literature is fairly murky, and mostly focused on harvested bamboo plantations, not a standing grove of bamboo.  My interpretation of the literature is that, in the long run, a standing grove of bamboo of the type shown above stores vastly less carbon than hardwoods would, on the same land.  Bamboo has short-run advantage because it grows fast, but in the long run, you accumulate much more woody biomass with tall hardwoods than with bamboo.

Just a quick calculation to check that.  The largest tree taken down at Wawa was a 42′ stump diameter maple approximately 70′ tall.  Using this publication (.pdf), extrapolating from their table, and realizing that about half the weight of green wood is water, I come up with an estimate of about 6 tons of dry wood, above ground, from that one tree.  Using bamboo pole shipping weights and some guesswork, I’d put the above-ground dry weight of the average bamboo plant of the type pictured above at about 8 lbs.  That would mean it would take about 1500 bamboo plants to equal the above-ground dry wood weight of that one tree.  The entire alleyway in question is maybe 0.05 acres.  At that density, you’d have almost one bamboo culm (stem) every square foot, which I think is at the upper bounds of being plausible.  So one large tree stored as much wood above ground as an entire alleyway full of closely-packed bamboo.  Clearly, the standing hardwoods store more carbon than the standing bamboo, per acre.

The County’s historical aerial photos of the Wawa site are consistent with trees that were planted there as saplings around the time that building went up (1975-ish), grew about 3’/year to a mature height of around 70′ in the mid-1990s.

Photos of the alleyway behind Wawa.  Alleyway is the diagonal patch sloping upward to the right, in the center of the photo.

1976:  No tree of any size appears planted in the alleyway behind the current Wawa.  Note large tree across the street casts large shadow.  Nothing like that appears in the alleyway.  (Sun angle is about 9 o’clock, i.e., sun is shining from off to the left).

1990:  Fifteen years later, you can see the shadow of a tree.  Based on the shadow length for the Joe’s Pasta building, the maple trees in the alleyway are about 35′ tall at that time.  (Sun angle is about 4:30 o’clock).

1997, 2011, 2017:  Based on shadow lengths (relative to Joe’s Pasta building), trees reached mature height of 70′.  (Sun angle is about 4:30 o’clock).

Older, grainier photos appear to show nothing but scrub.  This is 1953 and 1960, respectively.  Note that in the 1960 photo you can see the same shadow of the large tree across the street as in the 1976 photo, but nothing comparable in the alleyway behind the current Wawa.

 

This is a followup to the last two posts, on the removal of some mature maple trees from the Town right-of-way behind the new Wawa.  The point of this post is to:

• Try to be clear about what actually happened.
• Find the root cause of this poor decision, and fix the Town’s decision-making process to reduce the chance that this occurs again, and
• Determine what the best “fix” is for the clear-cut strip of Town land.

But my main point is that if you start of by fuzzying-up how this actually occurred, you can’t even get started on that process.  Instead, if somebody serves up a bunch of baloney, you have to start off by calling it that.  And so the three sections of this post are:

• Baloney
• Bureaucracy
• Bamboo

Continue reading Post #469: Wawa again. Baloney, bureaucracy, bamboo

This is just a brief followup to Post #467, regarding Wawa’s clear-cutting of the alleway right-of-way between the Wawa lot and the adjacent residential lot.  As noted in the prior post, Wawa had agreed to keep three large silver maples, but cut them down anyway.  This removed all the natural screening between the Wawa and the neighbor’s back yard.

I would say that more than 30 people showed up, at one time or another, yesterday morning, to stand in front of the Wawa and hold signs protesting the removal of those mature silver maple trees.  (I believe the organizers put the number closer to 50, but in either case, it was a crowd.)  This included a couple of Town Council members and one person from the Planning Commission.  Enough passing motorists honked in support that there seemed to be general support for the protest.

The largest tree left a stump 42″ across.  The cut was too rough to allow the tree rings to be counted.  There were rumors that the tree was more than 100 years old, but my best guess is that the tree was probably around 55 years old, based on a couple of crude formulas I found.  (That’s based on the typical ratio of diameter-breast-height to stump diameter, and then a crude formula for estimating tree age by species, for landscape trees, given on this website.)   That building on that site is about 45 years old, so arguably, my best guess is that these trees were roughly contemporaneous with that building.

The Town’s Facebook posting on this event is short.  Here is, I hope,  link to the Town’s Facebook posting on this.  According to the Town of Vienna, Wawa has reportedly agreed to plant a dozen roughly 6″ diameter trees to replace the three large silver maples that were destroyed.  This will be in addition to a solid vinyl fence and landscaping to be installed in front of that fence.

How this happened, exactly, is still not clear.  I have heard from several credible sources that some Town official gave permission to take down all the trees in the alley right-of-way.  But the Town’s official position is that this was a mistake by Wawa’s contractor.  If past experience with the Town of Vienna government is any guide, we’ll never know what the true story is.

The Town makes no mention of the developer forfeiting the tree bond for this project.  The fact that the Town does not mention that leads me to think that the builders actually did have the Town’s permission to take the trees down.  But, because the Town is great at stonewalling things like this, that’s speculation.

I doubt this will even affect the Town priding itself on being an officially-designated tree city.

My only other thought on this is that there is no longer any reason, other than cost, for Wawa not to build a masonry wall at the back of that property.  That would likely be a better barrier to sound transmission than the proposed solid vinyl fence.

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.

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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.

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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.