This post is a courtesy for the Vienna Transportation Safety Commission (TSC).
The first point is to provide a convenient reference to Post #424, which is my summary of the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit hazard. In a nutshell, I think that the obstructed view of the sidewalk there constitutes a clear hazard to pedestrians and bicyclists, on what is now a walk-to-school route thanks to the Madison HAWK light.
At tonight’s (11/25/2019) TSC meeting, I’m going to ask the Town to do something about that.
My second point is that there does not seem to be any technical guidance on this issue whatsoever, from either the Virginia Department of Transportation or from Federal sources. The issue being, specifically, when a driveway meets a sidewalk next to a public road, what constitutes adequate sight lines between drivers in the driveway, and pedestrians on the sidewalk. (So, not an issue of driver-to-driver sight lines, but driver-to-sidewalk-pedestrian sight lines.)
Best I’ve seen, so far, from VDOT or federal sources, is a vague statement that one should have adequate sight lines. And that’s in the context of roadway intersections, not driveways entering a roadway.
After considerable searching, I found a handful of municipalities that addressed this exact issue. Near as I can tell, all of them ask for the area to be kept clear of visual obstructions 10 feet or more back from the sidewalk, when a driveway enters a roadway.This should be contrasted with the 1-foot distances between the sidewalk and the obstruction (a 5′ tall transformer box) at the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit.
So, if you were looking for solid evidence that the situation at the Chick-fil-A drive-through exit is hazardous, here are four cities that would have banned it. These are all standards for vehicle-pedestrian sight lines.
Lincoln, NE (.pdf) says you can have no obstructions with 10 feet of the sidewalk where a driveway enters a street. Like so:
City of Kirkland, WA requires a 22′ setback, as measured along the sidewalk, but they assume that cars will be moving 10 MPH down a driveway. Not sure this is relevant.
Bellevue, WA says 14′ from the back edge of the sidewalk must be kept clear, but that’s measured in the middle of the travel lane.
City of Albuquerque requires 11′ be kept clear around residential driveways.
I think this is enough to show that where this issue of pedestrian visibility at driveways is explicitly addressed, the required setbacks from the sidewalk that must be clear of visual obstruction vastly exceed what we have at the Chick-fil-A drive through exit.
Today I have the joy of doing a posting that nobody is going to believe. To the best of my understanding, the following statements are true.
With one possible exception, plantings of any sort, of a scale that can be included in the MAC streetscape, will have no material effect on traffic noise as heard at the sidewalk. There are psychological advantages, and certainly aesthetic advantages, and possibly some modest health advantages to greenery adjacent to a city street. But noise reduction is not one of them.
As far as I can tell, this is something that most experts on noise abatement agree with. And that every expert on landscaping disagrees with.
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.
My wife used to email me that line, as a joke, on the anniversary of my company’s founding.
The joke being “doughnut” (singular), because there was only one employee — me.
I got an email a while back, from a fellow who thought the articles on this website needed by-lines. I scratched my head a bit at that. Why should I add my name to the start of every article? I never wrote him back.
This has now come up again, and I finally get it. Some people seem to think there’s a team of writers turning out these postings on savemaple.org.
To which my reply is doughnut (singular).
Savemple.org is blissfully free of team building exercises, staff meetings, performance reviews, consensus forming … and guest writers. I write everything on this website. Full stop. If I can ever convince anyone to do a guest article, you’ll see a by-line.
If somebody mentions something that I think is worth writing up, sure, I’ll do that. Happy to steal an idea from any source. But the research and writeup is solely mine.
And that’s the last you’ll hear of my annual doughnut.
At the 8/19/2019 Vienna Town Council meeting, there was a seemingly innocuous item listed on the agenda as “Directive to Town staff to research amending requirements related to commercial parking, parking lot landscaping, and streetscape.”
If you walk through the meeting materials for this item — which you can, as of this writing, access at this URL — it still looks fairly cut-and-dried. At issue were a handful of items such as the amount of parking required for commercial buildings, the nature and type of any required landscaping for parking lots, and the MAC “streetscape” requirements including broad brick sidewalks.
Although the language of the motion was not provided in advance, once you got to hear it, it still seemed fairly — eh — boring, for want of a better word. Cut-and-dried. Here’s Councilman Majdi’s motion, which I am pretty sure I transcribed word-for-word, from the tape:
“I move to direct town staff to draft amendments to the MAC as its top priority, and simultaneously to consider amendments to the regular commercial code: C1, C1A, C1B, and C2, in Chapter 18 of Town Code that affect the MAC. I further move to direct staff to draft amendments to the regular commercial code that require the MAC streetscape, require landscaping for parking lots, and direct staff to consider changes to parking requirements or other incentives to encourage economic growth on Maple avenue, when drafting these amendments.”
In the end, that passed 4-3, with (what I characterize as) the remaining pro-MAC Town Council members (DiRocco, Noble, Colbert) voting against.
And yet, while I’m not seeing some fantastic controversy there, discussion lasted for an hour and a quarter. I really don’t understand what went on. There was an hour of discussion before they even heard the language of the motion. At that point, the Mayor invited an audience member to get up and speak. (This was not a public hearing, so how that was legal, I have no clue.) Then immediately after that, they voted.
It just struck me as a strange session all around. Like more was being not said than said. So I’m just going to flag this one, putting a marker down in case, at some point, it becomes clear what happened.
At the end of this, I’ll give my best guess as to what is going on. Let me emphasize that the final section here is pure guesswork. Best guess, this was an attempt to focus the scope of (at least the initial) rewrite of the Town’s zoning ordinance to a handful of items that might be viewed as critical to Maple Avenue development. And, as importantly, not to give Town Staff license to rewrite every aspect of the zoning ordinance.
My Post #360 is incorrect. At that time, it appeared that the Town was no longer posting recordings of work sessions for (e.g.) Town Council or Planning Commission. The Town has now posted all of the recent work session recordings, so what I wrote in Post #360 is not correct.
If you want to know what was said in a recent meeting or work session by the Town Council, Planning Commission, Board of Architectural Review, or Board of Zoning Appeals, you can look at the Town’s Granicus calendar page, at this URL.
Note: After I published this, the same colleague who introduced me to FIDO suggested that I add one major caveat: Things only appear in FIDO once they are in the hands of Fairfax County. Issues that are handled solely by the Town of Vienna, or that are handled first by the Town and then by the County, either never appear or appear with some time lag. So FIDO gives you a look at what’s going on with a property, but it’s not necessarily a complete look, or the most timely look, at what is happening. That said, practically speaking, is the only look we’re going to get — the Town of Vienna does not have a similar publicly-visible permit-tracking system in place.
Original posting follows.
A colleague clued me in to the Fairfax County FIDO system. There, for any address, you can look up the status of any building, occupancy, or other permits or licenses issued by Fairfax County. The FIDO system can be used to provide some reassurance that projects that appear to be in process really are. Continue reading Post #351: FIDO
This is a set of screen captures from a dialogue that, unfortunately, I entered into last night, on some Facebook page related to Vienna development. Some entries may be duplicated as I maintained continuity of the screen capture. Please Google “Neal Rentle” and “Vienna” and see what you come up with.
Just some observations. If you see someone a) who just joined a group a few hours ago, b) who posts under a name that looks real, but is in fact a false name, who c) refuses to offer any verification that they are in fact a Vienna resident, and d) gets obvious points of fact about Vienna completely wrong, and most tellingly, e) immediately deflects to another point when called out on those incorrect points of fact (a form of the “Gish Gallop“), then f) odds are you are looking at a paid “social media campaign” posting. Or, possibly, a sock puppet.
Answer: About 40. Maybe a few more, because we’re wealthy, and assisted living is something that you have to be fairly wealthy to afford. Maybe a few less, because our resident population is a little younger than the US average. But, best guess, if we use assisted living at the US average rate, then 40 assisted living beds would serve the needs of the entire Town of Vienna.
I calculated that back in March, when Sunrise assisted living (proposed for Maple and Center) was a hot topic, but never got around to making that public. Here, I work through the arithmetic, then just line out the variety of options available for elderly who have various levels of need for assistance.
If you want information on assisted living, in general, in Northern Virginia, see Post #205.
Affordable housing is a weighty topic that requires a real depth of knowledge if you’re going to address it seriously.
This post, by contrast, is not a serious analysis of affordable housing. This is just one of those quirky little things you stumble across doing a Google search, that, oddly enough, can be used to get across a few simple points.
Bottom line: Vienna residence, furnished, utilities included. Monthly rent is $1950$1500. Price includes utilities, internet and cable, as well as daily maid service and free continental breakfast.
Correction: Turns out, a colleague knows people who have lived there. If you prepay a week in advance, it’s just $50/night, which works out to $1500/month.
Trip Advisor breathlessly assures me that it’s the #1 rated! motel in Vienna, VA. True, by definition.
On a more serious note, how about a little arithmetic. It looks like the Wolf Trap Motel has about 120 rooms, or “dwelling units” in this case. Is there any hope that MAC zoning will ever provide even as many as 120 affordable housing units in Vienna?
And by that I mean, actual, formally-defined affordable housing under some legally-administered program. Not the fast-and-loose discussion of “the market-determined rent on these apartments will be more affordable” that has substituted for real Town public discussion of this issue so far. (And if you have no clue what I’m talking about, in terms of a legally-defined affordable housing project, take a look at what they do in Falls Church.)
The arithmetic is easy enough: Additional MAC dwelling units x % reserved for affordable housing = additional MAC affordable housing. All we need are plausible estimates for each.
The table below works through all of that, projecting total dwelling units based on the current MAC average density of dwelling units per acre, and some assumed fraction of Maple that eventually undergoes redevelopment.
But what fraction of units might plausibly be affordable housing? To model that, I took one of the recent Falls Church mixed use projects. There, for the Broad and Washington Project, the developer proffered six percent of the units in the building for affordable housing (see this .pdf). So, if they can do it, presumably we … might too. (I think this figure is ballpark for the rest of the Falls Church mixed-use development. E.g., five beds in the large Kensington assisted living facility in Falls Church are in a special affordability program.)
Reading down the table, the first three MAC projects come in at 41 units per acre. You can then see counts of total additional units that would be built under assumptions that 30% or 70% of the total MAC acreage gets redeveloped at that density. Finally, if 6% of all new units are set aside for affordable housing, you get the counts at the bottom: 64 affordable housing units if 30% of Maple is redeveloped, or 169 affordable housing units if 70% of Maple is redeveloped.
(N.B. for the number-oriented among you. The acreage is not proportional to the percentages because I net out the 5.7 that have already been approved for mixed-use development.)
And so the answer to my question is, maybe, if all suns shine. If Vienna actually had an affordable housing program. If every mixed-use building from now on would proffer affordable units at the same rate as was seen in the model Falls Church project. And if a very large fraction of Maple gets redeveloped.
If all that happened, you might get more affordable housing units out of MAC than there currently are rooms in the Wolf Trap Motel.
But: You can’t get blood from a stone. Put aside the fact that some projects would not be suitable for this program (e.g., the million-dollar condo townhouses at Marco Polo). The bottom line remains that there is no free lunch. Every one of those units is money out of the developers’ pockets, so affordable housing must be balanced against other competing demands for proffers. For example, developers might not be able to afford both putting the utility lines underground and reserving 6% of units for affordable housing. Ditto, providing significant public green space on their property and in additional supplying significant affordable housing. And if a future MAC results in smaller buildings, there would be fewer units and less profit available from which to supply affordable housing.
My point is that instead of just talking in the abstract about affordable housing, we really ought to get into the numbers just a bit. It’s instructive. Best guess, any formal, legal, zoning-driven affordable housing program under MAC would be a drop in the bucket, relative to the perceived need for affordable housing.
My only other point is to study Falls Church, because, by definition, they’re doing better at it than we are. Interestingly, while Falls Church has this formal, legally-defined affordable housing program, they also make sure that people looking for affordable housing can find a comprehensive list of apartment and condo rental rates. They put those right on their website, on the affordable housing page (here, .pdf.). Those aren’t “affordable housing” in the legal sense, they are just (presumably) the market rates on the cheapest housing options available in Falls Church. And given the extremely limited supply of legally-defined affordable housing, the market rate is going to be what almost every person pays. Like it or not.
So, no free lunch. But maybe a free breakfast, for the time being.
Addendum
I started out this post entirely tongue-in-cheek. But I didn’t realize there was more truth here than I bargained for. A colleague assures me that she knows of five or six people who do, in fact, use the Wolf Trap as the only affordable housing in town. They all work food-service jobs on Maple Avenue, as far up the block as Whole Foods, don’t own cars, and walk to work, while living (presumably two-to-a-room, so 750/month/person?) at the Wolf Trap Motel.
So, in fact, Wolf Trap Motel does function as affordable housing in Vienna. And that peculiar old motel out on Route 50 in Fairfax — the one that looks like a ship’s wheelhouse — apparently does the same for that area. So the recycling of downscale hotels as affordable workers’ housing is not just limited to the Wolf Trap Hotel.
As a final note, yet another colleague assures me that the Wolf Trap is the most common way-station for the newly divorced in the area. So, yeah, it does serve as affordable housing. Maybe not as the Town intends it, but it serves as that all the same.
City of Kirkland, WA requires a 22′ setback, as measured along the sidewalk, but they assume that cars will be moving 10 MPH down a driveway. Not sure this is relevant.
