Category: Town of Vienna, VA

Post #1649: Capital Bikeshare at Tysons: 170 slots, 14 locations, 6 round trips a day.

 

This final bit of analysis of Capital Bikeshare is here just in case anybody in Vienna actually believes the cheerleader-style reporting you may read regarding  Capital Bikeshare.

Here’s the actual use of the Bikeshare racks around Tysons, for the past 12 months. To understand this, realize that the underlying unit of data is a “trip leg”.  It’s a transport of a bicycle from one rack to another, or, in the case of a round trip, from one rack back to that same rack.  E.g.  if you rode one of these bikes from the Metro station to work in the morning, and then back in the evening, that would be two trip-legs.

To get a better estimate of the actual number of users, I divide trip-legs by two to get “trips”.  (Except for round-trips, for which each one counts as a trip).  I’m betting that in most cases, this is a far better estimate of the number of unique users on any given day.

Then, I divided these 12-month totals by 365 to get them on a per-day basis.

The upshot is that, on a typical day, the entire Capital Bikeshare investment in the Tyson’s Metro area — 14 racks, total of 170 bike slots, and an unknown number of bikes — typically benefits six people.

Let me point out that this is a mostly-mature system at this point.  Most of those racks have been there for years now.  And let me further point out that it looked just like that the last time I analyzed the data for Tysons Metro in isolation.  And it looks like this out in the far Maryland ‘burbs as well. And in Reston.

If you can look at that, and say, oh, boy, let’s spend a quarter-mil to install those in my Town  — then let’s pay Lyft (the owner of the company that operates Capital Bikeshare) whatever annual maintenance they charge, on top of that.

If you can say that, then I think you and I live in alternative realities.

I don’t even care if it’s somebody else’s tax dollars paying for it. Building more of these, when we already know what the outcome looks like out here in the exurbs, is just the worst kind of government.

In case anybody wants to check my work — nobody ever does — the underlying data are here:  https://ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data.

Finally, let me reiterate that in the central urban core of the DC area, Capital Bikeshare is a fine idea and it works well.  (I’ve said that in almost all of my prior posts on this topic, and repeat it here to be sure that you understand I am not anti-bike or anti-Capital-Bikeshare.)  The heavy use of the bikes in that area contributes to a reasonable cost-per-ride.  But in those areas, a) there are lots of nearby places to go from and to, where racks can be sited, and b) as I recall, a typical bike rack slot turns over an average of six times a day.

In other words, there are maybe two-orders-of-magnitude more riders per bike slot in the dense urban core than in the far-flung suburbs.  Bikeshare provides value in that urban core.  It does not out here.

Realistic transportation policy needs to recognize that and be shaped accordingly.  Early on, local governments could be forgiven for taking a chance on a technology that, in hindsight, just doesn’t work out here.  Now, by contrast, with all the accumulated evidence, there’s no longer any excuse.  We know it doesn’t work, in the sense of having an outrageous average cost per mile of transportation, due to negligible use rates.  Why are we still expanding it?

Post #1617: When will the tear-down boom end, the sequel.

 

It hasn’t been possible to buy a small house in Vienna, VA for at least a decade now.   Every small house that goes up for sale is purchased by developers, who then proceed to tear it down and build the largest house that will fit onto that lot.

This sustained destruction of middle-class housing, replacing it with lot-filling McMansions, is what I have termed “the tear-down boom”.

I have written about the various implications of the tear-down boom.  Among other things, this continual replacement of small houses with gigantic houses means that:

  • Post #519.  Town revenues from residential real estate have been pushed materially higher by the resulting increase in the price of the houses.
  • Post #308.  There’s a tremendous mis-match between the stock of houses in the Town of Vienna, and the houses available for sale.  Middle-class people can live here — if they already own a house — but they can’t move here, because all the middle-class houses are replaced with McMansions before being re-sold.  As a result, increasingly, Vienna is a town for the wealthy, not the middle class, something I termed the “Mcleanification” of Vienna.

And yet, some of the economics of the tear-down boom just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, simply as way to generate housing stock.  People really don’t need 10,000 square foot houses, and everything I read about the next Gen X and later is that they have no interest in buying such gigantic pieces of real estate.  Seemed like a classic case of “sell it to whom?”.

The best explanation I could give for the tear-down boom is that it was the result of two toxic Federal economic policies.  These were the huge tax advantages to home ownership, including both tax sheltering of current income and tax-exemption of any capital gains, and near-zero real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates.   In 1997, the Federal government eliminated capital gains on housing.  (With some limits.)  That was on top of the tax sheltering that housing provides via income-tax deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes.  Then, in 2008, the Fed dropped inflation-adjusted interest rates to zero or below, following the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Between those two policies — the tax advantages and the free money — it became ludicrously cheap to finance the purchase of a mega-home.  And that mega-home was a highly-leveraged investment that was, ultimately, better than tax-free.

But trees don’t grow to the sky.  Back in 2019, I asked “When will the tear-down boom end?”  That was Post #217.

Even then, the market was showing some oddities.  Oddity #1 is that these mega-homes were appreciating less rapidly than adjacent lower-priced homes.  Oddity #2 is that the changes in tax law in 2018 made it much more expensive to own homes costing over about $850,000.  Here’s the analysis of just how much more expensive it became to carry the cost of a $1.4M house after the 2018 changes in Federal tax law:

Not only did it suddenly cost a lot more to carry that $1.4M house, almost all of the additional cost came from the housing value just in excess of $850,000.  Basically, the law reduced the size of what I would term the “tax efficient” house, that is, the house that earns you the maximum tax breaks as a percent of cost.

As a result, in 2019, I looked at that and said, isn’t this going to put the brakes on the tear-down boom? 

And so far, the answer is no.  Just casually driving around town, these still seems to be a tear-down on pretty much every block.

So far.

Today’s mortgage interest rates.

In this last section, all I want to do is assess the impact of the rise in mortgage interest rates.  Literally, dig up the spreadsheet above, and replace the then-current 4% mortgage interest rate with the current 7% (or so) rate.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.

Redoing the analysis, I find that the carrying cost of a $1.4M (small) McMansion in Vienna is now about 50% higher then it was back in 2018.  And 86% higher than it was in 2017, before they changed Federal tax law to reduce the tax advantages of owning an expensive home.

So, to be clear:  Those houses are still big money-makers for the owners, as housing prices have risen steeply in the past year.  That said, if home prices merely stabilize, new McMansions will have after-tax carrying costs in today’s environment that are 86% higher than they were in 2017.

My belief is that this plausibly is going to put a damper on tear-downs in Vienna.

I’ve been wrong about that before.

But I believe it strongly enough that I spent last week painting the front of my house.   That’s a real change for me, because I had simply stopped doing any maintenance on my house that didn’t directly affect occupant health and safety.  I figured, why bother to keep the place up, when they’re just going to tear it down when I eventually move?

I was letting the house deteriorate, peeling paint and all.  But now I have about a decade’s worth of deferred basic maintenance to do. Because in today’s environment, it’s no longer a given, I think, that this house will be torn down when I leave it.

Post #1607, Hating Maple Avenue

Today, as I was driving home after a trip to one of our local parks, I got honked at on Maple Avenue, in the Town of Vienna, where I live. 

My offense?  Failing to cause an accident on Maple Avenue.  Apparently the Tesla driver behind me wanted me to clear the roadway by running into the car that was blocking the lane ahead.  Instead, I stopped.  (It’s not as if I had a choice, because I literally couldn’t get around the lunkhead blocking the lane.).  In any case, after a three second delay, the lane cleared, and we all proceeded merrily down the road.

Despite the stupidity of honking at me for failing to run into somebody, maybe that impatient driver can be forgiven.  Because, unless you’ve bothered to look at the data, you probably don’t realize just how many car accidents occur on that innocent-looking two-mile stretch of road we refer to as Maple Avenue.

So in this post, I’m going to dig up a few pieces of data on reportable accidents along Maple Avenue in Vienna.  Just to remind myself that on this stretch of road, the occasional bit of defensive driving is no sin.

Saturday afternoon is the pits.

The main commercial district of the Town of Vienna, VA lies along an arterial highway, Virginia Route 123.  Although here in the TOV that stretch of Rt. 123 is called Maple Avenue.

It’s a congested urban arterial highway that sees about 30,000 vehicles per day.  With all that implies.

In the past, I outlined the fundamental reason why traffic is so consistently awful on this piece of road.  The Washington and Old Dominion railroad was here before the roads.  There’s roughly a five mile stretch of the old W&OD rail bed  that acts like a fence.  For that stretch, the only gate in the fence — the only road that crosses that old railroad bed — is Maple Avenue (and a couple of nearby side streets). As a result, anyone who wants to move north-south in this area, or east-west in this area, and doesn’t want to use the interstate, ends up driving on Maple Avenue in Vienna.  Either that, or do an end-run around that old railroad bed.

 

This road is congested during the AM and PM rush hours every business day.  But at least during rush hour, the traffic flow is predictable.  Almost everybody is just passing through.

For my money, the absolute worst time to drive on Maple Avenue is Saturday afternoon.  In addition to having the road packed and the traffic slow, traffic is chaotic.  Cars are moving in all types of unpredictable ways.  It’s jumbled mix of people running errands locally, and people just trying to get from one side of Vienna to the other.

Traffic crawls.

To add to the fun, in order to squeeze five lanes into the road bed, the lanes are about as narrow as they can possibly be.  The travel lanes are about 10′ wide.

But the real killer is is that the center turning lane is just 9 feet wide.  Which, if you drive a small car, is OK.  But if you drive a large SUV, crossover, or truck, you need some real skills to get your vehicle fully out of the travel lane, and fully into the turn lane, on-the-fly.  And, since many people lack those skills, but still drive those vehicles, the result is that people making left turns consistently block the adjacent travel lane, because they haven’t pulled their vehicle fully into the allotted 9′ space.

Which is why I got honked at today.  I couldn’t move forward, because the rear bumper of the left-turning SUV in front of me stuck out about two feet into the travel lane.

I’ve lived here long enough that I’m completely used to this.  I expect it.  If it’s Saturday afternoon, you aren’t going anywhere very fast on Maple Avenue.  And you’ll be dodging a lot of bad driving along the way.  That’s just the way it is, as we all try to negotiate this narrow urban arterial highway.

Nor is that ever going to get any better.  The Town, in its Wisdom, ensured that some new, large, and very expensive buildings were going to get put up right next to the road.  (They made it a condition of the zoning that the face of the building could be no more than 15′ from the road.)   So, short of Armageddon, there will never be any way to widen that roadway.  There’s a roughly 49′ curb-to-curb distance now, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

If that’s not enough, we’re now in the middle of changing the zoning in order to pack in some high-density housing directly on Maple Avenue.  Because, apparently, what we think we need here in Vienna is thousands of additional residents, all living directly on Maple Avenue.

Congestion has predictable consequences.

Here’s a map of reportable accidents that occurred in 2021, on or around Maple Avenue in Vienna.  As you can see, there were 100 car accidents involving significant property damage, injury, or both.

But 2021 was a good year, as traffic was down due to the pandemic.  If you look at the last pre-pandemic year, the count was 134 accidents.  More-or-less an accident every three days, along Maple and vicinity.

Source for both maps:  VA TREDS system

I guess I’ll stop there.

Fact is, every year, a whole lot of people damage a whole lot of expensive hardware, doing stupid things in Maple Avenue traffic.

And so, if some yoyo is partially blocking the travel lane, yeah, I think I’ll stop.  Honk at me if it makes you feel better.  Because it’s probably smarter to stop, than to roll the dice and see if I can squeeze by without doing any damage.

I am not, in general, a patient or polite person.  But on Maple Avenue, on a Saturday afternoon, I purposefully strive to be both.

At the end of the day, I guess I pity the folks who still can’t manage to figure out that no matter how much you honk your horn, if you’ve chosen to drive in that traffic, you aren’t going to go anywhere very fast.  It’s just the way it is.

 

Post #1597: Vienna sports fans, it’s time to start asking for your new ball fields.

 

The Town of Vienna and the surrounding areas of Fairfax County are chronically short of ball fields for organized youth and amateur sports.  This is a complaint you’ll hear from anyone tasked with finding field time for practice, let alone for competition.   The ball fields around here are pretty well booked up at peak periods.

With the completion of the Town of Vienna’s large new police station, Vienna now has a rare opportunity to add to the stock of public ball fields in town.  A few years back, the Town bought the former Baptist Church on Center Street, for $5.5M of your tax dollars.  That was used as the temporary police station, as the new police station was built.  But now, that 3-acre tract of land — located directly across from existing Waters and Caffi fields — is no longer needed for that purpose.

If you’d be in favor of turning that land into playing fields, you’d better start speaking up right now.  Get your preferences known.  Because, as sure as night follows day, and as sure as every new building in Vienna will be absolutely as large as the law and the lot allow, if sports advocates don’t get dibs on this plot of land soon, somebody’s going to find an excuse to put a great big taxpayer-financed building on it.

I’d bet money on that.

Dimensions, please.

A U.S. football field is 360′ long and 160′ wide (reference).  That’s a fairly big chunk of land in an urban environment, amounting to about 1.2 acres.

Below, you can see a standard football field laid out in the Astroturf outfield of Waters field, in the heart of the Town of Vienna.  (You can verify the dimensions using (e.g.) Google Maps).  You can also see the now-idle three-acre former Baptist church tract, owned by the Town, directly across the street.  You can verify those dimensions using the Fairfax County tax map.

Source: Google Earth, annotations mine.

Just in case it’s not readable, the former Baptist Church lot measures out to be 400′ deep and 325′ wide.  There’s probably a bit of ambiguity on the depth, regarding the exact location of the Town right-of-way.  So the usable space may exceed that by a bit.  But those dimensions are good enough for doing a bit of rough planning.

First, that former Baptist Church tract is a nice size and shape.  As a matter of arithmetic, it would be feasible to squeeze in not one, but two full-sized football fields.  

Admittedly, that would leave room for just about nothing else.  The combined dimensions of two standard U.S. football fields, would be 360′ x 320′.  That leaves a total of five feet left over, at the sidelines, and 40 feet, at the end zones.  Two football fields would fill the lot from side-to-side, more-or-less lot-line-to-lot line.

So, practically speaking, it would probably be inadvisable to put two full-sized football fields in.  But, for sure, one football field would fit.  You’d have 20′ of running room past the end of each end zone, and plenty of room for a parking lot on one of sidelines.  Likely, you’d put the parking lot adjacent to the existing homes, to put some space between the field and the nearby housing.

Soccer fields for high-school aged kids are about the same size as a football field.  So, more-or-less ditto for a standard high-school soccer field.

But soccer fields for younger kids are smaller.  For ages 12 and under, a soccer field can be as small as 255′ x 120′ (reference). You could fit a two “youth” soccer fields in there with room to spare.  In that configuration, there’d be room for a couple of rows of parking directly adjacent to Center Street.

Finally, baseball and softball fields are a bit more flexible, but I see a recommended length of 275′ for each foul line for a Little League field (reference).  So you could put in one Little League baseball diamond and still have plenty of room for (e.g.) a small parking area, perhaps a row of cars along Center and a row adjacent to the nearby housing.

FWIW, under no circumstances would I suggest that these fields be lit, because they are directly adjacent to housing.  I’d be thinking more along the lines of a set of low-key daytime-use ball fields.  Something more akin to the baseball diamond at Meadow Lane, which sits directly across from single-family homes.  And not a clone of the lit-and-Astroturfed Waters Field.

 

Isn’t fitness one of our town goals?

In any case, I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to convert that land to open green space, in the form of ball fields, before somebody thinks up an alternative use for it.  If you think that’s a good use of your tax dollars, you should start talking that up sooner rather than later.

Think of it as the Town’s tangible commitment to youth fitness.

As the Town proceeds with its rezoning, and likely opens the door to a whole lot of new housing along Maple Avenue, it seems like there needs to be some balance to offset all that population growth.  Part of the balance needs to be some effort to increase the amount of land available for recreational purposes.  And if this particular track of land gets built on, the opportunity to include this green space in an ever-more-crowded Vienna will be lost for good.

Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Source:  Fairfax County, VA

Consider the following proposal.  Instead of installing regular overhead streetlights, I proposed to light the road and adjacent sidewalk with spotlights, aimed directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers. Continue reading Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Post #1592: Patrick Henry Parking Garage. (And Library).

 

Just tracking the progress on this.  It’s not as if the powers-that-be are ever going to ask any library users what they’d like to see.  So this is just an attempt to keep track of how far this has moved from the original objectionable design.

Recall that the Town of Vienna has gone in with Fairfax Count to replace the existing Patrick Henry Library with combination parking garage and library.  I last looked in on this issue in September 2021, in Post #1263.

The original design proposal was pretty awful, with a one-floor library squatting under one half of a three-floor parking garage, with minimal window area, what has to be a dark interior, and no green space to speak of.

 

Basically, look at any of the light, airy, award-winning libraries that Fairfax County has built.

Source:  Fairfax County website, pictures of Dolley Madison library.

And do the opposite.

For my part, I suggested that this would work a lot better if they did what every new commercial structure on Maple is doing, and put the bulk of the parking underground.  That would have allowed the Town to wrap the new library around a little pocket park, and avoid having a huge above-ground parking garage as the centerpiece of Vienna.  Outlined like so, with the park in green, surface parking in black, and a two-story library in blue.

This was, of course, completely ignored.  Why should the Town put the parking underground just because every other responsible decisionmaker along that stretch of road was doing exactly that.

But, Town staff assured us to ignore all this claptrap, because the original design was just a something-something-something and they were already redesigning it.  Don’t worry yourself about it.

Anybody who could do arithmetic soon realized that this was going to be one very crowded site.  The proposed building will have 3.4 times as many parking places (213) and 1.5 times as much library floor area (21,000 square feet), as the current library.  To fit in both an enlarged library, and all that additional parking was going to be a trick, no matter how you stacked it.  It was going to fill that lot with building, side-to-side, front-to-back.  (Unless you put the parking underground, as illustrated above.)  As I put it in that prior post, everything is going to get 25% closer together, get stacked much higher, and even with that, it’s a given that all the green space is history.

Source: Google Earth.

In June the Town of Vienna got the formal proposal from the architects chosen to design the new library.  This was presented in a Town Council work session (now called conference session, I think.)  You can see the documents at this link.

The good news is that, as of the June iteration, the architects managed to cram all of that on the lot and mostly hide the parking garage.  You now have a tall one-story library running the length of Maple.  The majority of the lot is taken up by a four-level parking garage running behind that.  The proposed library manages to hide about two-third of the view of the parking garage, when viewed from Maple.

As is mandatory with new Town of Vienna buildings, this is more-or-less the largest structure that could possibly fit on that lot.  There will be some little vestiges of green, but otherwise this appears to fill every legally available square foot, and nearly every legally available cubic foot, of space.

The latest design, delivered to the Town just a few days ago, shoves the building back off the street a bit, provides a bit of open space, provides access to the school behind the library, and and tries harder to hide the garage when viewed from Maple Avenue.  Those all seem like improvements over the last iteration.  You can download the most recent design from this TOV web page.

The result is this:

Source:  Fairfax County, VA, URL given above.

This obviously won’t be as spacious and neat as the architect’s rendering makes it look.  And it has more-or-less nothing to do with anything that’s on Maple Avenue now, not even the new construction under MAC.  And, based on the description, they’re going to have to ask for a few zoning variances to be able to shoehorn that onto the lot.

But at this point, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief.  As in, the library will have windows.  And they’ve done their best to hide the fact that the bulk of the building is a parking garage.  And so on.

Looks like they are keeping the goofy, environmentally unfriendly, and completely unnecessary acorn street lights.  Which are now jarringly out of place in front of this aluminum-and-glass building exterior.

All that glass surface means this is a small environmental disaster due to the heating and cooling load through all that window area.  (I’m sure the Town will point to LEED certification, but all that means is that they’ve constructed it well, not that the design isn’t an energy hog from the start.)  But if they go with modern heat pumps, the (now-mandatory) de-carbonization of the Virginia grid will eventually reduce the C02 emissions from those large heating and cooling loads.

Unlike the other big new buildings on Maple, this one isn’t adding to the existing congestion.  We won’t have hundreds of people living there, or streams of new business flowing into and out of it.  By and large, it’s going to serve the people who use that library now.  So, in contrast to other construction occurring on Maple, this is mostly harmless despite the size.

All in all, it’s not my cup of tea, in this tightly-packed urban context.  But it could have been a lot worse.  Most importantly, it will work, as a library, and it hides the fact that it’s mostly a parking garage.  Anything beyond that is gravy.

Post #1589: Correction to Post 1586

 

A local who has the Tea Party plates on his car took exception to my blanket statement that those plates mark environmentally insensitive individuals.  My claim that I’d never seen cars with (e.g.) greater than 30 MPG EPA rating, with Tea Party plates, is now wrong, courtesy of three outliers that he photographed and emailed to me.  I haven’t bothered to check the EPA ratings, but these at least aren’t low MPG trucks.

The gist of that prior posting still stands.  But as a matter of fact, there are some vehicles with Virginia Tea Party plates that do, probably, get over 30 MPG.  Contrary to what I said in that posting.  I don’t think that’s the norm, but mea culpa.

Still seeking a photo of that rarest of beasts, the Tea Party Prius.

As to why I call them the Tea Party plates, well, that’s what they are.

https://vatp.org/2010/11/13/va-tea-party-plates/

Three photos courtesy of an email correspondent:

Just to be clear — because I didn’t blur the plates or anything — it’s legal to photograph anything you can see from a public right-of-way.  At least here in Virginia.  Commercial use of such an image may fall under some different set of statutes.   But posting such an image with no claim to copyright and no intent to harass is fair use here in the Commonwealth.