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No Middle Road on the ICC |
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There is no middle road on the ICC. There is no formulation that it can be cast in that does not pose serious threats to the environment and to the communities that would abut it. There is no path that does not open up the green wedge to further development. You could no more build the ICC through that green space and not have developers demanding (and getting) permission to develop it, than you could hurl hundred dollar bills into the air on a crowded street corner and not incite a riot. And in the end, opening up the green is the only effect the ICC will have. The State's own studies show that does virtually nothing to relieve traffic flows on our County's major arteries. Along the swath it cuts through the County, it relieves some intersections while worsening others, and some of those improvements bring with them denser traffic that changes the character of the roads and local communities that use them. Perhaps the most obscene fact of all is that all the routes, proposed, ostensibly, to better link I-270 to Baltimore, all turn sharply South and drop their cars at Konterra. Interestingly, for those who argue that the ICC is essential to our technology corridor, the State's and County's own projections for growth in that corridor are the same with or without the ICC. There is no link on the PG side of the ICC that matters one iota to the I-270 corridor. Shortening some people's 30 and 40 mile commutes has been proposed as another rationale, but the number of affected people is small. More importantly, the decision to live that far away from one's job is a personal one - the people of this county are under no obligation to help fund a billion dollar highway so some folks can live in the countryside. If the Feds and the State have a billion to spend here, better that it be spent on improving and extending Metro, Ride-On and on improving local roads - all of which will serve far more people than the ICC. At their root the congested conditions in the County are the direct result of policies that have permitted too much development absent the infrastructure needed to support it. Unwilling to put fees on the developers to pay for the infrastructure, and unwilling to tax everyone up-front to pay for the roads and schools that are needed (the politically expedient means of avoiding public awareness of the true cost of development) , development has been allowed to proceed until conditions become intolerable and affected neighborhoods scream for relief. When things are bad enough roads get built and we get taxed. If it ended here, this would be sufficiently bad. But the worst of it is that these adverse road conditions have become officially "acceptable" so that the very improvements that provide relief become the justification for the next round of development that leaves roads as badly choked as they were to begin with. A smooth flowing road is an underused road waiting to be filled. And that is the ultimate problem of any form of the ICC. Whatever relief it provides is transitory and you can tell that by the way it is sold in different communities. To impacted neighborhoods, its packaged as traffic relief. To hungry developers, its sold as more housing, more shopping centers, more development. Every car taken off the road can be replaced, every new lane can be filled, every improved intersection can be reclogged until it ceases to function again. We need to get our priorities straight. We cannot continue to "bend" the environment without eventually breaking it. We cannot both try to limit sprawl while building road projects that foster it. We cannot, as the Master Plan also suggests, focus high density development into the I-270 corridor and at the same time open the wedge to sprawl development. The best way to deal with congestion in the wedge area now is to proceed with local road improvements while simultaneously down-zoning what is not currently built so that the benefits of the improvements are not swamped by a new wave of development. The best way to foster growth is to focus it in the corridor and place our next Mass Transit investment there. And the best way to protect County tax payers is to ensure that growth is not allowed to outpace the infrastructure and that impact fees are sufficient to fund the infrastructure for whatever level of growth we believe is manageable.
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