What’s so important about these parks?

Parks offer places of refuge from an increasingly stressful world.  They provide habitat for many plants and animals that need significant amounts of forest to survive and they clean our air and water.  Once they are paved, they are gone forever.

The parks that would be affected by the “techway” and the ICC in its many permutations were specifically created to provide a buffer zone for water runoff from surrounding developments.  In the ideal world the parkland would absorb the runoff before it reaches the stream.  Unfortunately, there is so much surface area that is impervious to water surrounding the parks today that they are often overwhelmed during heavy rainfalls.  This problem would be made much worse by situating major highways in or near the parks. 

There are two agreements that have been entered into by the state and county that have goals that will be difficult to meet even with our current levels of forest canopy and stream buffer.  If we destroy even more of our parks, the goals set by these agreements will be almost impossible to meet.

• The state has entered into The Chesapeake 2000 Bay Agreement with Virginia and Delaware which requires each state to reduce pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay watershed – this agreement requires that we repair stream buffers, not destroy them.  Major highway construction in these parks would contradict the agreement   See http://www.chesapeakebay.net/agreement.htm
  
• The Montgomery County Council recently signed onto the Cities For Climate Protection that requires that the county government reduce the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere by 5% below 1990 levels.  Trees absorb carbon dioxide and will be an important factor in our ability to meet that goal.   See http://www.iclei.org/co2/

How will we solve traffic congestion without these roads?

Actually, the counter-intuitive answer is that building roads actually contributes to the problem.  Roads promote growth around them, which soon fills the roads to capacity.  If we continue to grow in the current manner and at the current rate we could pave over the entire county and still not “solve” the problem. 

We need to slow down growth in the region and growth that does occur must be located in denser communities near transit lines.  It has been shown clearly that people are much more likely to take transit if they can walk to it.  Arlington with 5 stations, no parking at the stations, and very high density around the stations has the highest percentage of metro ridership of any jurisdiction in the area and the least traffic congestion. They have shown that this approach can work.  Providing transit around the perimeter of the area – the “purple line” – will connect the metro spokes and provide transportation options that go from suburb to suburb.  Again – areas surrounding these transit stations must be densely developed with mixed use development that encourages people to stay close to home and walk or bike to shopping, entertainment and jobs.  We have a perfect opportunity to jump start the Purple Line by putting rail on the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge connecting the communities of Alexandria and Oxen Hill.  The Sierra Club is fighting hard to make this happen.  And, of course, telecommuting and staggered work hours are having a positive effect and will be more widely used as technology improves.  For more information on transportation solutions see the website of The Coalition for Smarter Growth:  http://www.smartergrowth.net/   

Some highway proponents say that end-on construction will mitigate the damage to the parks.  What is end-on construction and will it mitigate the damage?

End-on construction involves building a road on pylons rather than using traditional cut and fill methods.  Each part of the road would be put in place from the part of the road just built.  It is true that end-on construction would minimize the width of the road bed and would allow animal migration under the elevated roadway.  However, there would still have to be clear cutting of the forest in the road’s right-of-way that would have a major effect on the habitat for interior dwelling creatures and the run-off problems would be the same.  An elevated roadway would also increase the noise level in surrounding neighborhoods and make the park a much less desirable place for human retreat. 

Won’t we hurt our economy if we don’t build more roads?

This is not a foregone conclusion.  There are many factors that go into economic prosperity and they are difficult to quantify.  For one thing we save money on water treatment by preserving these very important stream buffers.   Here are a couple of interesting examples of how our stream buffers can help save taxpayer dollars:

• Rather than construct an $8 billion water filtration plant forecast to operate at an annual cost of $300 million, New York City is spending $1.5 billion to protect 80,000 acres of its upstate watershed that naturally filters the water used downstream.
• An article in the April 13, 2001 edition of The Washington Post reports that it is estimated to cost $8.9 billion to clean up the Chesapeake Bay over the next 10 years.  “The money would be used to preserve thousands of acres of watershed property, create buffer zones to protect rivers and streams, and reduce pollution from sewage and urban storm water.”

The Sierra Club maintains that saving stream buffers only to sacrifice them to sprawl-inducing roads is wasting the taxpayers’ money.