Posted on 05/05/2008 6:53:31 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
In the community of Shady Grove Woods, trees are becoming more and more scarce.
Residents and other anti-Intercounty Connector activists marched through the neighborhood on Saturday, pointing out the trees that were cut down to make way for the six-lane highway.
‘‘It’s just that we didn’t have a say in it in so many ways and we’re not talking about a two-lane road, we’re talking about a major highway running through here,” resident Sam Chim said of the ICC. ‘‘We have a lot of nice, private woods back here and now we’re going to have a highway running through instead. It just kills the whole atmosphere of living in Shady Grove Woods; it’s going to be like Shady Grove Highway after this.”
Chim is one of several residents who has lost a portion of his back yard to the highway, and one of nearly 100 people who attended the weekend ‘‘Irish wake” in the Derwood neighborhood.
The event, called ‘‘Wake-up MoCo,” was organized by Connie McKenna and a group of neighbors in an effort to draw attention to what they say is the devastating impact of the Intercounty Connector on their community, located west of Shady Grove Road along Briardale Road.
A walking tour playfully called ‘‘O’Malley’s March,” the name of Gov. Martin O’Malley’s former Irish rock band, mimicked the processional of an Irish wake as bagpiper Steve Porter led the group to the barren field behind several homes.
‘‘Today we’re here to mourn for what was really a forest six weeks ago,” said McKenna, president of the Shady Grove Woods Homeowners Association.
The ICC, an 18-mile toll road that will connect Interstate 270 in Gaithersburg to Interstate 95 in Laurel, is in the early stages of construction and is expected to cost about $2.4 billion...
(Excerpt) Read more at gazette.net ...
Think of the trees, man!
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Having a freeway put in your backyard? Kiss of death for your property value. Who’d wanna buy your house? A retired truck driver?
Meanwhile the same idiots whine about traffic getting worse and worse... This is the big city. If you want trees... go move someplace else.
Do these people not commute to work? This area is seriously underserved road-wise and it’s mostly because of these anti-highway whiners.
I’m fair about this - I don’t want a highway in my yard either, but half the reason traffic is so bad getting around DC is that there are no good highways going THROUGH the city and same thing with Baltimore.
I realize the ICC isn’t in the city but it would relieve surface road traffic a lot - sometimes you have to look at the entire net benefit of such a thing.
Dunno about that - I looked at houses off the highway and they’re just as insanely expensive as all the others around here.
It would be on heck of a highway if the trees were allowed to stand.
"Caution - Oak Tree in Left Lane - 1000 Meters"
It would be nice if we could put freeways where nobody owns property, but such conditions do not exist in the Lower 48 anymore, AFAIK.
I can't stand these NIMBY whiners. If these losers had been around in the 1950s and 1960s the Interstate Highway System would never have been built. They hold our country back.
... half the reason traffic is so bad getting around DC is that there are no good highways going THROUGH the city and same thing with Baltimore.
What needs to be done is this... and yes, I am dreaming, I know... down near Richmond, VA, build a highway that starts at the northeastern-most corner of I-295 (near its eastern exit with I-64) and have it roughly parallel US-301. Have this highway continue into St. Mary's County and Calvert counties in Maryland. Continue across the bay into the Eastern Shore (now I am really in la-la-land). Have this highway roughly parallel US-50 and US-301 into Delaware and connect it to Delaware Route 1. If you really want to speed things along, build a second crossing over the Delaware River and have it hook into the NJ Turnpike. The grand result of this is that Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and DC are bypassed. To make a highway more acceptable to the residents of the areas where it would be built, you limit the number of exits.
There were some of them back then - that's why there are no through highways besides the relatively useless 295 through DC and only 95 goes through Baltimore - anti-highway groups in the 60s and 70s. They didn't want to disturb their neighborhoods. There were plans for many more highways in both cities.
The hilarious part is that these neighborhoods today that the proposed highways would have gone through are almost all ghetto hellholes - I don't think adding a highway would have made them any worse than they are today!
“I looked at houses off the highway and they’re just as insanely expensive as all the others around here.”
You’re right about that. But they don’t sell as well. People don’t like the noise factor. Many of these house get discounted to move them. Another tip: don’t buy a house near an intersection. Headlights will sweep across your windows every time someone turns. Used to sell real estate, but jimmuh killed me on that job!
So the idea is to take all the non-local, non-commuting traffic off of 95?
I rented a room in a house that backs up to I-270 at the I-370 exit. The noisewall helped, and for a time, I slept downstairs partly for that reason. (The noisewall only went up 1 story.) When I slept upstairs, however, I became used to the noise quite quickly. I wouldn’t recommend it for families with small children, however.
Now, try and imagine living across the street from the railroad tracks, like I did back in the 1980s while growing up. If you really want (intermittent but loud) noise, railroads are hard to beat (and they don’t have noisewalls).
Heavy curtains will take care of that.
Heavy curtains? I suppose, if you don’t like fresh air much! Middle of the block! Best place to buy.
The problem with this road is going to be the same as all the others: when it is completed, lots of land will be opened to development, and the development will create traffic that will clog the road! You can’t win.
Well, just open the curtains during the daytime.
"Caution - Oak Tree in Left Lane - 1000 Meters"
Let's see, 1 meter = 3.28 feet, so that's 3280 feet or 1093 yards, that's a little more than half a mi##SCREEEEE!!SMASH!!CRUNCH!!BOOM
Another tragic metric road sign catastrophe.
Well . . . it's 25 miles from the big city. And moving away to be near trees is no longer an option for these people. They might be able to sell if the real estate market ever goes back to the way it was in 2005, when people would buy anything, anywhere. But right now, they're truly screwed. I feel for them, but I would have gotten out three years ago. They had plenty of warning. This road was not a secret. Everyone knew it was coming, and everyone also knew that all the legal avenues for stopping it had been exhausted. So if you didn't want a road in your back yard, you should have sold your house two or three years ago. Demonstrations aren't going to help now.
It is too bad about the trees. The construction crews should try to save some of them. They help control run-off and they hold the soil. They also add a lot of beauty and coolness. The George Washington Parkway, which is heavily lined with trees, is one of the most beautiful roads in the US and is a tourist attraction in itself. The ICC could be pretty and could make commuting less headache-inducing.
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