Short term, to try to relieve some of the pressure on 270 and the beltway, I believe that some advertising for MARC in the Frederick/Urbana area could easily pay dividends. No this is not a cure all, but having the ticket sales to show there is demand would make it easier to argue for increased transit service. Unfortunately 270 from Germantown to Frederick if not all the way to Hagerstown along 70 is running near if not above design capacity even during non-rush hours. Note that increasing service on MARC will require demonstrating there is demand for the increased service as it will cost a similar magnitude as adding lanes to 270. This is in large part because impacting the ability of CSX to move freight on that line is a non-starter.
My opposition to widening 270 south of Gaithersburg and 495 is due to the fact that all those people who drive in on those highways need to get off somewhere, and the surface streets I am familiar with (Connecticut, River, Georgia) are already full during rush hour. I have seen the lights at those roads back traffic up the off ramps and impede the flow on the beltway.
I am currently in the unenviable situation of for work driving my work truck from our shop in Gaithersburg all the way to Georgetown to perform my work (and I require the equipment on that truck to do my job). Any reduction in the number of cars on the road makes everyone else’s life easier.
Exactly. There is no sense in building bigger traffic pipes to pump more cars into the center when the core is already thoroughly congested.
Widening 270 north of Gaithersburg will simply encourage developers to add to the sprawl along the corridor. Any new road capacity will be overwhelmed by new traffic volume the moment it opens.
I know I sound like a broken record, but the fact is that we are now a metro area of 10 million people. More cars are a liability inside the beltway, and in an increasing number of places outside the beltway. Too many people have not yet adjusted to this reality. They think pouring more asphalt will solve the problem. It won't.
You have to drive for work, and that's fine. But we have to start getting commuters out of their cars if they're coming into the central city. We need to encourage people to get out of their cars for shorter, non-work trips, which means emphasizing mixed use neighborhoods. And we should be encouraging people to live closer to their jobs -- to trade the 30 mile commute on clogged arterial roads for a two or three mile commute on neighborhood streets.
My standard comment, especially to younger people looking for their first house, is to draw a circle with a radius of five miles around their job, and look really, really hard within that area. My other standard comment is that the best thing we could do in the long run to ease congestion would be to voucher the schools so that toxic public schools would no longer chase so many people to the far suburbs to find a decent school district.
In the short run, the most important simple thing we could do is to create more places to cross 270, the beltway, 66, 395 and a number of non-interstate arterial roads. We have far too many limited access commuter sewers that are barriers to lateral movement. This adds immensely to traffic congestion while degrading the neighborhoods through which they run.