Central Annapolis Road Sector Plan

The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission has been studying ways to improve Route 450 between Veterans Highway and the BW Parkway. A lot of it focuses on improving pedestrian safety, which is usually good for cyclists. They held a public meeting on it back in December. Some people really want a pedestrian bridge over 450 at the site of the Capitol Plaza Mall.

Landover Hills Mayor Lee P. Walker and the Rev. Boyce Truesdale, 63, of Woodlawn both said they would like to see a footbridge built between the highway and Capital Plaza Mall. The mall could be home to a proposed community and learning center, recently the subject of a Park and Planning feasibility study.

Donald Allen, 47, of Bellemead said traffic becomes congested on Route 450 and said he also would like to see a pedestrian footbridge near the Capital Plaza Mall like the one at the Bowie Town Center over Route 197.

Pedestrians.org has a pretty good page on pedestrian bridges and when they are and are not a good idea and using it's rules, this is in the "is not" category. On 450, as you can see from the picture, they have cyclists riding on a narrow sidewalk - which is unfortunate since I think that riding on the sidewalk is illegal in PG County.

There are some ideas to add bike and pedestrian improvements that aren't sidewalks.

Jamie Parks of Kittelson & Associates Inc. suggested placing signals at crosswalks where Varnum Street and 69th Avenue intersect Route 450 as well as at a crosswalk outside St. Mary's Catholic Church where he said drivers are legally required to stop for pedestrians to safely cross, but rarely do. Parks also suggested a bike path to run along Webster and Varnum streets.

They should also look at continuing the bike lanes and path planned as part of the review of Route 450 north of there.

Their next meeting is this month.

Thursday, January 28, 2010
7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
St. Mary's Church, Burgundy Room
7401 Buchanan Street, Landover Hills, MD 20784

Update: More information here.

Comments

[John Curran]

Are you sure the illustration above corresponds to the proposed plan? That yellow bus is an MBTA bus, which belongs in Boston. It looks to me like the intersection pictured is on Commonwealth Ave. Boston, too.

Are you sure that illustration represents the proposal under discussion, especially on the point you made about bicycle traffic?

[washcycle]

That's what they had in the presentation material. You can follow the first link in the post to the presentation.

[Jon]

This seems to me to be illustrative of Maryland's choppy approach to bike access. They could build the awesomest bike paths here, but it wouldn't really connect to anything. There's about a 1 mile gap between 450/295 and the ATTS. On the other end, there's fairly short gap from 450/410 to the New Carollton station.

It's a shame. The latter gap is probably easy enough to close (especially with the ideas that have been floating around for improving the New Carollton area), but if they were willing to work on the area all the way west to the Anacostia, you'd actually have a pretty neat & useful set of trails all the way from Montgomery County to New Carollton.

[John Curran]

Wow. I just looked at the presentation. That photograph is definitely from Boston. The signboard on the front of the MBTA bus even says "1 VIA MASS AVE". Was the design firm being lazy, dishonest, or both?

I'm all for high-density development. But I would send this proposal back to the drawing board. It's not just bad for cyclists. It's dishonest to everyone to sell a vision that won't look anything like as pictured: The picture is from another city!

[Washcycle]

Well, the bus may be from another city but it is just a stand-in. Just as I'm sure none of the people pictured are from PG County either. I wouldn't call that dishonest, it represents "a" bus, not "the" bus. The firm was probably being cheap (using an image they already had) which I'm OK with since it doesn't matter too much.