What will happen next regarding Beach Drive?
For some years now portions of Beach Drive, both in DC and MoCo, are closed for certain days: cars prohibited in order to give bikers a wide-open road and so we exacerbate the motorist versus bicyclist polarization, already long past the point of triggering random road rages. I like biking, but more people need to live by driving to work than are able to bike safely to work.
Why not cars AND bikes instead of either/or with each having their own high-quality domains they each deserve?
Dollars well spent once will prove more economic than dollars spent on imperfections that keep needing expensive re-thinks. Or are these changes just the unchecked misconceptions of officials unaccountable to voters? Montgomery Parks, which is part of the unelected MNCPPC, gets to declare what is a road and what is a trail and gets to declare a road to be a trail just because they think it is a good idea to benefit some over others disregarding the public purpose of having built a road initially rather than a trail or path and how many people NEED the road versus desire a bike-trail. How many bicyclists use their bike regardless of weather? A magnitude less I guess than people who drive a car to a job that allows them to live the life they want.
Weather and other realities will always prevent the bike being a good year-round commuting option except for the highly skilled and motivated few. An extreme case of recent government agency “fiat” is the Beach Drive, seemingly random, closures to cars: Montgomery Parks, cocooned in its insulation from voters, just declared a long-existing combination of a car road and its nearby parallel bike trail to become, by diktat, that bicyclists get to have BOTH their bike-path and the road too leaving commuters and travelers via car to suffer inefficiencies and diseconomies and lost time because what was built by all the taxpayers gets arbitrarily taken away by the government. Just too bad for many and OK for a few.
One stretch of Beach Drive in particular, being closed to cars is especially puzzling: the stretch between Cedar Lane and Connecticut Avenue. Puzzling because of its proximity to Navy Med now greatly enlarged with the addition of Walter Reed. The BRAC decision that closed Walter Reed in DC and merged it into Navy Med in Bethesda was made despite all the observations from people in Bethesda and Kensington that over-development already had traffic very congested. Zoning question: why let zoning be done by a small cabal instead of set by the citizens impacted?
These 2 hospitals combined into 1 impacted the Beach Drive stretch between Cedar Lane and Connecticut Ave: one of a very few roads people can use to get to Wisconsin Ave between Jones Bridge Road and Cedar Lane which is where the new “Joint Base” is located. Yet Montgomery Parks took a few vital roads and made them even fewer and denser and more dangerous!
This stretch was closed during the pandemic since fewer were needing to commute to anywhere but now is remaining closed with a day here and there changed due to the crescendo of neighborhood outrage over the adjacent Culver Street becoming a drag strip of angry Parks re-directed commuters trying to just get to work or make an appointment on time. With Beach not available it is Culver or Saul Road and that is it and Saul does not even have parking lanes for two blocks it is a road in name only not functionality. Lots of impatient cars and no shoulders to steer onto if needs be.
All this too despite BRAC which was the “study” that evicted historic and sprawling Walter Reed in DC, and made it into a developers dream, and arbitrarily shifted all those patients and employees to Navy Med in Bethesda and in consequence required very expensive road widening that does not fix the rush hour back ups and the resulting leap-frog rude driving to get a few cars ahead for the next turn and thus fender benders and lost hours for thousands. These rush hour accidents were instantly created the day all those employees had to go to a different place and instead of slow organic change we see dramatic massive bureaucrat induced change. Eisenhower should also have warned us of the politician/bureaucrat/industrial complex. See Jones Bridge to Connecticut to the Beltway any workday afternoon for a free admission to the BRAC re-alignment demolition derby.
Beach Drive for decades was a park concept of a road for cars and also a nearby bike trail, but the road was built for 2 way traffic whereas the bike trail’s width was, probably to save money, and still is, in most places, built for a few cyclists not many and the asphalt was laid on a shallow foundation, if any at all, so that tree roots over time create ride-jarring bumps.
Some say roads built with taxpayer monies to be roads for cars should remain for cars and bikes should gat safe and properly designed bike paths. The results of the past decades indicate vast dollars available to service automobiles like the inter county connector and regular re-pavings but few dollars for proper sized 2 way bike trails. Why not build proper for both instead of build for one then switch and other shenanigans? The car may be proving to be NOT all that we people thought it would be but change by agency whim is not the answer. Real people with real transportation needs need to have their voice heard and not 1,000s of lost hours in traffic tie ups created by the abuse of government power taken from the people through non elected agencies and too few politicians for a greatly increased population. And what’s with these “at large” seats? At-large means more power to the few and less power to the many. Back to roads versus trails versus paths: when businesses get weird and create negative consequences they get sued, but its much harder to sue a government and its really tough to get refunded for tax expenditures whose purpose gets changed by an after the fact switcheroo.
