[Part I] No Back Roads: Connecting the Grid

A really interesting discussion has erupted over at Dan Reed's Just Up the Pike, subsequent to the article on the subject of whether or not the ICC can justify high-density development.

As this concerns a proposed 262-home neighborhood where the ICC will meet Georgia Avenue and Norbeck Road, various people have weighed in on this one, including former District 4 Democrat candidate and Montgomery Civic Federation past-president, Cary Lamari, a longtime resident and activist in the Norbeck neighborhood.

The discussion is certainly worth reading, but I want to try to stick close to a point I raised, and have raised before and will doubtless raise again, that of "back road connections", or as the Urban Planning contingent would put it, "grid network" or "grid connectivity".

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One might question the idea of "urban grid" as applied to Montgomery in general, and District 4 in particular, especially as people seem to have this notion that anything much north of Leisure World is pretty rural. That's not the case, even though there's a fairly large stretch of "unoccupied land" north of Norbeck Road (MD-28) and south of Batchellor's Forest Road. Well, it used to be unoccupied, but no longer. That stretch of "countryside" is in fact the right-of-way of the Intercounty Connector ("ICC"), and most of the woodlands there have been flattened, and the fields are about to be paved.

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From Georgia Avenue (MD-97), the ICC will travel east-southeast before taking a turn more to the southeast to cut across Norbeck Road between the eastern leg of Bailey's Lane and Wintergate Drive.

Looking at a Google Map of the area, to the north and east of the ICC route is the Allenwood-Gayfields-Gaywood Estates community. Interestingly, Gayfields has something like an urban grid pattern, though on a large scale. Yet despite its internal connectedness, connections other than to Layhill Road are limited to one connection to Norbeck Road via Drury Road/Tierra Drive. Contiguous neighborhoods such as Allenwood have connections only to Layhill Road, although it wouldn't be difficult to connect Graylake Drive to Drury Road. The nearby Chester Mill community could easily be connected to Allenwood, from the cul-de-sac at the north end of Chapel Hill Road, via a small bridge across Batchellor's Run to the intersection of Narrows Lane and Narrows Terrace, though you might have to sacrifice a house to do that. Yet with excellent connectivity to Norbeck Road, the community served by Woods Center Road lies sprawling at low density between Chapel Hill Road and Drury Road.

Now, to the west of Drury Road is the community served from Norbeck Road via Radwick Lane and Twin Valley Court. Twin Valley Lane provides some back-road grid pattern to the neighborhood. Were it not for the placement of one house west of the intersection of Tierra Drive (the southern leg of Drury Road) and Flint Hill Road, Twin Valley Lane could be extended to that intersection, giving back road grid interconnectivity to most of the communities that lie in the triangle bounded by Layhill and Norbeck Roads and the Intercounty Connector.

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More to come...

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