Council Unanimously Supports Bus Rapid Transit Plan in Straw Vote

In a straw vote on Tuesday, Montgomery County council members voted in unanimous support of the Countywide Transit Corridors Functional Master Plan, which would add up to about 80 miles of bus rapid transit (BRT) in the county.

The straw vote is non-binding, but it indicates the council's current position on the plan to explore building up to about 80 miles of rapid transit bus routes in the county. A final vote on the plan is slated to take place on Nov. 26.

The plan to build a BRT system is only in the earliest stages, and it will be years before the public sees any results. 

"This project could be years before it goes forward because it involves a lot of operational analysis," Council Member Nancy Floreen (D-At Large) said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, "traffic won’t get better. It will get worse regardless of whether we build transit improvements," Council Member George Leventhal (D-At Large) said.

Leventhal added that planners are "trying to show that we don’t need to widen roads on 355 and 29, but it will be years before we know if that is the case."

BRT typically involves creating dedicated bus lanes that maximize moving the most amount of people in a single lane. Dedicated lanes can be created from pre-existing lanes.

Council members agreed that nothing would be built unless public hearings had been held and the public had been fully informed. 

Ten BRT routes tentatively are planned for the cross-county network, but not all routes necessarily would be completed at the same time, in the same decade, or at all. Further details will come much later down the road, as studies are made and analyses completed. 

• Georgia Avenue North
• Georgia Avenue South
• New Hampshire Avenue
• North Bethesda Transitway
• Randolph Road
• University Boulevard
• Veirs Mill Road
  
• Route 29 
• Route 355 North
• Route 355 South  

Council members did disagree over whether to extend rapid bus lanes from Bethesda south to Friendship Heights and the Washington, DC, line. 

In a 6-3 vote, council members voted to include that part of Wisconsin Avenue (from DC to Bethesda) on the BRT plan map as a dotted line—meaning that BRT could be built on that part of Wisconsin Avenue if it was to connect with a similar rapid transit route built in the future on Wisconsin Avenue in DC (from Friendship Heights to Georgetown, to example).

Council Members Floreen, Phil Andrews (D-District 3) and Hans Riemer (D-At Large) voted against including that portion of Wisconsin Avenue in the BRT plan.

One factor in building BRT routes is the financing, which "is a huge question. The whole thing could fall apart over that," Leventhal said.

Another factor is how BRT will affect properties. County residents will ask, " 'What does this mean for my house?' By the time we know that, likely none of us will be sitting here," Leventhal added. 

The next step in the BRT plan is to perform engineering studies to find out how the routes will or could work, and how they would work, Riemer said.

"We’re not ready to deal with [new road] treatments, but we are ready to deal with dedicated lanes," Council Member Roger Berliner (D-District 1) said. 

"The fundamental predicate is that we have to use dedicated lanes. Our roads are our resource, and when you have a resource that is oversubscribed, you have to allocate it," he said, adding that cars and buses are not equal in terms of their abilities to move many people at once.

"[Let's] change from pure congestion to having the finest rapid transit system in the country," Berliner added. 

The county's transportation department already is budgeting money for studies and conceptual planning of three bus rapid transit routes—on Routes 355 and 29, and on Randolph Road, Bethesda Now reported last month.