The following five parameters must be understood and intelligently addressed if there is to be a prosperous, stable and sustainable future for the Washington-

Baltimore New Urban Region (NUR). These realities are relevant in all NURs in the United States . The data presented below relate specifically to the National Capital Subregion of the Washington-Baltimore NUR.  

1. There is already too much land devoted to, and held for, urban land uses in the National Capital Subregion.

 

2.  The National Capital Subregion's jobs are center-weighted now and will be center-weighted for the foreseeable future.

 

3.  Scattered urban land uses cause an irrational and untransportable distribution of trips which is the root cause of gridlock.

 

4.  There must be an equitable distribution of the costs of services, not subsidies for those who create and profit from dysfunctional human settlement patterns as is the case now.

 

5.  Without Balanced Communities within a sustainable New Urban Region, the future is bleak.

Each of these realities is documented on the following pages and in the material cited in the End Notes and the General Bibliographic Note. Programs that attempt to guide citizens toward a better future must reflect these realities. The NUR and the Subregion can change course and achieve a prosperous, stable and sustainable future, but only if these realities are understood and if there is Fundamental Change from Business-as-Usual. 

 

(Resource Note: This material is intended to be read without the interruption of footnotes. There are End Notes with references for each of the five sections.  There is also a general bibliographic summary of resources.)

 

1.  There is already too much land devoted to, and held for, urban land uses in the National Capital Subregion.

 

There is already too much land devoted to, and held for, urban uses to support efficient, sustainable or transportable settlement patterns for the foreseeable future. The evolution of Balanced Communities within a sustainable NUR will take up much less land than is currently devoted to, and planned for, urban land uses.

The Region's citizens do not need to develop more land. Individuals, enterprises, institutions and agencies need to renew, revitalize, recycle, refill and more intelligently use the land already devoted to urban use. Urban land uses should be located either within the Clear Edge that surrounds the urbanized area at the core of the Subregion, or within the Clear Edges around the urban enclaves which exist in the Countryside. 

 

Facts documenting the first reality:

• Within the area with a radius R=10 miles from the National Capital Subregion's core with a center point at the Virginia end of Memorial Bridge (200,000 acres), there is enough vacant and underutilized land within two miles of existing METRO stations (500x75=37,500 acres) to meet the foreseeable demand for urban development (jobs, housing, services, recreation and amenities), if the station areas are developed and redeveloped at the same densities planned for the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington County.

In fact, the capacity far exceeds the Metropolitan Washington Council of Government's 25-year population and job projections for this area using the same densities. These are not Manhattan densities. Single-family detached housing exists at the edges of these 500-acre METRO station areas, and this housing is valued much more highly by the market than similar units in scattered locations that have only automobile access.

• Likewise, there is enough vacant and underutilized land within radius R=20 miles from the core (800,000 acres) at the same density as green, leafy Reston (10 persons per acre at the Alpha Community scale) to meet all the demand for urban development (jobs, housing, services,  recreation, amenities) for the next 25 years in the National Capital Subregion even if there were very little shared-vehicle (aka, transit) related development.

This means there are two alternatives for accommodating all the projected development within the Clear Edge around the core of the Subregion without ever "developing" another acre of greenfield.  The intelligent strategy is to plan for a combination of these two alternatives to create Balanced Communities in the urbanized area that surrounds the National Capital Subregion's core.

In addition, there is extensive vacant and underutilized land within the Clear Edges that surround the urban enclaves (aka, towns, villages and hamlets) that now exist within the Countryside. The goal here must be to create disaggregated Balanced Communities that are within and support a healthy Countryside. To achieve this goal, those enclaves will require additional development to facilitate their evolution to relatively balanced components of human settlement.

The "frontier" of speculation on land for intensive urban land uses has moved well beyond radius R=30 miles from the National Capital Subregion's centroid (1,800,000=/- acres). In fact, the frontier for speculation on scattered urban land uses is well beyond radius R=70 miles (4,000,000+/- acres in the Northern Virginia Subregion. At minimum sustainable densities, there is enough land in the Virginia Subregion alone for 40 million residents. Within the R=70 frontier, urban land include power plants, server farms, and campus-layout office parks, in addition to sites for retirement villages, golf-course housing developments, orphan cluster-scale subdivisions and other scattered urban housing. (Only Virginia acreage is used in this calculation for the reason noted below.)

 

Radius R=70 miles from the National Capital Subregion's centroid when including both Virginia and Maryland encompasses over 9,850,000 acres. Because of the existence of the Baltimore Subregional core and the National Capital Subregional core within the Washington-Baltimore NUR, it is not possible in Maryland to go much beyond 30 miles from either of these regional cores except in far western Maryland, northeastern Maryland and on the DelMarVa Peninsula. For this reason, only the Northern Virginia Subregion area number for beyond R=70 miles (4,000,000 acres) is used in the "frontier" calculation above. The application of Regional Metrics for the entire Washington-Baltimore NUR indicates that even with half the Region preserved as open space, there is already over five times the land committed to urban land uses as will be required by the year 2050.

 

2.  The National Capital Subregion's jobs are center-weighted now and will be center-weighted for the  foreseeable future.

 

Most of the jobs are now located in the National Capital Subregion's core and the intensively urbanized area out to R=10 miles. They are projected to be center-weighted 25 years from now according to municipal and MWCOG projections. The critical need is to stop scattering orphan housing units, dooryards and clusters, as well as isolated employment "campuses," across the Countryside. The objective must be to create Balanced Communities by locating housing, services, recreation and amenity in a synergistic relationship with existing and future job locations.

 

3.  Scattered urban land uses cause an irrational and untransportable distribution of trips which is the root cause of gridlock.

 

There is no way to have a sustainable region if everyone is encouraged to live anywhere they can afford a house, work anywhere they can find a job, seek services and participate in leisure activities anywhere they want. This unsustainable distribution of activities generates a market for development anywhere a short-term profit can be achieved. 

 

The dysfunctional distribution of activities (trip distribution) is compounded by the expectation that "the government" can provide transport facilities that allow citizens go wherever they want whenever they want to travel and arrive in a timely manner.  Ubiquitous mobility is a physical impossibility when there are such scattered origins and destinations of vehicle trips, period!

 

This fundamental flaw in transport and mobility strategy is termed the "Private Vehicle Mobility Myth."  There must be a balance on a regional basis between the travel demand generated by the human settlement pattern and the capacity of the transport system.

 

Even with extensive new transit investment, the total cost of any system that meets the expectations of the Private Vehicle Mobility Myth would be prohibitive for even the top one-fifth of the economic food chain, much less for the total population. Serving the total population is an imperative in a stable democracy.

 

4.  There must be an equitable distribution of the costs of services, not subsidies for those who create and profit from dysfunctional human settlement patterns as is the case now.

 

The costs of most services which make contemporary civilization possible vary depending on location. Under the current system, those individuals and organizations that create added service costs through dysfunctional land-use location decisions do not pay those costs. Those who create and/or profit from the agglomeration of dysfunctional human settlement patterns should be required to pay the true prices for their costly actions. Instead, these costs are now being subsidized by all taxpayers.

There must be a process to intelligently allocate resources and equitably account for the location-

related costs created by public and private actions.  This process will fundamentally restructure the market for land, goods and services, and thus will change Business-as-Usual. The total cost to provide the same services varies. In outlying, scattered locations, the costs for services are far greater than the costs for services that support sustainable patterns and densities of land use. Charging the full cost of services in dysfunctionally scattered locations to those who create them and then profit or benefit in other ways from this pattern will be a catalyst to create Balanced Communities throughout the Baltimore-Washington NUR. This must be a goal of Fundamental Change.

 

5.  Without Balanced Communities within sustainable New Urban Regions, the future is bleak.

 

If the organizations, citizens and their representatives in the Region continue Business-as-Usual and do not support Fundamental Change, the Region will:  

• Lose the Countryside and the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem.

• Lose competitive advantage over other Regions.

• Continue to degrade each citizen's quality of life.

• Squander economic prosperity, erode social stability and accelerate environmental degeneration in the Region.

These points are difficult to put in more simple language than the text above. This is because reality runs counter to so many myths and misconceptions upon which citizens now rely to make location decisions. However, that is what the images and words of educational programs for citizens and their government representatives must accomplish in order to create Balanced Communities within sustainable New Urban Regions.

 

-- December 15, 2003

 

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END NOTES FOR REALITIES 1 THROUGH 5:

 

1. The data to support Reality 1 are derived by applying Regional Metrics to the data gathered for Metropolitan Washington Regional Activity Centers: A Tool for Linking Land Use and Transportation Planning, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, July 2002, and  the 1990 and 2000 US Census. Also see: Stark Contrast (SYNERGY/Resources, May 2001, also included as Section II of the Handbook); It Is Time to Fundamentally Rethink METRO in the National Capital Subregion (SYNERGY/Resources, January 1999); Priority Transportation Improvements (SYNERGY/Resources PowerPoint, April 2003); The Myths That Blind Us (Bacon's Rebellion, 20 October 2003 ).

 

2. The data to support Reality 2 are derived by applying Regional Metrics to the data gathered for Metropolitan Washington Regional Activity Centers: A Tool for Linking Land Use and Transportation Planning, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, July 2002, and  the 1990 and 2000 US Census. Also see: Understanding the Current and Future Distribution of Jobs in the National Capital Subregion (SYNERGY/Planning, Inc., Dec 2000, also included as Section X. (2) of the Handbook); Priority Transportation Improvements (SYNERGY/ Resources PowerPoint, April 2003).

 

3. The data to support Reality 3 are based on the annual survey of urban traffic congestion prepared by the Transportation Research Center at Texas A&M University . For a derivation of the physics supporting this analysis, see: The Physics of Gridlock (SYNERGY/Resources PowerPoint, April 2003); Smoke and Shadows (Bacon's Rebellion, 13 January 2003 ); Access and Mobility (Bacon's Rebellion, 30 June 2003 ).

 

4. The parameters used to establish Reality 4 are based on the Five Natural Laws articulated in The Shape of the Future. (SYNERGY/Resources, 2000).  Also see: Beyond the Clear Edge (Bacon's Rebellion, 26 May 2003); Scatteration (Bacon's Rebellion, 25 Sept 2003 ); Slow Growth Isn't Smart (Bacon's Rebellion, 17 Nov 2003 ).