Open forum: More gridlock with Wayne Purple Line option

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Open forum: More gridlock with Wayne Purple Line option

E-mail this article \ Print this article

Your July 16 article did an excellent job summarizing the serious concerns of residents near Wayne Avenue in downtown Silver Spring over the proposed Purple Line route at street-level on Wayne.

The community near Wayne supports a sensible mass transit solution to our traffic problems, not one that as designed will make them worse. For a Purple Line that MTA says will draw no more than 20 percent of its riders from cars, rather than buses and Metro, and does not have relief of traffic congestion as a primary goal, it has morphed from what was originally thought to be Metro-like rapid transit to a slower streetcar that in downtown Silver Spring would most likely increase, not decrease, gridlock in one of the county’s most congested areas.

Up to 180-feet-long trains, crawling on Bonifant across Georgia Avenue, into the intersection of Wayne and Fenton at a diagonal as a fifth stream of traffic, and then on Wayne past the entrance to the Whole Foods parking lot every few minutes at rush hour, are a recipe for disaster.

There will be even greater traffic backups for many blocks on Georgia, Fenton and Wayne than exist today — choking the recently revived downtown.

Jonathan Jay, Silver Spring