Options for the CCT "final mile"
The Trail must cross five streets at traffic lights to avoid using CSX or WMATA right-of-way or six to stay away from the CSX corridor entirely.
If you go from the Silver Spring Transit Station to Bethesda on the Georgetown Branch Trail, you must cross eight major roadways at-grade at traffic lights. Three of these roadways are six-lane state highways. In addition, there are another seven lesser Trail crossings with stop signs.
The proposed Purple Line transit/trail alignment would eliminate all Trail crossings at traffic lights, and all of the Trail crossings at stop signs except one. A trail user would travel the 4.4 miles from the Silver Spring Transit Center to Bethesda and encounter no traffic lights and only one stop sign, at a crossing of a two lane residential street (Talbot Avenue). The frequent stops, the many long waits at lights, and the dangerous conflicts with motor vehicles at busy roadway crossings would be gone.
Options for the CCT "final mile"The Trail must cross five streets at traffic lights to avoid using CSX or WMATA right-of-way or six to stay away from the CSX corridor entirely. |
The planned CCT alignment into Silver Spring is shown in the map as the red line alongside the CSX corridor. "Save the Trail" advocates assert that the Trail must be kept completely away from rail transit to be attractive and safe to use, but as you can see from the map, the further the Trail alignment is pushed away from the rail corridor the more indirect and dangerous the Trail becomes. The Trail alignment that avoids being alongside active rail must come into Silver Spring as an on-road trail down Second Avenue, and will have six crossings of busy streets at traffic lights, two of them six-lane state highways with dangerous bus and turning traffic (16th Street and Colesville Road).
"Save the Trail" advocates claim to be defending the CCT and the bicycle network even as they attack the trail-with-rail concept that the Metropolitan Branch Trail and the "final Mile" of the CCT are being built upon. We will not have the strong political support essential to complete the CCT along the CSX corridor if transit opponents succeed in convincing decision makers that a trail built alongside active transit tracks will be "devastated" and unsafe to use. Such assertions are unfounded and are destructive to the goal of completing the CCT.