Traffic improvements could mean property grab
By: Alan Suderman
Examiner Staff Writer
March 23, 2009
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The state of Maryland is considering seizing private land to make room for extra lanes of traffic around Bethesda’s National Naval Medical Center, which is expecting 4,000 more visitors each day as Walter Reed Army Medical Center moves to the Rockville Pike campus.
Easing gridlock
Intersections the State Highway Authority is considering for “major” improvements:
Old Georgetown Road and West Cedar Lane
Rockville Pike and Cedar Lane
Rockville Pike and Center Drive/Jones Bridge Road
Connecticut Avenue and Kensington Parkway/Jones Bridge Road
The National Institutes of Health, a Catholic girls school and homeowners are among those who could lose land as the state considers major improvements at four intersections near the medical center to ease already nasty traffic.
“It’s a possibility,” said Maryland Department of Transportation Secretary John Porcari, adding that the state was still planning how to expand the intersections and that discussions about the state taking private land were “premature.”
Part of the state’s plan to ease traffic congestion is to add extra turn lanes to increase traffic flow. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., on Monday said he planned to ask for $40 million in federal funding for the improvements.
Under the Base Realignment and Closure initiative, the medical center is set to incorporate D.C.’s Walter Reed hospital in 2011, meaning an additional 4,000 daily visits, many by wounded soldiers and their family members, to the already congested area.
More than 60,000 automobiles pass through the area each day.
Montgomery County’s BRAC coordinator, Phil Alperson, said the state recently met with some of the residents whose property could be affected by expanding intersections, but said details about the state’s plans were still sketchy.
“It’s all speculative,” Alperson said, adding that some of the state’s proposals range from taking part of a resident’s yard to taking a resident’s whole property.
“None of the residents I spoke to are happy about it, needless to say,” he said.
One of the potentially affected properties is Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic girls school that sits next to the medical center at Rockville Pike and Cedar Lane.
School officials said they were open to helping solve some of the area’s traffic woes but want to keep as much of their land as possible.
“We need to ensure that our campus meets the needs of Stone Ridge’s ... program,” head of school Catherine Ronan Karrels said.
Porcari said that if the state needed to take land, it would try to work with private property owners in a “cooperative way.”
“But the state does have the ability to use land for highway right of way where necessary,” he added.
