Montgomery Traffic Fixes Are Ineffective, Study Says

If you drive on Great Seneca Highway near Muddy Branch Road in Gaithersburg, you have the dubious distinction of passing through Montgomery County's most clogged intersection. That is, if you can clear the light anytime soon.

No. 2 on the list is Georgia Avenue at Randolph Road, which joins the top-10 most crowded county intersections for the first time, according to a new report by county planners. No. 3 is Route 355 at King Farm Boulevard, which moved up from eighth worst.

In fact, traffic congestion is so bad in some parts of Montgomery that the county's new rules to control it may already be obsolete, the report suggests.

Congestion is "at undesirable levels in many areas of the county," the report said. The Montgomery planning board is slated to discuss the findings tomorrow.

While the mid-county is clearly affected, some of the most severe jams are in the county's southern tier, where more development is planned and thousands of new commuters will be heading for the expanded National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda in a few years. And although there are plans to blunt the impact of newcomers, the report suggests that more may be needed. Of the 422 intersections that were tested, 59 were considered failing, the report said.

Rockville Pike (Route 355) from downtown Bethesda to West Cedar Lane, which passes by the naval medical center and the campus of the National Institutes of Health, is also on the troubled list, as is Georgia Avenue from downtown Silver Spring to the Beltway.

Other problem areas are Norbeck Road (Route 28) from just north of Rockville Pike to Georgia Avenue, and Connecticut Avenue (Route 185) from Friendship Heights at the District line to the Beltway.

"One of the points we are trying to drive home is that it's not necessarily getting worse, but traffic is not significantly improving. We need to start to focus on making the system better," said Ronald Vaughn, who headed the study for the planning agency. The report proposes several possible fixes, from widening intersections to adding rapid buses with dedicated lanes to allow them to bypass traffic.

Across the county, one of seven intersections, or 14 percent, is more congested than recently enacted rules allow, the report said. The new tougher standards stem from the new growth policy, which a sharply divided county council spent almost all of last year trying to rework. The goal was to find a way to allow growth while ensuring that more development does not lead to more gridlock on the roads and more crowding in public schools.

Despite its somewhat gloomy outlook, the report also contains at least a glimmer of hope for drivers and public transit users trying to navigate clogged streets. The report said that in some places, efforts to limit congestion are working. In others, help is on the way.

"Congestion levels were reduced as a result of improvements at those intersections," Vaughn said. "Where we have resources to make improvements, they are working."

Improvements, which have included changing the timing of lights and adding new lanes, resulted in better traffic flow on Georgia Avenue (MD 97) at Forest Glen Road and on Frederick Road (Route 355) at Ridge Road (Route 27), among others.