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ACT Letter to County Council
The LATR Traffic Test and White Flint

April 4, 2010

A last-minute issue threatens to derail the progress of the county's innovative White Flint Master Plan. This is the question of whether construction of transit- oriented buildings within the White Flint sector should depend on whether intersections outside the sector meet traffic tests designed for non-transit-oriented development.

This general issue has been addressed by ACT in past years' testimony about the APFO. As we have told the Council repeatedly, as long as we use a LATR test (which ACT does not favor), the CLV threshold should depend on the location of the building, not the location of the intersection. The current policy of basing the threshold on the location of the intersection simply makes no sense. A building that lacks transit access should not be allowed to create congestion that would otherwise be unacceptable, simply because the intersection that gets congested happens to be near a Metro station. And conversely, the ability of a building that has good transit access to get by with somewhat less convenient auto access has nothing to do with the location of the intersections that drivers must pass through to reach it.

We were very interested to read the letter on this subject submitted to the Council by the Montgomery Civic Federation. This letter argues that the county is legally obligated to apply a test of whether "public facilities will be adequate to support and service the area of the proposed subdivision." If the Civic Fed is correct, the current practice of making CLV thresholds depend on the location of the intersection may well be in violation of the law, since it tests whether public facilities are adequate to service the area of the intersection rather than the "area of the proposed subdivision."

We urge you to enact a full exemption of the White Flint sector from LATR and PAMR. Making traffic tests depend on building location rather than intersection location is good sense, it is good policy, and it may be the law.