Proposed legislation to expand Anne Arundel County’s adequate public facilities (APF) requirements to include more types of transportation has spurred some industry experts to suggest the county follow lessons learned by Montgomery County after it launched a similar multi-modal initiative.
In October, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman introduced Council Bill 81-25 which would replace the existing Bicycle, Pedestrian and Transit Assessment (BPTA) with an expanded APF test and mitigation requirements covering a broad range of transportation options.
In a letter to county officials, NAIOP Maryland expressed strong opposition to the bill.
“CB 81-25 would place an unjustified burden on new development and redevelopment projects as well as tenant improvements in existing commercial buildings,” the letter states.
The bill would establish mitigation levels based on census tract data, not the pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders generated by a particular use.
For many developments, those expanded requirements to improve bicycle, pedestrian and transit infrastructure would be “cost prohibitive and fraught with practical challenges such as the lack of adjacent right of way to accommodate segregated bicycle and pedestrian pathways,” the letter says. “Based on transportation engineers’ analysis of the seven sample projects selected by the DPW [Department of Public Works], adding bicycle, pedestrian and transit to the APF test will result in fees two to four times higher than the current road impact fee.”
Anne Arundel County, however, is not alone in looking to change regulations to support multi-modal transportation. Maryland, like some other states, has embraced the concept and some local jurisdictions are already implementing it.
Montgomery County changed its APF requirements in 2020 to focus more on multi-modal. The effort didn’t go well at first.
Katie Wagner — Principal with Gorove Slade, a transportation planning and engineering company — was working on a proposal to build a 32,000-square-foot Lidl grocery store in the county at the time.
Under the new requirements, “we identified over $6 million in offsite multi-model transportation improvements for that project and that figure didn’t consider whether there was right of way available to add the street lights, bike lanes and huge retaining walls that the developer would have had to provide to provide the infrastructure,” Wagner said.
Montogomery County staff, however, worked with members of the development industry to address issues and, in 2021, created a “proportionality guide to establish a fair cost for off-site improvements to address transportation deficiencies” for each development, Wagner said. The Proportionality Guide takes into consideration the location of the project and daily vehicular trip generation.
The county also agreed to lower APF requirements for types of developments the county most needed.
For example, “I have not had to do a full traffic study for a daycare center under this new policy as daycare centers often go into the ground floor of office buildings and the trip generation is insignificant. Supporting the development of more daycares to address childcare costs is a county priority,” Wagner said.
Transportation experts formed a working group to assess issues and provide advice relating to Montgomery County’s multi-model APF requirements, triggering other improvements in the process.
“That really improved transparency and predictability in the process,” Wagner said. “Now, if a homebuilder tells me they want to build 200 townhouses, I can run a calculation and tell them what their offsite, multi-modal transportation costs will be.”
Anne Arundel needs to “take that important step of recognizing the multi-modal impact of individual developments and factoring proportionality in their new legislation,” said Jackie Plott, Lead Transportation Planner with Traffic Concepts, Inc.
The county is also going to have to wrestle with the complexities and challenges of improving multi-modal infrastructure in very different environments, Plott added.
“The concept of multi-modal holds significant merit. The problem is implementation,” she said. “It is easier to implement in urban areas. In Anne Arundel, that could be Parole Town Center, Odenton Town Center and Glen Burnie Town Center. But Anne Arundel has many rural areas where transportation is car-centered. It is difficult to implement an adequate public facilities law that delivers multi-modal in rural settings.”
Even urban and higher density suburban sites face multi-modal implementation problems, said Brian Downie, Senior Vice President of Development at Saul Centers, Inc.
“With multi-modal and complete streets, there is a constant tug of war between what you would like to accomplish and what you can do within the framework of the existing right of way.”
That land is often not available for bicycle or pedestrian paths, or lanes and stations for rapid transit, Downie said.
In addition, commercial and multi-family properties also need adequate access — including, curb cuts, service lanes and loading areas — and those needs can conflict with multi-modal and complete streets goals.
“My observation is that counties need to be flexible in implementing multi-modal or complete streets policies,” Downie said. “I think Montgomery County has become more flexible over time as they ran into many situations where a one-size-for-all approach simply wasn’t going to work.”