Montgomery County, Maryland, is pursuing two transit-oriented

Montgomery County, Maryland, is pursuing two transit-oriented development (TOD) projects around the Twinbrook and Shady Grove stations on the Washington DC region’s Metro system. Two charrettes, led by Design Collective, an architecture and planning firm based in Baltimore, produced conceptual plans which will guide the creation of new sector plans by the county. The two sites presented very different challenges for the design team, which also included Seth Harry Associates, market researcher Randall Gross, and transportation planners Howard/Stein-Hudson Associates. The Shady Grove station area lies at the end of the line and consists of scattered office and industrial facilities and 39 percent vacant land. The charrette plan proposes expanding the station into multimodal transit center, which would become the focus of residential and commercial development on an urban grid. Commercial development is denser at the Twinbrook site, but 22 percent of the land here is in parking lots. Area residents particularly wanted improved pedestrian access to the rail station, says Matt D’Amico of Design Collective, adding that the station needs be transformed from the barrier it is today, into a permeable seam around which a neighborhood can grow. “People want to use transit and participants had nothing against high residential densities,” D’Amico says. The concept plan estimates that a TOD could support up to 1,500 new residential units.