Gaithersburg, MD has a vast and growing collection of large new urbanist neighborhoods. Basically, everything built there in the past 25 years has been walkable.
The big problem is that all these walkable places are still independent subdivisions. There's not a critical urban mass because they're poorly connected to one another. So while lots of people walk within each one, for the most part everyone drives between them.
The State of Maryland is planning a high quality BRT line called the
Corridor Cities Transitway that will finally stitch them together, and hopefully start to produce that critical mass of urbanism. The line was originally planned as light rail, but with Maryland also planning a
new subway in downtown Baltimore and a
circumferential light rail line around the DC suburbs, there's not enough money to do rail in Gaithersburg. Being the least dense / least urban, it drops to BRT.
So, let's take a quick tour. These are mostly cell phone pictures, and some of them are a few years old, so be prepared for low quality.
Downtown Crown
First stop is Downtown Crown. This is currently under construction.
Watkins Mill Town Center
This development is going in at what will be a transfer station between the BRT and MARC commuter rail. The MARC station is already there.
For this one, they've built the rowhouses and a few lowrise apartment buildings, but the main town center, near the transit station, is still an empty field. The station is on the extreme left of this picture (you can't see it very well; right now it's just a couple of bus shelters slapped atop a MARC platform). The new stuff is on the right. The eventual town center will be in the field.
This development will stretch across I-270. The part on the other side of the highway is smaller and less transit-oriented, but internally walkable.
Old Town
Gaithersburg has a small historic downtown. It's not on the BRT line, but is on the MARC line. In addition to a really lovely downtown train station (still active for MARC), it has some infill. May as well post it.
Kentlands
Kentlands was the first New Urbanist neighborhood in the US that was built for permanent residency, instead of as a resort. Obviously it was also Gaithersburg's first N.U. development. It was originally built in the late 80s & early 90s, then in the late 90s it doubled in size. Now some of its original commercial buildings are starting to redevelop and densify.
There's not a lot of construction there now, except a little of that redevelopment, one property at a time. This is actually great news, because it means Kentlands is starting to function less like a master planned community and more like a bona fide urban neighborhood.
Kentlands will have a BRT station, but right now you have to drive (or take a local bus, which nobody does).
Double-stacked rowhouses. Pretty interesting.
Teaser for the next one...
Washingtonian Center
Washington Center was the 2nd of these things built, and like Kentlands it's continuing to evolve. It's actually very close to Crown, the first development in this thread. Easily within walking distance. But not the same development. There won't be a BRT stop at Washingtonian, but it is walking distance of the Crown stop.
There's a nice lakefront, with some taller buildings attached, but the really progressive thing about this development (most of which dates from the late 1990s) is it was the first place in the US to use urban-format big boxes.
My pictures of this are so terrible and old that I think it would be better to just find a couple from flickr and share those instead.
from the peterson companies on flickr
from sebastian pires on flickr
from concord977 on flickr
The new urbanist style of developments continues north into Germantown and south into Rockville, with N.U. neighborhoods strung along what will become the Corridor Cities BRT line. But since I had really just planned on posting a couple of pictures from Crown and Watkins Mill, then let this snowball, I'll go ahead and stop now.
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