WABA in Montgomery County: Summer meetups, prepping our state legislative agenda, and more…

As you may have noticed, we’ve been getting out quarterly Montgomery County advocacy updates. Check out our April update if you’d like to catch up, and read on for our summer 2024 update.

We’ll start with a bit of WABA news: Jeremiah Lowery’s last day as advocacy director was July 22. Jeremiah is joining Legal Aid DC, and WABA Senior Organizing Manager Kalli Krumpos is serving as acting advocacy director. 

Let’s continue with a couple of up-coming events:

WABA’s third Montgomery County bicycling advocates meetup of the year takes place Wednesday, August 21, 5 pm to 7 pm at Saints Row Brewing in Gaithersburg. This is a community social and bike-talk event, and all are invited to join us. Appetizers will be on WABA; buy your own beverages. Click here to let us know you’ll (maybe) be joining us. As usual, we’ll have a few speakers starting at 6 pm. (Thanks, by the way, to Councilmember Natali Fani-González, Senator Jeff Waldstreicher, and Delegate Jared Solomon for joining us in April in Wheaton, and Delegate Emily Shetty for joining us in May in Kensington.) We’ll post program updates when we have them.

And save the date: WABA’s 5th Great Montgomery County Bike Summit is scheduled for Sunday, September 29, 2 pm to 5 pm at the Wheaton Rec Center. Registration is open. We’re still working on the program, but we’ve confirmed that Councilmember Natali Fani-González will again deliver a county welcome, and State Highway Administrator Will Pines is a tentative Yes to keynote. If you have thoughts or suggestions, please drop us a line.

Next, what we’re working on at this time…

Summer Advocacy Focus #1: 2025 Maryland State Legislation

While the 2025 Maryland state legislative session doesn’t open until January 8, WABA is developing our 2025 legislative agenda. We’re working with allies and legislators to confirm reintroduction of a number of bills that didn’t pass in 2024, and to develop new bills and identify sponsors for official drafting and introduction. Bills that are “pre-filed”(drafted and ready before the start of the legislative session) enjoy a timing advantage. Also, local bills – state bills that apply to a single county – must be presented to the county’s legislative delegation for fall discussion and approval. 

We have confirmed reintroduction of several bills that passed the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate:

• Bicycle Safety Yield (a.k.a. Stop as Yield), boosting bicyclist safety and smoothing traffic flow by allowing a bicyclist to proceed past a stop sign, yielding to pedestrians and motor vehicles as required.
• Bikes On Sidewalks, changing the default statewide to allow riding on the sidewalk, an important safety step for higher speed roads without bike lanes.
• Enabling Montgomery County speed-limit reduction without a traffic and engineering study, as justified by the county’s Complete Streets Design Guide and Pedestrian Master Plan.
• The Transportation and Climate Alignment Act, which would require mitigation of the greenhouse gas (GHG) and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) impact of major transportation projects.

We expect reintroduction of two other bills that didn’t pass in 2024:

• Electric Bicycle Rebate and Voucher Program.
• The Great Maryland Trails Act, establishing a state trails office.

New bills we are discussing with legislators include:

• Eliminating Contributory Negligence for Vulnerable Road Users, including pedestrians and bicyclists. Currently if you’re injured in a collision but found even only one percent negligent, your ability to recover damages is severely limited. Maryland is one of only four states with this provision. 
• No parking, standing, or stopping in a bike lane. Baltimore currently has a provision; the 2024 Better Bus Service Act would have extended this prohibition state-wide, but the bike-lane provision was stripped out of the bill by amendment.

We’re also involved in transportation-revenue discussions – the state faces a five year, $3 billion transportation funding shortfall – and we are discussing other road safety, pedestrian, and bicycling bills with legislators. We’d welcome your getting involved. Drop us a line! 

Summer Advocacy Focus #2: 2025 Montgomery County Project Priorities

Each year, the state updates the six-year Consolidated Transportation Program (CTP), a catalog of major capital projects that are currently underway or planned for the near-ish future. The Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) invites CTP requests from the counties, conveyed via priority letters.

An MDOT site provides a geographic display of CTP projects. Note the color-coding by state legislative district. Click on a project icon to be taken to the project page in the CTP document.

What Montgomery County projects would you like to see added to the state CTP? 

In addition, county agencies are already thinking about programs and capital investments they will make via the county FY26 Operating Budget and FY26 Capital Budget and FY26-FY31 six-year Capital Improvements Program. (Fiscal Year 2026 starts on July 1, 2025.) Two WABA priorities are:

• Reversal of Capital Bikeshare program cuts with Bikeshare program expansion.
• Creation of a county e-bike rebate/voucher program.

The Montgomery County Dept. of Transportation (MCDOT) maintains a page listing Capital Budget & Capital Improvements Program Projects and a bicycle and pedestrian project list. We’re doing our best to stay on top of projects. If you have particular concerns, please let us know.

Focus #3: Bikeshare and Bike Commuting during the Red Line closure (and beyond!)

We’re now over two months into a three-month shutdown of Metro’s Red Line stations between Silver Spring and Glenmont. In addition, the Takoma station was closed for a month, until late June. These necessary but regrettable shutdowns – WABA is a huge transit fan! – meant an opportunity to promote Bikeshare and bike commuting. 

Credit to WABA member Sean Crago for suggesting free Capital Bikeshare membership for people affected by the station closures. We turned his suggestion into advocacy, and MCDOT responded by arranging 100 free memberships for affected individuals. Excellent!

Please note however that Bikeshare is free for qualifying Montgomery County residents who receive state or federal SNAP, WIC, TANF, SSI/SSDI, LIHEAP, Veterans disability (60%+), or Medicaid assistance. Visit the Bikeshare for All page.

In addition to our Bikeshare advocacy, WABA has been offering guided bike commuting rides originating in Wheaton, Forest Glen, Silver Spring, and Takoma. These rides were a modest success and a learning opportunity. We’ve transitioned from scheduled rides to an on-demand/by-request model. For information, visit the Red Line Rides page, and if you’d like to try out bike commuting and would like a guide, please get in touch at RedLineRides@waba.org.

Mark your calendar! We’re planning to organize bike commuting from/to several county locations for Metro DC Car Free Day on September 23, 2024.

Focus #4: Complete Streets, ‘Context Driven,’ and State Projects

WABA is a big believer in complete streets, roads (re-)designed to be safe and usable for pedestrians, bicyclists, rollers, and transit users and not just motor vehicles. An ideal complete street will offer sidewalks and safe pedestrian crossings, protected bike lanes or sidepaths, and, when appropriate, dedicated bus lanes. We even launched an initiative to promote conversion of state roads, which are the most dangerous in Washington DC-area jurisdictions, into complete streets: WABA’s Complete State Roads initiative, which serves as a framework for our Montgomery County state advocacy.

All this is why we’re thrilled with MDOT’s new Maryland Complete Streets policy, launched on June 6, 2024. We’ll call out one of the four goals:

Require the implementation of planning and design principles from Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) Maryland Transit Administration’s (MTA) Bus Stop Design Guide, and State Highway Administration’s (SHA) Context Driven: Access and Mobility for All Users Guide, or Context Guide, to address safety, access, and mobility for all users on all projects in MDOT right-of-way in the following cases:

i. When implementing a capital improvement project, such as construction or reconstruction of a roadway, intersection, or bridge.

ii. When permitting new or reconstructed streets to access MDOT right-of-way; or

iii. When there is an opportunity to improve safety for all users by applying proactive engineering safety countermeasures to resurfacing projects.

The policy references MDOT SHA’s ‘Context Driven’ guidelines and toolkit. Context Driven “is a planning and design resource offering practitioners guidelines centered on establishing safe and effective multi-modal transportation systems.” In practice, it describes safety countermeasures appropriate for application in “contexts” ranging from dense “urban core” areas to rural areas.

We met with then-State Highway Administrator Tim Smith and senior staff, regarding Context Driven and SHA projects, back in May 2023, and with Smith’s successor Will Pines in December 2023 and again a few weeks ago, on July 15. 

WABA backed our partners at the Coalition for Smarter Growth in recruiting Montgomery and Prince George’s County support for revisions to Context Driven to better reflect on-the-ground conditions and local plans for transit-oriented development and densification. We supported the development of a letter from the two counties’ planning and transportation directors to Administrator Pines, sent in May, and we were pleased with Mr. Pines’ July response. 

We are also pleased with the SHA’s aggressive steps to implement Pedestrian Safety Action Plan (PSAP) recommendations. Back in December, the SHA announced the first five PSAP-implementation projects – improvements to New Hampshire Avenue/MD 650 between University Blvd./MD 193 and a short distance south of the Capital Beltway/I-495 are slated for completion by the mid 2026 – and additional PSAP projects will be announced soon.

We’ve had many fruitful discussions with the engineering and safety staff planning and managing the SHA’s safety work, and we appreciate their efforts. So we’ll take a small amount of credit for encouraging the development and adoption of MDOT’s and the SHA’s new policies, via our recent years’ advocacy work.

Stay in Touch!

Visit WABA’s action center, blog archive, and events pages to learn more about current actions and events throughout the region, and contact us at advocacy@waba.org. Finally, if you’re not already a WABA member, PLEASE JOIN. We need your support to amplify cycling community voices and elevate safe-roads advocacy and mobility for all.