Save The Trail Coalition

Testimony -- December 10, 2009

before the Montgomery County Planning Board

Ajay Bhatt, Coquelin Terrace

My name is Ajay Bhatt and I live in a house that has been in my family since 1978 on W Coquelin Terrace adjacent to the Capital Crescent Nature Trail.

I am here today to oppose this new plan to destroy the Nature Trail and build two train lines.

Like the plans before it, this plan revision fails to address many important community concerns and promotes the falsehoods that after repetition have become accepted fact among many.  Unfortunately many issues have not been well thought out and are lacking in the plan. 

Specifically the negative environmental impacts of building the train, the negative economic impacts of total cost of ownership and the negative impacts on our quality of life.

Quality of life first.

This plan does not consider that we have never had two passenger train lines running adjacent to our houses and running in our community streets.  Two trains running every 6 minutes means a train passing every 3 minutes. With overhead power lines.  This is unacceptable - It will reduce our quality of life and it will be a financial hardship for everyone that does not want to live next to train tracks.

What was there before was an infrequent train, running a few times a week, a single track, something that we walked on as kids without worry

The track sat in the middle of the existing trail with buffer zones of trees 30 feet in each direction.  Today with the nature trail we have the same.

What you are proposing with two train tracks is unacceptable.  It is not the single track trolley that was proposed when the county bought the land from the railroad. 

This plan fails to address any sincere mitigation of the environmental devastation that the train line will cause.

No where in this plan does it say that the 17 acres of mature forest will be clear cut - but they will.

17 acres of trees.

Today’s science, now incontrovertible, acknowledges that trees have a great effect on surrounding ambient temperatures.  If you cut down these trees it will be significantly warmer.  Significantly warmer not only because of the lack of shading, which is obvious, but also the loss of evapotranspiration.

Evapotranspiration causes a natural cooling effect.  Water transpired and evaporated from the leaves, branches and trucks of the trees has a significant cooling effect on the surrounding atmosphere - it is the equivalent of what sweat does to a hot body.

After being involved with green roofing projects and seeing the effects of surface temperatures of traditional roofs compared to green roofs - it worries me that no one has considered this.  The cooling affects of evapotranspiration cannot be ignored.  I do not see anything in this report about the mitigation of the loss of evapotranspiration.  The evapotranspiration rates based on the existing surface area of all the existing trees must be an important consideration in the decision to cut them down as these trees function as a natural air conditioner.

Our electric bills will go up without the trees.

No where in this plan is there a survey of birds and animals.  There is an abundance of wildlife on the nature trail.  This plan does not address the displacement of the thousands of birds and animals.

Another factor not mentioned is how will you mitigate the additional noise from the beltway.  The existing trees create a natural traffic sound buffer to all those south of the nature trail.  No where in this plan is it mentioned.

The plan does not consider the environmental costs of construction - the amount of fuel that will be used to construct this train

A study of the Portland system concluded that amount of fuel used to build their system was more than 15 years worth of fuel saved by the riders on the trains - assuming they would have been in their cars.

There is no discussion of the mitigation of the ugliness of overhead power lines.  The artist’s renderings do not adequately show support poles and the distances between them and their placement.

This plan lacks a thorough review of the impact of development around stations and how the development will affect car traffic.  There are no empirical studies to show that only train riders will frequent these commercial developments. This plan lacks a thorough review the net traffic gain or loss. 

I believe it will lead to more traffic and traffic backups.  We don’t need more traffic on Connecticut Avenue and East-West Highway and anywhere else inside the beltway.

Economic Issues

This plan does not consider the total cost of ownership for a new train system.

There is no cost-benefit analysis in this plan.

When there is not enough money to maintain and upgrade existing systems, why are we considering spending $1-3 Billion on something entirely new.  Seattle's new light rail system cost $179 million per mile.

This plan proposes 16 miles - isn’t there a better way than a new system?   

Economists who have studied public rail systems in the US say that they are not worth it - 95% of rail systems in the US do not pay for themselves. 

We cannot afford to build a train system that will not pay for itself.

We have existing transit systems - they don’t pay for themselves, cost taxpayers to operate, are poorly maintained and are in desperate need of upgrades.

This new train will have new cars running on new tracks with new electric lines and new poles and new bridges that means - Something new that will cost even more to maintain and more to operate.

Can we afford this? No

In closing I do not want the county and the federal government to use my tax dollars to build and pay for a system that will not pay for itself,

A system that if built, will force the county to destroy a nature trail through a mature forest and turn that space into an urban landscape trains and electric lines.

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