Longdraft plan would hurt quality of life

"We're not letting you get out of here without writing them," said Saqib Ali -- two personalized, hand-written letters each by the 35 people gathered at Quince Orchard library last week at a meeting of the Longdraft Road Coalition.

One letter would go to the lead planner of the county project to widen Longdraft Road, the other to the local newspaper.

The coalition set to its letter-writing campaign after more than an hour of hammering out its strategies to prevent the widening of Longdraft Road from two lanes to four between Quince Orchard and Clopper roads. The project is part of Go Montgomery!, County Executive Douglas M. Duncan's 10-year, $1 billion plan to alleviate traffic congestion in the county.

"The issue is that they're trying to pave over the whole county and I don't like that," Ali said as the group scribbled away.

The letter-writing campaign is but one of the group's tactics: Ali also ponied up $593 to pay for 100 signs -- 14 inches high and 22 inches wide, bearing a graphic with a line through the word widening -- to put up in yards and windows along Longdraft Road.

"It would make a great visual statement if people going up and down that road saw sign after sign after sign," he explained. "We're trying to kill this project [now]. Hopefully these signs will be a windfall for us and drive people to the Web site, to the meetings."

The coalition rolled out its revamped, more interactive Web site -- www.longdraft.org -- this week, featuring surveys, documents and links to relevant county agencies and a chat group for residents to help get the word out.

They believe the widening of Longdraft Road would have a negative impact on quality of life.

Twenty-nine private driveways open directly onto the 1.2-mile stretch of Longdraft road as it winds through a finger of Great Seneca Park and across eight side streets that have no other outlet.

In addition to cutting into back yards, the coalition believes the increase in traffic would endanger pedestrians (like Maria Leu's two children who walk to Ridgeview Middle School) and cause significant environmental damage -- all while failing to ease the traffic burden along nearby roads.

Members of the coalition took those concerns to a town hall meeting the night before where eight of the nine County Council members were in attendance.

Overall, Wanda Garrett and Denise Dion explained at the coalition meeting, the County Council seemed to have little concern for -- if not awareness of -- the Longdraft widening. Garrett also expressed deep reservations about Councilwoman Nancy M. Floreen's openness to their cause.

"[It's a] valuable project in making sure that over the next 20 years, there is place for people to drive where they need to drive, and they can get to where they need to go," Floreen (D-At Large) of Garrett Park said at the town hall meeting. "A lot of this is a master planning issue and a lot of this is a community impact issue. And we've got to think about the needs of the future; the community is beyond you and if they don't have Longdraft Road to go down, where else will they go down and what other communities will be impacted?"

Uzair Asadullah, a county planner on the project, said he is aiming for a meeting in April where the public can evaluate and give input on the project's first phase, a feasibility study that considers environmental, traffic and accident-related issues.

The study would then need approval by the director of the Department of Public Works and Transportation before being presented to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission in order to move on to the next phase.

The coalition plans to invite Asadullah to its March 19 meeting.