Lower Merion Township’s Planning Failure and Its Consequences for the City Avenue Rezoning Project

For at least the last decade Lower Merion citizens have been requesting that the Township prepare a revision to its comprehensive plan, which is now 32 years old (state law mandates that these plans be updated every ten years). These pleas were routinely ignored or dismissed as irrelevant by the Board of Commissioners. Finally, almost five years ago, the Township began a process for revising its comprehensive plan. Visioning meetings were held with groups of civic associations, and the Building and Planning Department under the leadership of Chris Leswing, Assistant Director of Planning, produced a dense document, 215 single-spaced pages plus extensive appendices, with an equally dense title: Issues Report to the Lower Merion Township Planning Commission Relating to the Preparation of a Comprehensive, Preservation, Infill and Redevelopment Plan. This volume, impressive as it is for the amount of labor that went into its production and for the many beautiful photographs of Lower Merion residences it contains, surprises because it fails to address the most important element underlying land use planning, which is the capacity of the infrastructure to respond to current and future demands.

A series of sparsely attended ‘workshops’ with the Planning Commission ensued, trying to cover topics such as institutional land development, commercial land development, residential land development, and circulation. Each of these conversations has ended inconclusively, but they have made two facts quite clear: (1) the public’s conception of a Comprehensive Plan for the Township is quite different from that of the Planning Staff and the President of the Board of Commissioners; and (2) the public’s agenda (i.e, the segment of the public that is closely attending to these very important issues and processes) for the future of the Township is also quite different from that of the Planning Staff and the President of the Board of Commissioners.

It truly seems as if our officials think a comprehensive plan is nothing more than a ‘vision’ statement containing uplifting words and currently popular buzz word-concepts, such as ‘transit-oriented’ or ‘pedestrian friendly.’ Recent experience has also demonstrated that our leaders, despite paying lip service to the values of preserving the quality of life in Lower Merion Township, will invariably subordinate the values of neighborhood preservation to the interests of commercial development and institutional expansion.

WHAT WOULD A REAL COMPREHENSIVE PLAN DO FOR US?

• Map out the desired patterns of land use in the community, providing a guide for future development.
• Determine maximum infrastructure capacity and set finite targets for and limits to growth.
• Assess our infrastructure, in order to
• identify current inadequacies and propose strategies, including but not limited to a capital improvement plan, for mitigating them.
• identify and plan for the future capital improvement projects needed to accommodate future demands.
• Establish criteria and goals for the different zoning classifications adopted in the Township.
• Review and revise the zoning code to correct the deficiencies and errors revealed by years of experience with land development applications, particularly in the Township’s commercial zones.

The Issues Report does not address any of these fundamentals.

Similarly, a lot of labor has gone into refining technical details for a new zoning code for the proposed new City Avenue District Regional Center and the Bala Cynwd Retail District, but it has become increasingly clear over the last several months that no serious planning has been done to deal with the potential consequences of the massive redevelopment that would be allowed in the proposed Regional Center District. This lack of planning brings into stark relief the flat contradictions between the rhetoric that is offered in support of the new ordinance and the reality that would materialize if it were enacted as now written.

The stated goals of the new ordinance include “decreasing auto dependency, encouraging pedestrian access, transit-use and Shared Parking and Accessways, and mitigating the effects of congestion, vehicular traffic and pollution.”

Regardless of the technical details that provide windows at pedestrian level, rain gardens in parking lots, and sidewalks with wider verges, these stated goals of the ordinance are defeated from the outset by its new height and density allowances and the lack of any serious provision for attractive new mass transit. City Avenue is not pedestrian friendly, and the imagined future of gracious sidewalk cafes on its new boulevard-style sidewalks cannot be realized at the same time as additional traffic lanes are added in order to relieve the congestion that already exists, not to mention future traffic growth. Likewise, it is obviously impossible to build new 200-foot office buildings in a location with inadequate mass transit and expect to ‘decrease auto dependency.’

WHAT WOULD PLANNING FOR THE CITY AVENUE REZONING DO THAT THE PROPOSAL AS CURRENTLY DEVISED FAILS TO ACHIEVE?

• Express a vision for development of the area: show what the overall feel of the area would be if developed as desired. Provide visual examples of what the proponents consider successful development on the same scale and in the same type of surroundings, i.e. with a busy 8-lane highway used mostly for through traffic in the middle of the development.
• Examine the context for the new development. This includes the physical context, which encompasses the rest of theLower Merion Township, the deeply compromised Schuylkill Expressway, and the adjacent portions of Philadelphia on both sides of the Schuylkill River.
• Examine the existing infrastructure, including the transportation system, the storm water systems, remaining pervious surface and, to the extent that a residential component is planned, Lower Merion’s school system and recreation facilities. How many vehicles, how many gallons of storm water, how many schoolchildren, can these systems handle? In short, what are the limits?
• Impose an overall land use plan on the area, showing basic lot configuration, roadways, including proposed new roads, open space, greenways, and public transit nodes. Impose a design that can transform what are now vast surface parking lots into welcoming and attractive courtyard, plaza and squares that are protected from the streams of cars coursing along City Avenue to and from the Schuylkill Expressway. Require new development to conform to this model.
• Recognize that the only interest of the large commercial property owners who are urging the rezoning forward is in building and filling the largest new office buildings possible. Their goals are not congruent with the goals of creating mixed use buildings, pedestrian oriented connections, or attractive and attractively large public spaces, nor are they congruent with the stated goal of reducing automobile use. It goes without saying that they have no interest in providing for or subsidizing non-automobile transportation systems.
• Take active measures, rather than merely engaging in wishful thinking about ‘encouraging transit-use,’ to develop attractive transit systems. Parking structures will be required on the lots to accommodate increased automobile traffic and storage. The lack of adequate public transit facilities means that residential uses will have to accommodate one car per adult, to be consistent with current transportation requirements for jobs and recreation. It is not surprising that people who have carefully examined the situation are highly skeptical about the numbers of new cars predicted by the Roadway Sufficiency Analysis. The City of Philadelphia is proposing an entire new light trail system for Roosevelt Boulevard, and to revitalize and reopen the regional rail station at 52nd Street at Lancaster Avenue. Meanwhile the Township is standing by passively, neglecting congested intersections that have been problem spots for years, hoping that by some magic things will improve. As a famous transportation planner has written, “Congestion is the consequence of inappropriate policies and inadequate planning.” As in other areas of the Township, you cannot continue to pour new cars onto already congested roads and think that some kind of miracle is going to fix the problems.
• Integrate planning for the City Avenue corridor with planning for the Township as a whole. For example, we are told that the Township is desperate for recreation space. Provision for open space to help satisfy that need could easily be incorporated into the new ordinance for this enormous potential redevelopment area, just as the Township has put an open space preservation requirement for redevelopment of larger residential lots.