The Silver Spring Penguin

The planning department’s newly appointed Purple Line advisory committee must forge a path through the area’s master plan, and through its own ambiguous influence over where and how the mass-transit line should run.

The commitee’s 31 members met last Tuesday at planning HQ for an update on the Purple Line’s progress. A draft environmental-impact study, which would include ridership estimates, is expected to drop in early December, said Mike Madden, Purple Line project manager for the state transit administration.

Public hearings would follow next spring, and by summer, the light-rail versus bus debate should be settled, Madden told the committee. Construction wouldn’t happen until 2012 at the earliest.

But what committee members really wanted to know was this: How much influence would it have over where and how the Purple Line would be built?

Two constraints shaped the committee’s power, Tom Autrey, a transportation planner with the planning department, explained to the group. First, a Purple Line route between Bethesda and downtown Silver Spring was already embedded into the area’s sector plan.

Translation: The route along the Capital Crescent and Georgetown Branch trails was a done deal, though its mode — bus versus light rail — was still up in the air.

However, Purple Line routes had not been built into development plans east of downtown Silver Spring — through Park Hills, Seven Oaks, East Silver Spring and Long Branch. Those areas are blank slates for the Purple Line, as far as their sector plan is concerned.

The second constraint, Autrey said, was the state’s six optional modes of transit. Both the bus and light-rail modes have options ranging in price from the cheapest thing going, to the Rolls Royce of mass transit, and picks in between. A “no build” option, in which no Purple Line would be built, is still on the table.

“Our analysis is dependent on Mike [Madden]’s team to come up with a decision,” Autrey said. “It’s going to be difficult to go beyond those six alternatives.”

Madden shared his own thoughts on the committee’s influence.

“I don’t know if you’d have any official role, but you’d have as much a role as any civic association,” he told the committee.

Exactly what kind of input the committee would offer could be as divergent as the members themselves. Among them was Silver Spring’s Harry Sanders, cofounder of the Action Committee for Transit and a long-time Purple Line advocate. Sanders sat quietly through most of the meeting.

Takoma Park’s Byrne Kelly was more vocal, promoting a MARC shuttle between Silver Spring and Rockville to connect both ends of the Red Line. Two other committee members — Rob Rosenberg and Karen Roper — have previously voiced their concerns over the Purple Line’s impact on East Silver Spring.

No decision has been made on who will ultimately run the Bethesda-to-New Carrollton transit line. The state transit administration, WMATA, and Montgomery and Prince George’s counties have been tossed around as possible managers.

Edited Nov 6, 2007, at 10:45 a.m.