Consultants: Parking Key to Maple Avenue Vision

As the Town of Vienna’s Maple Avenue Vision begins to take shape, residents gathered at the Town Hall on Wednesday night for an early glimpse of the project said they wanted to ensure the plan would provide pedestrian and bike improvements and parking solutions, along with support for small businesses.

The Maple Avenue Vision plan will eventually make over a sizeable portion of Vienna’s main commercial corridor, encouraging walkable, mixed-use development all while maintaining Vienna’s small-town atmosphere, consultants said.

The process allows officials and townspeople to be one step ahead of the changes that will inevitably come from the transforming Tysons and Reston areas, said Doug Noble, chair of the Vision’s steering committee.

Alexandria-based consulting firm Lardner/Klein Associates has been hired to determine how to update the town’s zoning laws and give officials advice on how best to capitalize on Maple Avenue’s space.

And that capitalization will have a lot to do with how the town chooses to improve parking on the corridor, said Elisabeth Lardner of Lardner/Klein.

Lardner said redevelopment and expansion would be tricky without parking garages.

“You’re not going to get many more square feet without doing something with the cars,” she said.

A parking garage would get cars off the street and allow shoppers to then walk the corridor. It would also provide an opportunity for development around the structure, she said, as buildings could wrap around the structure.

Consultants are also proposing a new, voluntary zoning district that commercially zoned properties could opt into in order redevelop. The rezoning would not be mandatory and businesses could continue to operate under their current zoning, Lardner said, but the new district – the Maple Avenue Corridor Zoning District – would allow for changes that might not be available under the current commercial zoning laws.

Building height would be kept to 54 feet and four stories under the consultant’s outline.

“It’s very unlikely with your lot sizes that you would ever the full corridor built to four stories,” Lardner said.

Consultants also left bike lanes on Maple Avenue out of its recommendation, instead using side streets to feed cyclists onto the corridor, where bike parking would be made available.

Sean McCall, who coordinates Walking Wednesdays and the Safe Routes to School program at Vienna Elementary, said the sidewalks needed to be as wide as they could for cyclists who likely would ride down them, since the current 5-foot sidewalk wasn’t wide enough.

He also said officials needed to look at using different materials for the sidewalks in the future.

McCall said residents use walkers, wheelchairs and strollers with sleeping kids on sidewalks, and "those bricks are absolutely terrible for all those things,” he said.

Lardner said the outline presented Wednesday was still in its preliminary stages and her team would start to hammer out details in its draft zoning code amendments this summer.

“We’re still at the big-picture stage,” she said, adding that she wanted residents to be okay with the big picture before getting into the nitty-gritty.

The goal isn’t to have Maple Avenue end up as a bunch of identical, “monolithic” buildings, she said.

“The intent is not to make a cookbook or a pattern book of ‘This is what maple avenue should look like,’” she said. “Maple Avenue is eclectic.”

Vienna resident Dennis Couture was unsure whether Maple Avenue could ever be too pedestrian friendly and that the real opportunity lies on the side streets.

“I think we’re being shortsighted,” he said.

Mayor Jane Seeman said she was pleased with the progress in the Vision plan but acknowledged the challenges going forward, including parking and bike friendliness.

“I think providing bicycle access to these places is going to be a critical part of it,” she said. “It’s going to develop slowly … I have a lot of confidence in the people we’ve hired to do this.”

Lardner/Klein will now go back and develop draft amendments over the summer, which will be followed by public forums.

Public review and adoption is scheduled for November 2013.

See also:

Get Glimpse of Maple Ave Vision on Wednesday

Consultant Picked For Maple Ave Vision

A Vision For Maple Avenue