Early last week I drove up to Greenbelt (National*) Park to take a walk. It’s close to the house where Leda and I live in East Riverdale, MD, when I’m not back in Champaign during the school year. The park spreads out over 1100 acres of woods and streams between us and Greenbelt, the most successful new town built by the Resettlement Administration in the 1930s. I drove to the park because getting there on foot from our house seemed impossible.
But while I was taking my walk along the Perimeter Trail, I noticed another trail leading off to the SW corner of the park, about as close to where we live as anywhere in the park. A few days later I set out at lunchtime to see whether I could find it and what the trail was like.
I found it and got there in less than 10 minutes. (Yes, less than 10 minutes from a national park* in the DC area, one with trails and trees rather than fancy buildings named after dead presidents.) But if I hadn’t known about that trail I’d never have found it. There’s no sign, not even a pullout, where the trail reaches the arterial street along the south boundary of the park.
I also probably wouldn’t have looked for a way in over there, considering how perilous it is to get across that street. The signs say 35mph, but everything else about it yells “HIT THE GAS BUDDY!” Want to turn right without slowing down? Go for it! What about left? Sure! Why the hell not?
The street it intersects with is, if anything, even more of a speedway. Like a lot of the other suburban Maryland arterials, it’s a state highway (201, aka Kenilworth Ave. in this stretch), and it too is posted at 35mph at this point but designed for highway speeds. Which came first? The highway speeds or the traffic engineers’ design to make it “safe” for highway speeds?
Of course they had to make sure the traffic didn’t build up at the intersection, so they made it extra wide for the turns. Northbound on Kenilworth, drivers can choose between two comfy left turn lanes. And the right turn lane seems more like an Interstate on-ramp, designed to transform otherwise sedate drivers into Steve McQueen in Le Mans.
So, there I am at the SE corner of this intersection, looking across to the NE corner where supposedly there’s a trail going into the park. Hmmm, says I. Where’s the crosswalk? Nope, no crosswalk south to north. OK, well, over on the other side of Kenilworth there’s a N-S crosswalk, and there’s also a crosswalk on this side of Kenilworth. So. Seems like a long way around but how about I cross over to the other side of Kenilworth, then take that N-S crosswalk, and… um… Oh. Huh. No crosswalk to get across Kenilworth on the N side of the intersection.
It then occurred to me that some devious imp in the public works department must’ve been at work here, because this E-W superhighway, no I mean suburban arterial, is called “Good Luck Road,” as in, “good luck crossing this road, sucker!” (Yes I was waiting until now to tell you what the street is called. It’s just too good a punch line.) West of Kenilworth, the powers that be renamed this street “Campus Drive,” which presumably justifies at least one crosswalk going each way.
In the final ironic twist of today’s blog (my first in months for reasons that are a lot less interesting than this, which considering I’ve been ranting about suburban wayfinding is saying a lot), that pathway into Greenbelt Park is called “Metro Trail,” which presumably refers to a theoretical route connecting the park with the College Park metro station. Google Maps say’s it’s a one-mile walk to the trailhead, not impossible, as long as the intrepid pedestrian can make it the last 100 yards or so.
*by which I mean, a park managed by the National Park Service.
Of course being planners we rarely admit that behind every “boneheaded” traffic engineer there’s a lot of “boneheaded” planners who wrote the plans and attendant zoning codes that created 10 or so miles of Post-WW2 automobile dominated suburban sprawl extending eastward from the intersection along Good Luck Road and that feed into the intersection. In another time Good Luck Rd. was a minor rural road that connected the tiny hamlet of Good Luck with College Park. Before being eradicated by suburbia, Good Luck was located at the corner of what is now Greenbelt Rd and Good Luck Road.
There’s a great new tool to track changes in regional landscapes – the USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer at https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/topoexplorer/index.html
It is an interactive map where you can view USGS topo maps back to the beginning in the late 1800s/early 1900s.
I’m looking forward to diving into that topo explorer! thanks for the link. PG County Planning also has a web-based GIS, PGAtlas.com. Its layers include a series of historic imagery, including 2 maps from the mid-1800s showing that settlement at Good Luck Rd. There’s also an aerial photo from 1938. You can see the grading underway at Greenbelt but as far as I could make out no buildings completed yet. I’ve been trying to figure out when the cleared fields that are now part of the park were allowed to revert to forest; it seems to have been well before 1938 based on what appears to be forest cover on that map. But there’s at least one sign inside the park indicating that the area had once been farmed. I assume this would have been a tobacco plantation worked by enslaved people like so much of the rest of PG County.