America's Unofficial Rest Stops

February 21, 2020 4:03 AM

An essay about living in the "drive through country" of Montgomery County, Maryland.
posted by serathen (17 comments total)

It's in the top 20 for median income of all the counties in the US. Not exactly what most consider "drive through." I mean, a lot of people do drive through it since it borders Washington DC, but still.
posted by Patapsco Mike at 7:14 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]

Montgomery County is big, and a land of contrasts. Parts of it have a higher population density than Downtown DC (which it borders), while others are indisputably rural. Its school system is one of the most segregated in the nation. The County Executive is a socialist and a nativist. The bordering city of Rockville is easily one of the most diverse suburbs in the nation, while Chevy Chase (within MoCo) might be the least.

It sure as heck isn't "drive-through" country though. It's a suburb bordered by I-95 on one side, and a river with no bridges (apart from the Beltway) on the other.
posted by schmod at 7:29 AM on February 21, 2020 [8 favorites]

Maybe you could read the link? "Drive through country" refers to living next to major highways in a neighborhood without infrastructure to accommodate regular human needs of so many people moving through it. It could be Montgomery County or anywhere else.
posted by peeedro at 7:34 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

The description of the essay is misleading in that it associates the concept of "drive through country" with Montgomery County as a whole, which the essay itself does not do. So maybe reformulate the description? Because the essay has a lot of good stuff to say.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:42 AM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah, I thought this was an interesting essay, but it touches on several issues and I had trouble writing a summary for it. Plus, I don't know DC area geography that well.
posted by serathen at 7:59 AM on February 21, 2020

I would have trouble writing a summary for this too, but part of that problem is that the essay itself makes the same (odd) generalization about Silver Spring and Montgomery County. There are lots of issues that affect the county broadly and a whole other set that affect Silver Spring specifically, but I think what the author is talking about here has much more to do with living near a major highway and is happening all over the nation in pockets that meet that description. If anything, because of the affluence of the DC suburbs, there are probably fewer people affected by the things she describes than there might be elsewhere. An essay about gentrification in Montgomery Country, or the changing population over the past few decades due to gentrification in DC itself, (or the many troubles with development Silver Spring has faced on a rolling basis) might feel more accurate to people who are familiar with the area. It sounds like the author might be fairly new to the region as well.

I also found it somewhat odd for other reasons. Maybe living in a city has me too accepting of harmful behaviors, but someone leaving trash in my yard, or seeing someone peeing in public, are more routine to me than the writer makes it out to be. I was also a bit surprised by the implication that the yard worker in the bush might have been watching her kids (as opposed to finding a hidden place to pee).
posted by sallybrown at 8:25 AM on February 21, 2020 [6 favorites]

The roads being described here aren't really highways, though. Montgomery County is designed first and foremost with the passenger vehicle in mind, so huge portions of it are covered in 8-lane (well, 4 in each direction, anyway) roads that are not limited access. They're just... the roads, and you sometimes you get to take your life in your own hands and try to make an unprotected left onto one of them. They eventually feed into limited-access highways, but everything is sort of homogeneously paved in asphalt.

My wife is from MoCo--one of the parts that is more ostensibly friendly to pedestrians. There's a grocery store right across the road from the subdevelopment where she grew up--maybe 150 yards from her front door, as the crow flies, but across one of those 8-lane monstrosities. During my visits there, I've never once heard anyone suggest walking there, as the nearest crosswalk is half a mile up the street and the notion of playing Frogger to pick up a loaf of bread is not especially appealing. Similarly, the high school is half a mile away, but no one ever walks there.

Meanwhile, residents of the town are uniformly against the recent-ish installation of speed cameras, because apparently no one can control themselves enough to keep it under 35 on general-access 4-lane roads that border elementary schools.
posted by Mayor West at 8:34 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

"Maybe you could read the link? "Drive through country" refers to living next to major highways in a neighborhood without infrastructure to accommodate regular human needs of so many people moving through it. It could be Montgomery County or anywhere else."

Maybe you could be a little less insulting? Perhaps those of us who commented did in fact read the article and disagree with it's premise that MoCo is "drive through country" just because some people drive through residential areas when traffic on major highways is bad. I mean, sure, no one likes cars driving through their neighborhoods, but this is a universal problem for anyone who lives near a highway. I live on a dead-end road that stops at a river, and I clean up diapers at least once a month all summer long because people stop in front of my house to park and walk down to the river to swim with their young kids. They change the kids when they get back to their cars and they leave the sopping wet diapers along my yard.
posted by Patapsco Mike at 8:38 AM on February 21, 2020

I live and work in Montgomery County and can’t relate to this at all. I take public transportation daily and am frequently a pedestrian and have never felt worried about safely crossing a major road, even with my two young kids. I can’t say litter is worse here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Of course, I also can’t imagine a situation where I’d ever yell at a construction worker for peeing in the bushes, so this essay probably isn’t for me.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 8:57 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I tend to not leave the 495/270 corridor but I think I know what the author is driving at.

Its the difference in the care and attention paid to the little parks in the northern reaches of Germantown vs what is overlooked on Dairymaid Lane. It's the Kentlands vs whatever the area of peeling paint, sketchy playground, $110,000 condos is called that exists along 270 in-between Montgomery Village and Gaithersburg proper. It's why there's a barricade (presumably but not guaranteed to be city installed) that cuts access from the piles of 70's low rise apartments behind Grosvenor Station from the single family homes that connect to Strathmore Avenue.

That last one really rankles, as the folks in those apartments have to drive almost a mile down to a traffic light instead of a quarter mile up past Strathmore Hall to get towards the Giant.

It's making parts of the county not even pit stops, you just have no reason to stop there, no amenities.

I regret voting for Elrich, seeing his NIMBYism now.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:25 AM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

I grew up in Takoma Park and spent a ton of time in Silver Spring, the adjoining city where the essayist lives. I have to say I don't recognize the area that they describe. Takoma Park is the Berkeley of Maryland, in that it's liberal, wealthy and tree-lined, but still within a ten minute walk of a subway station and 12-story housing projects. If you're not near one of those Metro Red Lines, it's true that the transit is pretty lousy. Silver Spring is car-centric, but no more so than any number of suburbs I can think of. Single-family homes, malls, traffic. The schools have some of the best results in the nation in the Westinghouse/Intel science fair, and the school I was in was reasonably diverse given the population. My impression, like the essayist's is clearly my personal interpretation.
posted by wnissen at 10:04 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

Reading this, I was reminded of Buzz Bissinger's comment on the placelessness of many American "towns" and how it engenders a form of loneliness:

This is a part of America that I’ve seen a lot of. I’ve driven across the country five times. I spent a year in Odessa [Texas]. I’ve been to a lot of towns like this, not quintessentially small towns, but isolated American places. And it, frankly, struck me, in that it was relentless and ugly and had that awful, endless strip mall, in a sense, that went on for miles and miles. The main street is sweet and cute, but it really serves no real purpose anymore. It’s that strip of Highway 81 that has become a nexus of life in a place like Duncan, and there really is no nexus to a place like that, there is no there, there. It struck me right away that this is a place that’s kind of soulless, it had no center to it; the kind of place where people are desperate for some type of connection.

I was also reminded of the handful of experiences I've had staying at my stepfather's east coast house in Lorton, Virginia, and all the summers I worked in NoVa, the south side of the beltway:

Between these car-friendly conditions and the 8 lane highway which runs to both the beltway and into DC, our residential neighborhood is often used as a quick and easy “cut through” for drivers on their way someplace better.

I feel like the essayist is still groping toward some greater insight about community as a sense of place, how it feels when people use your place as a convenient byway instead of seeing and recognizing it as a sort of community, and how easy it is for people who are "outsiders" to your community to actually make you feel alienated from people or place. But she's not quite there.
posted by sobell at 10:24 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]

I thought the comparison to a big airport was pretty clear. We build restrooms for air travelers. Free restrooms! We don’t provide restrooms for car travelers, who perforce use shrubs, which is unpleasant all round.
posted by clew at 12:45 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

Huh, thanks for sharing this! I live in MoCo - used to be in Silver Spring, where it looks like this blogger lives, and now in Rockville. To me, it reads so much more about our pedestrian safety problem. MoCo wasn't planned to be a place where people walked around, not really. Rockville has some historic downtown, and some "town centers," but in my neighborhood, it was very clearly intended to be for cars. And so we have all these giant roads slicing up the spaces between where people live and where they want to get for work or shopping or whatever. We've had so many deaths from cars lately. It's a huge issue. And when people aren't really "supposed" to be walking around, you get a lot of neglect on a pedestrian scale. There's a bunch of broken liquor bottles and litter on the sidewalks near my house, too. I'm pretty sure I know which panhandlers he's talking about, even. And yeah, the county school system is segregated and racist as hell.

I don't know that the piece had a real thesis, or really needed to as a little blog ponder, but I liked it and it made sense to me. Thanks for sharing.

(As an aside, lest it sound like I'm down on my home, I do love it here and hope to work to improve it in the long haul. We're also where a lot of immigrant communities shifted after DC got trendy and expensive, so we have the best strip mall hidden culinary gems out there!)
posted by bowtiesarecool at 3:55 PM on February 21, 2020

a little blog ponder

That's it exactly. Move on: there's no plate of beans here. Just some personal ruminations worth considering.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:27 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I have lived in the Takoma neighborhood of DC for over a decade, from which I can easily walk to both Montgomery and Prince George's counties.

I would say that Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and Bethesda are all separate microcosms that aren't particularly representative of Montgomery County in general. Also, DC's commuter suburbs are woefully, alarmingly unfriendly to pedestrians (inside the beltway PG county is probably worse, but rural Montgomery county is pretty damn awful in this regard).
posted by aspersioncast at 9:52 AM on February 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

I guess I would also add that it's really obvious that this author moved here from the midwest and didn't expect Silver Spring to be what it actually is (I have a lot of love for Silver Spring, actually. But the built environment is pretty oppressive).
posted by aspersioncast at 9:54 AM on February 23, 2020 [1 favorite]