Cool bus stations will serve Montgomery's new Flash system

August 08, 2024

At its most basic, a bus stop is nothing more than a patch of pavement where passengers get on and off. A bus shelter is a tiny step up: an unadorned box of metal and glass. And then there are the things sprouting on Route 29 in Montgomery County, Md.

I call them groves of cyber trees.

“We decided we really wanted to design something unique,” said Joana Conklin, who leads the county’s bus rapid transit system known as the Flash.

Starting next month, articulated Flash buses will carry passengers up and down 14 miles of Route 29, between Burtonsville and Silver Spring. There are 11 stops, and most of them feature distinctive metal, stone and wood “stations” designed by ZGF Architects, a Portland, Ore., firm with offices around the world, including in D.C.

What do these stations look like? Imagine broad, cylindrical tree trunks — their metal “bark” pierced with holes and lit from within — from which emerge metal branches. Atop the branches rest tilted canopies sheathed in wood.

I think they look pretty cool, even if Flash buses won’t have their own traffic-bypassing lanes.

The look of the stations was helped along by a design grant awarded to the county by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The aim was to create something scalable, Conklin said. The “trees” can be employed in multiples, depending on the need.

The trees are the most distinctive feature, but each station includes other elements. A tall tapered marker stands behind the trees. It has a route map and a screen displaying real-time arrival information. There’s a ticket vending machine — passengers pay before boarding — and terminals where riders can tap their SmarTrip cards.

“When people talk about Montgomery County, they think about trees and they think about the history of quarrying,” said Corey Pitts, planning action manager for the county’s Department of Transportation. “We tried to provide elements of that.”

That quarrying history is reflected in benches that are trimmed in granite. Glass panels shield riders from the wind as they wait for the bus.

Some people have complained that there isn’t much protection from the elements. Conklin said there are a couple of reasons they didn’t opt for totally enclosed waiting rooms.

“You can imagine on a really hot day it’s going to get really hot inside,” she said. “The bigger concern was a personal safety concern. People want to be able to be visible when waiting there. They don’t want to be in an enclosed structure where no one else can see them.”

Otto Condon is the D.C.-based architect from ZGF who worked on the design, along with his colleagues Chris Somma and Melissa Dickson. I asked him if I was right to call the stations groves of cyber trees.

“We weren’t driven by a metaphor,” he said. But he’s happy for people to interpret the design in their own ways. Most bus shelters are unadorned glass sheds, he pointed out. These most definitely aren’t.

Said Condon: “If this thing stirs people differently, that’s great.”

Getting shirty

As an architect, Otto Condon has designed all sorts of things. As a Montgomery County Council member, Evan Glass has not. That changed over the summer when Glass sketched out some ideas to stick on a T-shirt — for a good cause.

“When the covid crisis first started, I knew that we needed to put resources toward our front-line organizations that were helping the hardest-hit communities,” Glass said.

Then protests in support of Black Lives Matter intensified, and Glass (D-At Large) was struck by the similarities between people fighting for civil rights and people suffering most from the pandemic.

Said Glass: “I wanted Montgomery County residents to know that we are strong in support of our communities of color and immigrants.”

And so Glass designed a pair of T-shirts that express local pride while raising money for three nonprofits.

There are two T-shirts. One bears the words “MoCo Strong” under a map of Maryland and an arrow pointing to the county. The other has the names of different Montgomery towns and cities — from White Oak to Dickerson, Friendship Heights to Damascus — inside the county’s borders and the words “MoCo Strong.”

The shirts sell for $17.50, and proceeds benefit the Collaboration Council, which provides after-school activities and mental health programs for minority youths; Identity Inc., which works with Latino youths in high-poverty areas; and Impact Silver Spring, which sponsors anti-racism programs.

I asked Glass whether he had a favorite T-shirt when he was growing up.

“I think my most prized T-shirt was probably a Bart Simpson T-shirt,” he said. “These T-shirts are way better than that.”

The shirts are available from Rockville-basedsportsextraonline.com.

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.

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