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Montgomery County real estate and the Purple Line
If you live or work in any Washington DC metro real estate, you should be familiar with the talks that have been going on with building the Purple Line Metro. The Purple Line will be a 16 mile mass transit that would connect Bethesda to New Carrollton in Prince Georges County. With the discussion of implementing this line, there have been some disputes that have arose in the town of Chevy Chase. People who live in these homes in Montgomery County located near the Capital Cresent Trail are concerned about the vibration impacts that will be produced by this light rail system, since the vibration impact will be at or above the acceptable limits defined by the Federal Transit Administration. This is not the only concern of residents of Chevy Chase Maryland homes, as they are also concerned about the safety hazards of the trail. The residents are concerned about students who are attending Chevy Chase High school crossing the trail going to and from Bethesda. One of the ways that this problem will be answered is that in the current plans for this new light rail system there are two crossings that will be developed either above or below the planned light rail. One of these crossing will connect Lynn Drive to Montgomery Avenue, and the other would connect East West Highway to Sleaford Road.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has been taking the concerns of the Chevy Chase residents into consideration and has come up with some solutions. One part of the proposal that MTA has made to alleviate the effect that the new Purple Line would have on Chevy Chase is to install Concrete Walls on both sides of the light rail system. The walls will be 2 to 6 feet high and they would help to eliminate the noise and vibrations caused by the trains. These walls will not be built around the trail but rather just around the light rail will also go under ground, allowing some of these walls to also work as retaining walls. MTA is also retrofitting the trains that will run on the Purple Line with vehicle skirts. These skirts are a portion of the train that will be hanging over the wheels. According to MTA, these skirts are predicted to reduce the noise that the train wheels make by up to 8 decibels. If the wheels and the skirts on these trains are maintained correctly, their impact would only be 5 to 10 decibels more to put this into perspective a whisper that is roughly 30 decibels.
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