Imagine, DC

An Email

2010-08-17T10:59:00.001-04:00

I know posting has been sparse recently as I have been busy with a new job and overwhelmed by selling my suburban house while preparing for a series of temporary work-related relocations. But recently I received an email regarding municipal land use policy that I wanted to open up to a wider debate. Please leave any constructive comments you might have regarding the issue.

do you think it is a good idea, bad idea, or value neutral idea for a small town to amend their ordinance protecting "open spaces" in order to allow for the refurbishing of an existing building to be transformed to affordable senior housing.
(I don't know if "open spaces" is a standard term, but in this case it means land zoned for institutional use and includes areas that have a lot of property such as schools, churches, library etc)

I watched a LONG debate/discussion at a city council meeting and found I'm kind of in the minority in my opinion and wondered what a less biased person with actual knowledge of city plan would have to say.

-s

Dave Murphy

"Open space" is a very sketchy term. Gigantic empty lawns that nobody uses for anything are often considered "open space". On the one hand, if they can be used for something more meaningful, I'm all for it. If a building or set of buildings reinvigorates the town, absolutely it is a better use of the land, regardless of its use.

A great example in my opinion would be Four Corners, an area we both know and love... When they tore down the Kay Tract to build Blair High School, they demolished acres and acres of "green space". That area was a haven for homeless people and drug activity. It was unpatrolled, unregulated, secluded, and crime-ridden.

But when they tore out all those trees, what arose was a school already too small for its student body despite the fact that it was spread out over twice the real estate of the old school. The main feature that interacted with the rest of the "town" (if one were to consider Four Corners its own town) was not the main facade of the school, not the grand entrance, walkways, side buildings, or even athletic fields; it is the driveways and parking lots that front the school.

It secluded the student body, who for the most parts are residents of Four Corners and downtown Silver Spring, from the rest of the town. Was it a better municipal use of land than a bunch of trees with trash and homeless people? Absolutely. But does it contribute more to the townliness of Four Corners? Barely.

A good side effect was the pedestrian improvements that came along with a 3,200 student school, and Four Corners desperately needed those pedestrian improvements. But despite the fact that it is the most heavily traveled intersection in Eastern Montgomery County (for PEOPLE, not cars... more people move through that intersection than even Georgia and Colesville) no major mass transit improvements came with the school save for maybe a bus shelter or two.

Now consider the lawns providing the setback for St. Bernadette's. That is open space. It is green space. Is it serving the people of Four Corners? Does it serve St. Bernadette's other than to isolate it from the high speed traffic of University Boulevard or the "public school kids" that as a universal community of faith we ought to be reaching out to and embracing? The only thing I've ever used those fields for is stretching out a football team before a game at St. Bernadette's. And in 5 years of coaching and two years of playing, I can count the number of times I've done that on two hands.

Now consider something like this:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=3922

Erik Bootsma, the architect that authored this article, is a Beaux Arts architect and a Catholic. He writes about religious structures often. Here's his website, it's great:

http://beatusest.blogspot.com/

But back to the suburban church being retrofitted... American churches are often gigantic, isolated structures that are monuments to themselves. Whereas in Europe, Cathedrals are the centerpieces of the towns, in America you have junk like the Mormon tabernacle, which only interacts with people driving down the Beltway and in no other way serves as a structural outreach to the community. For all their questionable doctrine, this is actually my number 1 gripe with the Mormon church. They structurally isolate themselves from their surroundings, even in Salt Lake City. But nowadays, every church does that. They move from central locations to wherever they can have the biggest parking lot, assuring that few will walk to their services and ostensibly turning away anyone that does not drive a car.

If St. Bernadette's was to take the lawns in front of the parish and do something useful such as what Bootsma proposed there in Arlington, it would create a community directly affected by the parish rather than isolated from it. And for a religious institution, what better way to attract members than to make the primary structure (the church) the focal point of a community? And as far as traffic on University Boulevard goes, building frontage could slow traffic down, and a more permeable street network could actually relieve congestion there. A train line running up Columbia Pike would be nice also.

As for your case, affordable senior housing is never a bad thing in theory. But what are they building? Garden style apartments with ample parking that will eventually mock seniors who lose the ability to drive? Or a community of well designed buildings that will allow seniors to partake in society without forcing them to drive? In my opinion, the latter serves more use than an open lawn that nobody uses.

Stupid Growth: Office Parks my Metro in Prince George's

2010-06-20T15:48:00.000-04:00

Maryland's Housing and Community Development headquarters will be the first Maryland state agency to move into Prince George's County. In accordance with Governor O'Malley's transit-oriented development initiative, the offices will be relocated from practically-rural Crownsville in Anne Arundel County to a site adjacent to one of the Metro or MARC stations identified for O'Malley's plan.

The four stations in Prince George's County identified by O'Malley's plan are Laurel MARC, New Carrollton, Naylor Road, and Branch Avenue. This can be an excellent opportunity to implement a plan that could become a turning point for the County's future growth. My fear, however, is that it won't be.

Prince George's County has a long history of squandering valuable property along transit stations. College Park Station is the best example of that. Surrounding the transit hub, which has Metro, MARC, and several bus connections is an office park fit for suburban Atlanta. Its poor pedestrian approaches and wasteful spread-out design offer maximum parking without any continuity of place among the buildings. Despite being very convenient to transit, the design and layout of the area scream "drive here!"

Even worse in my opinion is Suitland. Suitland is a destitute area with high crime and a weak economy. When the Suitland Federal Center was built adjacent to the Metro, it came out as a sprawling officeplex with absolutely no orientation to the surrounding area. But don't worry, there is ample parking. Worse yet, the fenced monstrosity acts as a barrier between the town and the Metro station.

I hope this agency goes to Naylor Road station, where O'Malley made the announcement. And I sincerely hope they get it right. But if we get more Suitland and College Park, thanks but no thanks. Keep your office buildings in rural Anne Arundel County where they won't do any more damage to Prince George's County's transit access. Putting office buildings next to a Metro station is not all it takes to make good transit-oriented development.

A MARC solution for Fort Meade

2010-06-15T17:57:00.000-04:00

I worked on Fort Meade for the better part of a decade. It made me hate commuting more than any Beltway traffic ever did. It is virtually impossible to get there without a car, and the parking is years of expansion beyond critical mass. The disastrous runoff and increasing traffic are wreaking havoc on the Patuxent River estuaries, and it is only going to get worse as Fort Meade receives almost 6,000 new BRAC jobs.

I have in the past called for Metro service to the base to service the 50,000 military, DoD, and contractors that work on the base and the adjacent facilities. And though that sure would be a nice connection, I am finally coming around to the reality that it would be more infrastructure investment that it would ever worth. The fact remains, however, that the base and surrounding facilities are not served by the MARC lines that run by either side of it. What more an obvious solution than to put a connection between the two of them?

View MARC Meade Line in a larger map

The idea would be to have trains leave Union Station and follow the Camden Line to Savage, where half of the trains would continue along the current Camden Line, and half of them would continue along a spur going eastward along MD 32. The spur would connect to the Penn Line at Odenton and continue to Baltimore and beyond. Stops along the way could include National Business Park, NSA, and the Fort Meade main gate. New tracks would be about six and a half miles long. Portions could easily be constructed along defunct railroad rights-of-way.

The Camden Line, which runs along Route 1 all the way from DC to Baltimore, has several sites such as : Laurel, Muirkirk, and Riverdale Park are struggling to implement transit oriented development by their respective MARC stations. The Camden Line, however, has by far the lowest level of service on the system, and that will still be the case when MARC's 2035 plan is complete. a Meade connection could be used to add more service to the southern half of the Camden Line, which could help encourage those TOD projects.

Best of all, this connection would bring a viable transit alternative to a growing facility with worsening traffic and catastrophic parking problems. It would bring regular, high capacity transit at a minimal infrastructure investment.

Against the Generistocracy

2010-06-15T02:58:00.005-04:00

Fifteen years ago, I was a nonconformist in high school. Like my older brother before me, I sported wild hair and listened to the latest parent-unfriendly rock music. And I loved visiting Phantasmagoria, a (literally) underground record store on Grandview Avenue in Wheaton.

It was an easy walk from my high school, a since-demolished private Catholic school that has, in its relocation, implied that they want to keep lower middle class students like me from ever attending there again. But in 1995, that school was a quarter mile from the Wheaton Metro station where I caught the C2 or C4 home, and occasionally I would stop in at Phantasmagoria or one of the other quirky little off-the-beaten-path shops in Wheaton along the way.

In 1996, Phantasmagoria moved to Elkin Street, next to one of my other favorite Wheaton venues, Legends Pool Hall. "Phantaz", as we called it, added a grill and a stage at their new venue, and all of the sudden Elkin Street boasted two hip venues. The tight streets and nighttime activity created a sort of feral urbanism, an area to walk around and feel natural despite the fact that I was trying to distract myself from the continuing decay of community and the arts in suburbia.

Both Phantaz and Legends were places shady enough to be considered cool, but safe enough that my mother would reluctantly approve of me spending Friday nights shooting billiards and going to punk shows. Both were independent businesses, and both were affordable enough for crews of lower-middle class outcasts to seek refuge. In Legends, you were most likely to see Central American or Southeast Asian immigrants on the billiards tables or service industry types at the bar; meanwhile, Phantasmagoria attracted every kind of punk, indie rocker, metalhead, ska fan, or geek rocker you can imagine.

I never got into any trouble there, save for coming home smelling like cigarettes (which I don't smoke now, and certainly wasn't then). Nonetheless, I felt welcome and at home in the shadows and back alleys of Wheaton, not in Wheaton Plaza or fast food joints where my more clean-cut classmates might be found bubbling around after school.

Olney was well represented at my high school. In fact, the shiny new campus is up there, far away from the public transportation that allowed me to attend the Wheaton campus. I was forced to spend a great deal of time in Olney, especially during my junior year when I dated a girl who lived up off Emory Lane.

The entire town disgusted me. I couldn't quite put my finger on why. I often cited the lack of mature trees and the spread out nature, but my friends would accuse me of being jealous of the affluence. There was no walking around. A seventeen-year-old with a ponytail caught milling around in that neighborhood must have looked like a fly on a wedding cake. The vast cul-de-sac mazes of huge colonials with vinyl siding were built to isolate and exclude, and there were no gritty little holes in the wall or back alleys for kids like me to feel at home.

That’s when I coined the phrase "generistocracy" to describe Olney and many other Montgomery County sprawlburbs. It described the people who lived in those crisp, new, bland neighborhoods that where completely devoid of any stimulation and hadn’t been around long enough to develop any character. Generistocracy helped me separate places like Olney from places like downtown Bethesda, home of one of my favorite underground shops, a second hand boutique called Rerun that specialized in hippie attire and rock memorabilia.

Bethesda was wealthy like Olney, but Olney rubbed me the wrong way. I felt welcome in Bethesda. Olney made it clear that I had no business there. Downtown Bethesda wanted me to come in and walk around. Bethesda didn’t have much to offer a kid like me the way Wheaton did, but it gave me a sense of place that I never got from the generistocracy.

Meanwhile, I'd continue to discover Wheaton outside the mall. There was Barry's Magic Shop and an antique toy store that specialized in trains. There was House of Cards, a baseball card store, and Nick’s Diner, which only served breakfast and lunch. There was a military surplus store where I bought most of the patches that were sewn on my jacket. And there were not one, but two music stores where I would stare enviously at guitars and drum sets.

It didn't sink in that these were independent businesses, the kind that didn't care if a kid with a ponytail would come in and poke around despite being unable to make a purchase more often than not. Shopkeepers in the mall always eyeballed me as if I were going to steal something. But the best part about them, the part that wouldn't hit me until much later, was how accessible they were. I didn't need a car, money, or an agenda. I could just be there and fit in. Had Wheaton gone all Starbucks and Panera back then, I don't know how I would have made it through high school.

My girlfriend's father, a prominent local banker, forbade us to go to Legends, insisting we instead played pool at the billiard room in their house. Wheaton was just too dangerous for him. It was bad enough his daughter was dating a kid who in middle school hung out with his Salvadorian, Ivorian, and Cambodian friends in the garden apartments of Langley Park.

But for my part, I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, and I didn't even smoke. I wasn't in a gang, I didn't get into fights, and I wasn't vandalizing. I didn't go to edgy venues looking for mischief. I just liked the fact that there was a place for me to be, and in Wheaton I felt like I fit in pretty well.

I liked walking around. I liked being recognized and treated like a member of a community. I liked that the businesses welcomed me. I liked recommending these places to my friends who might actually buy something. And it made going to the bus station after school an interesting adventure, not a walk of shame for that poor kid whose parents hadn’t bought him a car yet.

I’m thirty now, and I don't go to Wheaton very often anymore. More often I find myself in downtown Silver Spring or Bethesda. As much as Wheaton shaped who I am and how much I appreciate a sense of place, it just reminds me of high school too much, and I wasn’t very fond of my high school. Phantasmagoria closed its doors for good in 2001. Legends is still there, though it's been nine years since I last set foot inside. Many of the other small, independent shops have either gone dark or moved.

But Wheaton still has a bit of that feral urbanism, set of raw streets with not-so-mainstream shops and businesses that feel a little off the beaten path despite the fact that they’re right in the middle of everything, versus the tame, boring set of chains in strip malls that litter much of the suburbs. As wave after wave of investment pours into the choice real estate around Wheaton Metro, I can only hope that the edgy underground Wheaton I grew up with can survive and thrive.

Links and Open Thread

2010-06-11T02:14:00.000-04:00

I have been very busy with work and selling my house lately, and there haven't been many posts in recent months. I have a couple posts in the works that will be posted soon. In the mean time, consider this an open thread to talk about somewhere in DC that needs a little re-imagining. Off the top of my head, here's a few:

Walter Reed Army Medical Center
RFK/East End
Southern Avenue Metro
Downtown Bowie
Bailey's Crossroads
Springfield
Lincolnia
Glover Park
Fort Davis
Suitland
Annandale

Buffalo faces mounting issues as suburbs spread out and city spreads thin.
Rethink College Park talks about a Streetsblog video on autocentricity
Yonah Freemark looks at what DC Transit will be in just a few short years.
And check out a couple of new transit ideas that were posted on GGW.

I may not have to imagine much longer...

2010-05-04T18:10:00.000-04:00

As scenic and wonderful as Laurel has been the past seven years, it looks like I'll finally be making my way back into the District. My humble abode will be going on the market this month.

I have a lot of history in the region here. I was born in Foggy Bottom. I grew up inside the Beltway in Silver Spring. I went to grade school just outside the Beltway, and high school in Wheaton. I attended Montgomery College, and I even lived in Rockville for a year. I joined the Army at 21 (pre-9/11, but just barely, if you were wondering) and resettled here after my basic and advanced training. I joined the Army to see the world, but they stationed me back in Maryland.

I purchased a house in Laurel in 2003 when I was 23 years old. I was a Specialist (E-4) in the Army at the time, making about $1,800 a month plus a housing allowance. It took a lot of scraping to stay in this house, but a couple of war zone deployments helped me pay the mortgage as my taxes skyrocketed during an unprecedented housing boom. After I got out of the Army, I languished in unemployment for about six months, during which I picked up odd jobs and took extreme measures to afford the mortgage until I managed to crack into a government job with an entry level wage suitable for allowing me to live somewhat comfortably while keeping my house.

I've come a long way since then, and so has the housing market, not to mention the city of Laurel and the DC Metro area. I know I am very fortunate to have survived the housing boom-and-bust and still have made money on my house. It was part determination, part luck, and part having smart people around me.

But as it goes, my current job sends me all over the DC area quite regularly and Laurel is no longer a suitable staging point. I'm moving back into the city of my birth, to a yet-to-be-determined neighborhood. Having grown up in the shadow of the Capitol and lived just about my entire life here and being a person who loves cities, it is a powerful notion for me to be moving back into a city that has overcome so much strife. In my youth, the mass exodus from DC was taking place. By the time I was in the sixth grade, DC was the murder capital of the US. While I was in high school, my mother fought with me every time I wanted to go to RFK or the 9:30 Club, citing my safety. And even as recently as 2004, the Army forbade me from going into the parts of the city where I am currently looking to purchase my next home.

But in November 2008, Election Day, I saw a celebration at 14th and U, an intersection that for the past forty years had been overcoming scars left by race riots, neglect, and construction of the Metro. It was a historic day for many reasons as Obama became the first African-American president in a critical period for the nation, but for me it was different, something that had nothing to do with politics. All kinds of people celebrated in the streets of a fully rejuvenated neighborhood. Washington had returned to being a great American city. It made me want to go back. And now it looks like I can finally do that.

So I'll be posting about that experience, schedule permitting. And if anyone is looking for a spot halfway between DC and Baltimore, I know of a cute little bungalow off of Route 1.

A Bike Crossing and a Disconnected Street

2010-03-30T22:19:00.002-04:00

I drive around the College Park Metro Station a lot. That area is home to one of the most notable examples on Prince George's County's long list of misguided transportation infrastructure disasters. The College Park Trolley Trail crossing at Paint Branch Parkway. Rethink College Park has chronicled the embarrassingly over-the-top markings, signs, and traffic implements to bring notice to the heavily traveled bike path crossing.

Allow me to set the scene: The College Park Trolley Trail runs along the bits and fragments of a disjointed Rhode Island Avenue between Route 1 and the MARC/Metro tracks. It is a heavily used trail that connects north College Park to the University and the Metro Center, and this crossing is a crucial point on the path. Paint Branch Parkway is a four lane road with a double yellow line. The south side of the road has a sidewalk that goes under the train tracks to the Metro station. The north side has nothing between the train tracks and Route 1 despite several bus stops along the route. The only signalized crossing accessible to the north side of the CPTT is at Route 1, about a quarter mile west. And as mentioned above, there are no sidewalks to get there.

College Park has been trying to get a HAWK signal at the intersection, an option the County dismissed quickly. There is another way to get the crossing signalized, however College Park is likely to foolishly dismiss it: connect Rhode Island Avenue to Paint Branch Parkway.

View Larger Map

The CPTT and Rhode Island Avenue would intersect Paint Branch Parkway at the same place, and the vehicular intersection could receive a traffic signal on which the bike and pedestrian path could piggy-back. This would also improve street connectivity in traffic-clogged College Park. But that's exactly why the idea will probably never be explored. It would attract cars into the neighborhood, a notion that the University and the residents will likely balk at. Never mind the fact that it houses College Park's newest parking garage at Knox Road and Yale Avenue. People won't want through traffic by-passing traffic-choked Route 1 on the narrow, speed-bumpy neighborhood streets.

Prince George's County, like most of the rest of the nation, favors funneling traffic onto main streets instead of keeping a permeable network of interconnected and redundant streets. Usually, this just isolates communities and creates traffic problems. In this case, however, it hurts (sometimes literally) pedestrians and bikers who cannot count on Paint Branch Parkway drivers to obey the 35 mph speed limit or the state law that mandates cars stop at all crosswalks for bikes and peds.

In most other wealthy countries on earth, bikes, cars, pedestrians and transit find a way to coexist together on publicly maintained roads. This separation of modes with a grossly negligent safety situation once again emphasizes that in a country that is already bad at that, Prince George's County finds a way to prove they are one of the worst.

Look at Southwest

2010-03-11T20:26:00.001-05:00

Southwest was gutted by urban renewal a couple decades ago, and it became one of the less savory parts of the city. The area is now experiencing a revival, however the original street grid is still decimated by the elevated freeway and railroads and several of the residential and office complexes that occupy superblocks. What would Southwest look like if all the letter and number streets and diagonal avenues were connected across the quadrant? Something like this:

View Southwest L'Enfant in a larger map

Imagine Lamond-Riggs

2010-02-24T11:50:00.000-05:00

Northern DC has a huge swath of relatively dense urbanized area with little direct access to Metro. This area consists largely of the Petworth, 16th Street Heights, Brightwood, Manor Park, and Lamond Riggs neighborhoods, and the obvious reason is that there is no line running underneath Georgia Avenue. There are commercial corridors along this route on Georgia Avenue, Kennedy Street, Upshur Street, Blair Road.

While it is not economically feasible right now to dig underneath Georgia Avenue, that area is likely to get a streetcar connecting Silver Spring to the next station along Georgia, the Georgia Avenue/Petworth station (which technically is in Park View, just south of Petworth). The eastern reaches of this area would not benefit as much from this new transit line, however the opportunity exists to add a Metro station along the Red Line in the Lamond-Riggs neighborhood at Kansas Avenue and Blair Road:

View Larger Map

This station would lie about halfway between Takoma and Fort Totten, which are just under two miles apart. It would directly serve the Blair Road retail corridor, and if placed on the southeast side of Kansas Avenue, the New Hampshire Avenue corridor would be directly served as well.

What makes this site particularly amenable to a transit station is the plethora of suitable approaches. Peabody Street heads west and in less than a mile hits Georgia Avenue in the Vinegar Hill/Fort Stevens area. New Hampshire and Kansas Avenues head southwest into the heart of Petworth, an important neighborhood in the heart of northwest, densely populated and undergoing a true renaissance. New Hampshire Avenue also heads north through Takoma Park towards Langley Park, and this new station could serve as a hub for bus lines along New Hampshire.

Blair Road already connects this area to the Takoma station area, and linking transit-oriented developments can have a synergistic effect on the areas, like along the Orange Line in Arlington or the downtown areas in DC. To the south, Blair Road becomes North Capitol Street and crosses Riggs Road/Missouri Avenue near Fort Totten, another area which is rapidly growing. As Takoma and Fort Totten grow with more walkable, transit accessible developments, a station placed in between them could induce a string-of-pearls transit-oriented development environment that could become the focus of the northern part of the District, improving transit accessibility and the potential for growth and development. And it could be done without spending a single dime laying more track.

I imagine the first criticism of this station would be that it increases the time it takes to get downtown. For some, yes. However, there is an express train from Silver Spring to Union Station known as the MARC Brunswick Line. For many residents in Lamond Riggs, Manor Park, Takoma, Brightwood, and Petworth, it will most certainly shorten the amount of time it takes for them to get downtown. Considering the benefits of added grown and increased economic viability, adding one or two minutes to get downtown might be worth it. It certainly was at the New York Avenue station, which opened just six years ago and has induced billions in economic investment, even during troubled economic times.

What would this station be called? Track Twenty-Nine suggested "Kansas Avenue" some time ago, however I am partial to naming it after the neighborhood, Lamond-Riggs, or perhaps Fort Slocum after the nearby park and Civil War fortification. Though perhaps not well known right now, Lamond-Riggs has the potential to become a keystone for development along the northern edge of the District.

Sneak Peek at Imagine, DC Transit Vision

2010-02-17T02:19:00.001-05:00

Further explanation forthcoming, but at the GGW meet-up in Silver Spring tonight, a couple folks asked me about it, so here it is

What is on it?

-Potential extension of existing and under construction Metro Lines (including Silver), separated from each other to maximize capacity
-Two Metro Light Rail lines, the Purple Line (proposed) and the Black or "Columbia" Line (which hits Columbia Pike in MoCo, Columbia Heights, and Columbia Pike in VA)
-A vision for DC streetcars (red), Ride-On streetcars (light blue), streetcars for municipalities in Prince George's (various blues and purples), ART/DART (light green) and Fairfax Connector (white)
-Southern Maryland Area Rail Transport (SMART light rail, in yellow)

What's not on here yet:
-Corridor Cities Transitway
-MARC/VRE
-Baltimore Transit
-A "Pink Line" heavy rail inner loop
-A "Brown Line" crosstown light rail

I probably won't add these, it doesn't mean I don't think we should have them:
-Tram/Streetcar stations
-Intercity/HSR/MagLev
-Rapid/express bus (vision supplants most of this with rail anyway)
-Redevelopment and suburban ruralization that would ideally accompany this sort of plan
-Bicycle facilities (not my wheelhouse... yet)
-New/changed/removed freeways, parkways, and interchanges, as well as newly tolled roads

Here's a disclaimer: I am not under the delusion that this vision is feasible, politically expedient, affordable, cost effective, or in any other way possible. But I imagine it would be able to quickly and safely transport most of the area's growing population after gas prices breach the threshold of affordability.

Sorry I am currently incapable of putting together a beautiful graphic like many of my fellow transit nerds at BeyondDC, Track Twenty-Nine, or Greater Greater Washington, but hopefully the arrangement I have thrown together on GoogleMaps will give people an idea of what I'm going for here.

Keeping Money In the Community

2010-02-07T04:36:00.001-05:00

My New Years resolution was to eat at more independently owned food joints. Originally, I opted to do this to get a better taste for DC cuisine, but there is a reason that benefits everyone to seek local fare from locally owned restaurants. That money comes flowing back to you by keeping the money in the place where you live. And this goes for everything, not just food.

I purchase some pork tenderloin at the Wal-Mart in Maryland City, the money goes a lot of places. New York investors, Chinese suppliers, various distributors, and of course the fat cats in Benton, AR where Wal-Mart started. But where doesn't it go? Laurel. Prince George's County. And for the most part, the State of Maryland. My hard earned cash is going to support gated communities like Hot Springs Village, AR, the largest gated community in the United States and not surprisingly convenient to Benton.

If I purchase the same pork tenderloin at the Laurel meat market on Main Street, my money is not going through all the corporate filters of a Wal-Mart. The product is more likely to come from the state of Maryland and will probably be fresher. A larger percentage of the taxed monies will go to the city of Laurel, Prince George's County, and Maryland. And a retailer that depends on the community. Those taxes will go towards investment in my city, not a segregated community halfway across the country with a disproportionate lack of minority population.

River East Idealist had a great article last week on how River East residents can keep their money in River East and break the debt cycle in which many less fortunate River East residents are mired. Her first point was to stop attending colleges you can't afford. I like to think I'm living proof that this works. I have an Associates of Applied Science from Montgomery College. I educated myself where I lived, and I now have what could be considered a decent paying job and a rather prestigious position in Federal Government. Of course, if you can find a way afford a degree from a better more expensive school, go for it. But educating yourself outside your means is not necessary. I believe I am doing much better than most of my friends with bachelors degrees from more prestigious institutions because I do not have six figure student loan debt. My six figure debt is a mortgage on the house I own.

Another observation she made: stop financing cars. If the money Americans spent on the interest alone of financed cars were instead spent on public transportation infrastructure, I wonder how much better our systems would be. If that were the case, I speculate many Americans would not even bother to own a car. At the very least, I bet Metro would not be facing such a tremendous budget gap.

There are a plethora of ways we can keep our money in the community continuing to benefit us. But it is important that those methods be accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic status. Policy ought to be enacted promoting locally owned businesses over chains, mass transit over car ownership, and better investment in local schools to create sharp minds and keep them nearby. The status quo will continue to send money to out of touch corporations and Wall Street investors while siphoning investment away from our own communities.

Depressing Places

2010-01-12T00:48:00.001-05:00

This weekend, my job had me going to a site up in Columbia Gateway, a sprawling, depressing office colony in Howard County. It is an intimidatingly isolated, desolate, oppressing void of a place. I grew furious trying to figure out which anonymous LeCorbuseurian complex housed the site where I was meeting my colleagues. It was a very depressing landscape, and I couldn't wait to leave.

Then it dawned on me that thousands of people work here every day.

Columbia Gateway. Photo by Howard County

I find my self oppressed by the traffic-choked pedestrian-hazardous landscape of Laurel Lakes, and I am doing everything in my power to move. But push comes to shove, I can walk to the store. If someone is causing problems in my neighborhood, it will be noticed and police will be called. Those police shouldn't have too much problem finding the suspects. It is Lower Manhattan compared to Columbia Gateway (except they have the skyscrapers up there).

Perhaps I am ruminating on the concept too much. I may be reading too much James Howard Kuntsler. But then CNN illustrated human's desire for beautiful and memorable settings. The visual stimulation of the beautiful planet in the hit film Avatar is striking people on such a level that going back to the cul-de-sacs, drive-thru fast food joints, and office parks of reality has caused them depression.

I have not seen Avatar yet, but I plan to do so soon after reading the CNN article. I know the symptoms. I was a little depressed when I returned from my two months in Europe, having seen such awe-inspiring places as the Abbey at Fauntevrault, the American Cemetary in Luxembourg, Heidelburg Castle, Chateau Vianden, the Ardennes Forest, Die Bergstrasse, the Amsterdam canals, and Chateau d'Angers and then returning home to the billboard littered landscapes of Route 1 in Laurel. Fortunately, I go to downtown Silver Spring, Clarendon, H Street, Hyattsville, Chinatown, or one of the DC area's many other great places, and I get over it. They may not be on par with the beauty and sense of places as the Abbey at Fauntevrault, but they are memorable places designed for enjoyment of people.

Perhaps the visual magnificence of Avatar is so otherworldly beautiful and James Cameron has accomplished something truly profound. I'll let you know after I watch it. But perhaps many Americans are already depressed by their lack of access to truly beautiful places, and Avatar simply defined that their need for such places that was already festering inside them.

Coast Guard HQ: 2,000 Cars, No Boats

2010-01-07T22:49:00.001-05:00

A historic campus. An idyllic untouched corner of real estate in close proximity to the seat of federal government for a great nation. The headquarters of an esteemed branch of the military and an a department headquarters for a government agency. No nation on earth could improve on a venture like that. But in the United States, we throw in a 1900 space garage.

The United States Coast Guard Headquarters design has been approved. I'm not an architect nor am I capable of eloquently stating my disgust at a coast guard headquarters that looks like a spa retreat off in the woods despite the nearby convergence of two navigable rivers, but I will openly take issue with the 1,973 space garage. It is definitely better than surface parking, but this is a historic site, virgin land with views of the convergence of the rivers, the Capitol, and the monuments. Real estate in America doesn't get more prime than this. And DHS is dropping a greenified Tyson's Corner transplant with a huge garage in the middle of it, complete with a sexed up drainage pond and ample parking.

I've advocated that a campus like this ought to house an institution of higher learning, particularly UDC. To me, that would be the ideal way to dignify that site (Although I don't know what your average UDC student would think about moving into dorms that formerly housed mental patients... but one would think the good people hat DHS and the Coast Guard would have similar concerns!)

I'll admit my reaction is perhaps a bit pessimistic considering that I have not seen an illustration or elevation that contextualizes the complex amongst the St. E's buildings, but with streetcars imminent, location near two Metro stations, and traffic congestion already problematic, a huge parking garage has me worried that this is just going to be another office park like those in Columbia, Gaithersburg, or Tyson's Corner.

The garage is built into a slope visible from Haines Point. Several measures were put in place to minimize the visual impact of the structure, such as putting more of it underground and a green wall system on the northern facade, however on an important site like this with available transit alternatives, I would expect better planning and land use than a green-guilt version of the same disposable crap office box we have all come to know and hate.

Students of architecture, I beg your input on this one. I am at a loss for words. If the Army built something that ugly, I would be even more embarrassed as a veteran than I am when West Point gets annihilated by the Naval Academy in football every December.

Imagine a streetcar on Alabama Avenue

2010-01-03T02:57:00.001-05:00

When DDOT unveiled its Streetcar vision in October, I was little disappointed by the amount of service in River East. Indeed, the area's reputation has been mired in negativity for quite some time, which has lead to, for better or worse, a very different kind of land and economic development in Wards 7 and 8. This is evident in the distribution of services proposed by DDOT.

River East has experienced a great deal of suburban style development. Wickedly suburban. Affordable housing is often not accessible to the six Metro stations that serve this third of the city. Isolated affordable housing can often turn out to be frighteningly similar to ill-fated housing projects. Requiring people of lower income to rely on automobile transport greatly increases their cost of living, further exacerbating the poverty. But shiny new developments in River East, for all their efforts at civic improvement, are still focused around the automobile.

What really disappointed me about DDOT's plan is that all the streetcar lines appear to run THROUGH River East. Along the Anacostia River, perhaps, but they fail to connect many of the neighborhoods to the system, including several that are not very accessible to Metro. This plan would lead me to infer that Congress Heights and Fairlawn are and will be for the foreseeable future dependent on the rest of the city to be a viable place to live. The lines connect River East to the rest of the city, but they don't connect River East to River East. Not as much as it could, at least.

With DC's population rocketing past 600,000 and developers running out of "River West" real estate to develop, Benning, Deanwood, Anacostia, Washington Highlands, Hillcrest, Fort Dupont, and the rest of River East's many neighborhoods will becoming increasingly attractive for development. But the same type of dense, walkable, transit-oriented, traditional neighborhood design is not possible if River East goes as underserved by streetcar as it is by Metro (6 stations versus 31 in the rest of DC and not transfer stations). So I conceived a line that would make it feasible to live in Congress Heights and work in Capitol Heights without taking Metro all the way to L'Enfant Plaza first. I give you a proposal for a ninth streetcar line, the Alabama Avenue line:

View River East Streetcars in a larger map

Blue indicates lines laid out in the DDOT plan, purple indicates possible future streetcar extension laid out in the plan, and red is the Alabama Avenue line. Obviously, significant portions of the line also run along Southern Avenue and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue. It connects prominent neighborhoods to Metro stations and other streetcar lines. It puts more of the rail transit infrastructure within walking distance for District residents who will benefit most from its service and economic development. It is intended to interact with the neighborhoods as places where a significant portion of the District now lives and could potentially work in the future.

Where the city will ultimately have a streetcar network, River East will only have lines. The Alabama Avenue line would create a network that would compliment the existing Metro stations and the already-planned streetcar lines. It may not generate enormous ridership projections right now, but it would certainly draw more walkable urban development to Alabama Avenue and the other proposed corridors. We plan roads in anticipation of future development. Why can't we make that same investment with our streetcar network?

Cross-posted on Imagine, DC

New Years Resolution

2009-12-31T03:02:00.000-05:00

With the new decade upon us, I have decided to make on very important New Year's resolution: Eat at fewer chain restaurants. Recently I've been discovering local hole-in-the-wall joints like Dumm's in Riverdale Park. Want a decent half-smoke but you're in Silver Spring? Try Quarry House Tavern. When i'm hankering for a sub at work in College Park, do I go to Subway, Potbelly's or Quiznos? How about Jungle Grille on Route 1 instead? Need a quick late-night meal in South Arlington? Try Bob and Edith's Diner.

Apart from the fact that you are likely to get much better customer service and more/better food for the dollar at locally owned establishments like these, they keep money in the community. Panera might be great, but nothing beats the sandwiches at the Parkway Deli in Silver Spring. And better yet, the define a sense of culture unique to a very small area, like my old haunt the Corner Pub in Four Corners, or the Stained Glass Pub in Glenmont.

The punk rocker in me likes to think that I am keeping my hard earned cash out of the pockets of "the man", but the fact of the matter is it is an economically sound decision, and it enriches my sense of local culture. Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street is a hyperbolic example of how a food restaurant can capture the character of a neighborhood. Some places are late night joints for bargoers, like Tastee Diner in Silver Spring and Bethesda and Steak and Eggs in Tenleytown. And what UMD student has never spent a late Saturday night at Plato's Diner?
Plato's Diner in College Park. Photo from flickr by Steve Snodgrass

I tend to move about the entire region so if anyone has a favorite watering hole, lunch counter, or grease pit that's not of the ilk of McDonalds, Chipotle, TGI Fridays, or Panera, by all means share with me and the rest of our readers. So for one of your resolutions this new year, I encourage you to forgo Starbucks for your morning coffee, and instead patronize a more local institution and keep the money flowing around your neck of the woods.

And of course, Happy New Year, DC!!!

Snow Emergency: Don't Walk

2009-12-19T16:59:00.002-05:00

Having experienced many of my Christmases as a youth in Buffalo, I'm generally nonplussed by big snow storms. This one has confined me to my house, however, and I've been watching the madness unfold on News Channel 8, where they are warning us not to venture outside our houses if we don't have to do so.

Route 1 in Laurel, taken from the front of the Greene Turtle. Plenty of cars were out despite warnings, making pedestrian conditions hazardous. Photo by the author.

Generally, that's very good advice. However, they were showing footage of pedestrians crossing streets and dismissing it as wildly dangerous behavior because, hey, cars gotta use those streets! Certainly driving conditions merit warnings, but why are we chiding the pedestrians instead of the people driving non-emergency vehicles? How are pedestrians expected to stay out of the streets when public services are focusing efforts on clearing roadways while ignoring sidewalks?

Prince George's County Executive Jack Johnson declared a state of emergency because so many county residents failed to heed warnings not to drive. I saw a few of those obstinate drivers on my walk to the Safeway in my neighborhood... which of course was closed. In fact, the only things open in Laurel Lakes Shopping Center were a nail salon (?) and a liquor store. Eventually I found an open 7-11, but suffice to say there was a lack of healthy diet staples. The proprietor, Pankaj, had walked to his store this morning to make sure Laurel Lakes could at least purchase Hot Pockets and yogurt smoothies if nothing else. This really made me wish my neighborhood had live-work units. Not to mention sidewalks.

Despite my lack of healthy food, open shops, and decent pedestrian facilities, at least I wasn't threatened with a gun during a snowball fight. A public gathering in the public realm at 14th and U NW was broken up because... wait for it... a car was hit by a couple of snowballs. The man brandishing the weapon was an off-duty policeman. The message: People don't matter in a snow emergency. Cars do.

PG Stands for Poor Growth

2009-12-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

Now, I like to stick up for my county. I believe that in many ways, Prince George's County has been dealt the short end of the smart growth stick. But the fact is that the county government isn't even trying, and it seems that any smart, transit oriented growth that does occur happens by accident or coincidence.

What puts me over the edge was this Washington Post article in Greater Greater Washington's Breakfast Links. A concrete plant has been approved near Sheriff and Cabin Branch Roads near Fairmount Heights.The Post article points out the multitude of other industrial plants near this site, surrounded on all sides by middle class residential zoning. GGW highlights this concentration, pointing out that the region in majority black. Pushing around non-wealthy minorities is not a new thing Prince George's County.

Cheverly Metro Station. Photo by Genista from Flickr

But what the Post doesn't point out is that the site where this concrete plant has been approved is less than a mile from Cheverly Metro station, one of the most underused stations on Metro. And it's on the same side of US-50 as the Metro station, meaning that useful growth could potentially occur in that area if Prince George's County wasn't treating it as a dumping ground for undesirable industry. It's a location inside the Beltway with easy access to the city and multiple forms of transit, including two Metrobuses that directly serve the site, five Metro stations within two miles (Cheverly, Landover, Deanwood, and Capitol Heights, and Addison Road-Seat Pleasant), and an Amtrak and MARC station at New Carrollton under three miles from the site. This is not the first, but only the latest controversy where PG County has throw its citizens under the bus and tried to drop an industrial plant in residential areas near Metro stations.

This site could be used for transit-oriented development at Cheverly station. It could be a crossroads between Cheverly and Capitol Heights. Instead it is home to an asphalt plant, a recycling transfer station, and a clay mine. And now, coming soon, a concrete plant. These uses would be far more suitably placed along US 50 outside the Beltway just a few short miles away, alas those areas have been blanketed with very low density McMansion developments. Byzantine laws promoting sprawl in PG will continue to force industrial growth in inappropriate places, including Fairmount Heights, one of the oldest black settlements in Maryland.

Prince George's County will not continue to prosper as it runs out of agricultural land while continuing to neglect its valuable inner ring suburbs. Transit investment will continue to be difficult to justify, making it more difficult to fund. And PG will continue to mean poor growth until the county's planning begins to take a look towards the future with regard to land use economy.

Core Capacity & Freemark's Pink Line

2009-11-21T10:46:00.002-05:00

The Transport Politic often showcases unique and clever transit solutions visualized by the site's author, Yonah Freemark. Recently he looked into the WMATA system and made an interesting proposal: a separated Blue Line, and running along it, another investment, a so-called Pink Line. Though Freemark's plan would add invaluable capacity and connectivity to our system, I believe a similar vision could be achieved without building another costly Potomac Crossing. That's not to say we shouldn't, but perhaps a closer term solution might look more like this:

View Pink Line in a larger map

The existing Potomac crossing where the Yellow Line connects Downtown and Pentagon City is underutilized and ought to have it's capacity increased before another crossing is built. This alternative combines the cross-Arlington connectivity that Freemark envisions without the circuitous route back through Rosslyn. This investment could be increased even more if the Green and Yellow Lines could be separated downtown, which might prove cheaper than the Blue Line separation. Another advantage would be that this line could just be an extension of the Silver Line, which would eliminate the need for a new line color.

New track miles are most valuable in the core. Unfortunately, they're also generally the most expensive new track miles. But the benefits to the entire region are huge across the entire system, making it a worthwhile investment. And it's about time we started considering "the rest of Arlington" more a part of the core.

A Car Crash Hits Home

2009-11-03T14:07:00.000-05:00

I got word last night that the star basketball player from my high school was killed in a traffic accident on the B-W Parkway. I didn't know him on a personal level, only from being a freshman going to basketball games and seeing him lead the team to a win over powerhouses like DeMatha. But it hits home a little more when you know the person involved in the car accidents that take lives all too often on our region's roads.

Last week when swine flue deaths in America topped 1,000, the President declared a national emergency. Meanwhile, we have grown to expect 35 times that number of deaths on our roads every year. So much was made of the Metro accident this summer, as it should have been. But 9 people were killed. How many people have died this year on the Beltway alone? This is a dangerous paradigm to accept as a part of our daily life.

Playoffs? Playoffs?!!

2009-10-29T12:56:00.000-04:00

Posts have been increasing lately, but I somehow managed to get my football squad into the playoffs with out 2-6 record. Excuse the Jim Mora reference in the title.

We're now practicing at our home field under the lights (which makes a huge difference this time of year) because there are fewer teams practicing. Funny, it makes the program smaller and thus better served by the community it represents. The players have a much easier time getting to practice, and team moral has improved quite a bit. Just one more reason I decry the robust, "big box" approach to youth sports that the suburbs have been taking these days.

Imagine the Green Line North Extension

2009-10-26T20:03:00.001-04:00

Monday night, Prince George's County voted on its transportation master plan update. I would have attended, but I wonder if the vote and public meeting was intentionally held on an evening where the Washington Redskins Monday Night game at FedEx Field in Landover would make traffic unbearable for northern (urbanism friendly) Prince George's County residents to drive to (highway friendly and transit inaccessible) Upper Marlboro. It's just conjecture, but I would not put it past the county government.

The master plan calls for the creation, extension, or widening of several highways throughout the county, allowance for greenfield development outside the Beltway, and some other Cold War-era fixes to Prince George's transportation problems. The counties ample highways have been described to me by my coworkers as "the only thing worth visiting in Prince George's County". As a resident, I disagree wholeheartedly, but it is hard to dispute that many people use the B-W Parkway, I-95, US-50, MD-4, MD-5, and Indian Head Highway as through routes to get to "nicer" exurban communities in Howard, Anne Arundel, and Charles County.

The master plan did, however, propose many transit improvements. Most notably (for a Laurel resident like me, anyway) is the Green Line extension proposed through Beltsville, Laurel, and on to Fort Meade. The county's proposal for this extension doesn't cater directly to greenfield development like older proposals for the extension that followed I-95 to MD-32 on a circuitous route through southeastern Columbia en route to BWI. The route I have envisioned below follows the CSX corridor in Prince George's County, as indicated in the master plan. If the Green Line is extended to Fort Meade, it would probably look a lot like this:

View Green Line Extension in a larger map

Stations:
Beltsville (Baltimore Avenue and Powder Mill Road)
Muirkirk/Konterra (Baltimore Avenue at Muirkirk Road)
Laurel Lakes (Cherry Lane between Baltimore Avenue and MD 197)
Laurel (Main Street at First Street)
Savage/Annapolis Junction (Brock Bridge Road at Dorsey Run Road)
National Business Park (MD 32 and National Business Pkwy)
National Security Agency (MD 32 and Canine Road)
Fort Meade Main Gate (MD 32 and Mapes Road)
Odenton Town Center (Odenton Road and Morgan Drive)

Fort Meade is the largest job center in the state of Maryland, and it is currently unserved by transit.This train extension would enable reverse commutes from Washington, DC and the Route 1 corridor while facilitating transit oriented development along Route 1. Servicing Fort Meade also would meet some of the transportation challenges that presented by the BRAC's relocation of 5,700 jobs to Fort Meade; Metro access to the bases facilities would eliminate the need for highway widening at the massive job center in Central Maryland. The existing transit on the corridor, the MARC Camden Line, suffers poor service because it shares tracks with the CSX freight trains, does not serve Fort Meade, and has not induced any transit oriented development. This alignment would most likely overcome those shortcomings and better integrate northeastern Prince George's County into the urban fabric of the DC Metropolitan area.

Google Maps

2009-10-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

This week Google Maps began using a new symbology on its maps.line features and place names are now outlined/shadowed, making the maps much easier to read. The new maps are more aesthetically pleasing, professional-looking, and sharper at every scale:

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

They actually remind me of the maps put out by Alexandria Drafting Company (ADC), the local standard in road atlases for a good long time.

Suburbane

2009-10-23T01:59:00.000-04:00

Today I stopped in Calverton to fill up on gas. Much to my surprise, the Sunoco station on Cherry Hill Road offered "NBC at the pump", a TV screen with news and entertainment snippets. I had to sort of chuckle at the combination of two uniquely suburban inventions.

I often wonder what of our American toys were popularized or invented because of suburbanization. I've opined in the past that youth sports rose to prominence because of the suburbs. But the popular axiom "it takes a village to raise a child" is virtually lost in isolated, homogenized suburban culture. My mother, who grew up in a Sicilian ghetto in the West Side of Buffalo back when it was a thriving industrial city, used to bemoan the amount of television I watched growing up. As a pre-adolescent, however, I had few other choices for any type of sensory stimulation.

The Northwest Branch ran along the eastern edge of my neighborhood in a steep wooded valley. Despite the hiking path running through it, I was not allowed to play down there because I could get hurt or abducted and there would be no one around to help. Acres of wooded wonder just blocks from my house, and I couldn't utilize it. I was not allowed to walk along or cross University Boulevard for safety reasons. I was allowed to walk home from school along University Boulevard, as well as cross over the Betlway, but that of course was under the watchful eye of a twelve year old wearing an orange patrol belt. These two restrictions confined me to the Franklin Knolls and Montgomery Knolls subdivisions, which included two outdoor community pools, an elementary and a middle school, a synagogue-cum-Baptist church, and a nursing home. Oh, and I almost left out the acres of colonials, ranchers, and cape cods arranged in a hilly, illogical road network.

Newer, shinier suburbs sprouted up in outer Silver Spring and other towns by the late '80's, leaving few children my age in my neighborhood. It was mostly empty-nesters like the holdover Jews from before the synagogue left, the old Greek, Italian, Armenian, and Irish Catholics who moved in at a time when out neighborhood was still connected to a Catholic parish, before the Beltway partitioned it. We might have moved out in the early '90's when the neighborhood really started going down hill. Many of my neighbors did. These were the neighbors that had somewhat prestigious government jobs, like my old next door neighbor the Secret Service Agent. My father fell into this category, but tragically he passed away in 1992, and with three of my siblings in college, my mother decided to stay put.

By that time, I was older. I had slightly more freedom. But any semblance of "community" that existed in the Woodmoor shopping center or the Four Corners area a mile down University Boulevard had long since been replaced by generic strip mall shops. No satisfaction of place there. I also was discouraged from riding the C2 and C4 buses because of "bus people". (My mother eventually convinced me to drop this prejudice that I learned in school, and in high school I became a "bus person"). While most of my friends had a Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, my mother refused to let me and my younger brother partake in video games. Video games are also quite practical in the suburbs. If I could immerse myself in Super Mario Brothers 3 for a couple hours a night, it would fill the void where I should have had a sense of place. Lack of video games led to me talking incessantly on the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell once said that one day there would be a telephone in every major American city. It's easy to see how he would grossly underestimate his invention before the society was partitioned, isolated, and homogenized into suburban culture. The satisfaction of human interaction could be feigned through talking on the telephone, and later through its successors, the internet and the cell phone. Yes, these inventions have been quite useful and successful across the world. With over four billion subscribers worldwide, cell phones are considered the fastest propagating technology in the history of mankind. But the rise popularity of phones, like television, video games, and the internet, for better or for worse, is likely the product of the suburb induced loneliness that so many Americans suffer, completely unaware of the shortcomings of their environs.

Back in Buffalo, where many of my cousins live, one can still purchase a 4 bedroom single family house for under $7000. My aunts and uncles fled the West Side to McMansions in Williamsville and Amherst. The butcher on the corner of my grandparents' street is currently vacant. And Buffalo continues to spread itself thin. If you haven't recently moved to the most far flung, newly built suburb, you live in an undesirable area.

Meanwhile, Franklin Knolls made a bit of a comeback recently. My older sister now lives there with her family. The neighborhood owes its recovery in no small part to its proximity to Downtown Silver Spring and its revival. Our region has dropped that deleterious paradigm. Georgetown, where my older brother slummed with gutter punks in 1987, is now one of the most desirable and prestigious neighborhoods in the region (to the tune of I'll-never-be-able-to-afford-it). Georgetown was built 250 years ago for beauty and comfort, which back then came from sense of place. over time, it remained a memorable place. It became dignified and urbane, so much so that when the flight from the city occurred, those charms didn't abandon it. And in the flight back into the city, Georgetown immigrants would easily settle in to the timeless, memorable environment. In Franklin Knolls, my nephews will be far less likely to need television, video games, and telecommunications to find sense of place and social satisfaction like I did when I grew up there.

As for those vast mazes of colonials and cape cods in Silver Spring, they're slowly getting sidewalks, crosswalks, mixed use development, and better integration to their surroundings. With urbanization, I believe an area becomes more dignified, more memorable, more urbane. With suburbanization... well, I guess the only word to describe it is suburbane.

Transit Capacity

2009-10-19T02:28:00.000-04:00

Last month I criticized the plan to scale back Tysons Corner because of the need for increased freeway capacity. The more I think about it, the more merit I see in the notion that a revamped Tysons Corner will be desperately transit-starved. Freeways, however, are not the panacea. The plan to urbanize the region's most prominent edge city will bring thousands more jobs and residents to the area. Even if the area becomes more self contained, it will require much greater capacity for transportation in and out of the area's densest job center.

Downtown Silver Spring from the Metro station. Photo by mindgutter

Tysons will have 4 stations, but they will only be able to handle about 40% of the rides of stations at Silver Spring, Bethesda, Rosslyn, and King Street. Matt Johnson at Track Twenty-Nine created an excellent diagram showing how track sharing by Metro lines closer in to the city prevent the same capacities on the outer spokes of the system (except on the Red Line, which does not share tracks with any other line). Even with four stations, the capacity of the line does not stack up to urbanizations in Montgomery County, Arlington, and Alexandria. Can it support an even larger development with less system capacity? Can the already-clogged North Arlington Orange Line corridor support the additional riders with its finite capacity? Optimal success of the Tysons plan would require more Metro capacity such as a separated Blue Line on a new Potomac crossing.

I'm also lead to wonder if this has not contributed to the overall inferior urbanization in Prince George's County. No station in Prince George's has more than 60% capacity because the Green, Blue, and Orange lines all share track inside the District (though the northern section of the Green Line as the potential to do so if the Yellow Line ever runs all the way to Greenbelt regularly). Certainly the County's poor planning policies have contributed to the lack of urban development around virtually all 14 Metro stations, often egregiously, but perhaps lack of capacity has contributed as well.

The stretch of Metro in Prince George's County with the most service, the northern Green(/sometimes Yellow) Line has experienced the most development. Prince George's Plaza Station has probably seen the most. Though not exactly Downtown Silver Spring yet, University Town Center is probably the best example of urban development around a Metro station in Prince George's. Much has been planned for West Hyattsville, College Park, and Greenbelt, though little has come to fruition. New Carrollton, which will have added capacity once the Purple Line comes to town, also has grand plans for development. Stops on the Blue and lower Green Lines, however, are not experiencing as much planning buzz.

I have never heard of any study that implies the impact of station capacity versus development around stations, but it stands to reason that the more capacity, the more successful and robust development can be. The Orange Line corridor might be somewhat of an exception. West of Rosslyn, the Orange line can handle about 60% of the trips Silver Spring or Bethesda can handle. The strip is anchored, however, by Rosslyn, which has the same capacity as Silver Spring and Bethesda.

David Alpert suggested some innovative ways to create more system capacity by separating the Green and Yellow lines and rerouting some of the Silver Line trains. This would help Prince George's County, Tysons Corner, and other locations in Virginia and still be cheaper (in theory) than a separated Blue Line. If Silver Spring, Bethesda, and Rosslyn are models we seek to emulate, station capacity ought to be equivalent of those successful areas.

Bolling Air Force Waste

2009-10-14T22:41:00.005-04:00

Neil at GGW had a great article about the proposal to narrow the Anacostia River (dubbed the McMillian Two Plan) and bring a bit of Paris to eastern DC. If it works and can be done with environmental prudence, I am absolutely in love with the idea. It strengthens the urban fabric of the city, it extends the grid to an underdeveloped but historic part of the city, and it creates more monumental space in the city.

But my favorite part? The plan appears to redevelop the northern part of Bolling Air Force Base. Bolling AFB is an abominable waste of valuable riverfront real estate. Some might argue that the Nation's Capital ought to play host to military facilities. As a former soldier, this is a no-brainer. Of course it should. But DoD property within the District ought to use the space in a manner that is congruent with the rest of the city. Across the Anacostia River, Fort McNair interacts with its urban environment productively and in keeping with the other infrastructure surrounding it. Bolling AFB looks like it could have been built on an empty greenfield an hours drive from the city:

View Larger Map

Does an Air Force base (especially one without an active air strip since 1962) need to take up this much land? Does the utterly suburban housing stock need to sit atop land above one of the most iconic rivers in the world? I'm sure this is no problem at Minot AFB in North Dakota, but the District of Columbia has only 68 square miles. Should almost 5% of it be devoted to isolated, wasteful suburban style land use? Perhaps its time to consolidate Bolling's facilities into something that works better with the city surrounding it, and redevelop Southwest's Potomac waterfront in a manner more suited to its urban environment.

Tysons Should Look North

2009-09-15T15:24:00.002-04:00

Montgomery County Maryland has no limited access freeways that lead into DC. There is the Clara Barton Parkway, a limited access 4-lane parkway at the extreme western edge that ferries traffic to Georgetown with few at-grade intersections, but that's it. Nearly one million people live in Montgomery County, but none of them are hopping on a freeway to get to work Downtown in the morning.

I'm not sure if this is a chicken-and-egg issue, but I'm quite sure that this is related to the fact that the Metro's Red Line, which terminates both ends in Montgomery County, has the highest capacity and ridership of any single line. It shares no track with any other lines. Silver Spring and Bethesda have approximately 70,000 residents in each of their downtowns, and yet not a single freeway runs through them. And in each of those downtowns, there is only one Metro station.

Why then, shouldn't Tyson's Corner be able to thrive without freeway widening once it gets its FOUR Silver Line stations? Fairfax County is planning on scaling back its redevelopment because of potential stress on the freeways 40 years from now.

Their rationale is simple: many people will still drive. Well, sure. Especially if you widen the freeways. And especially if the Silver Line is shoehorned through a huge choke point at Rosslyn, where three lines will be sharing one track.

Perhaps Fairfax County should be considering the enhancement of Metro capacity instead of the worrying about freeways. Montgomery County has an assortment of redeveloped edge cities that don't have any freeways connecting their downtowns with DC. If the Beltway is the worry, why not seek to invest in a transit connection between Fairfax and Montgomery Counties?

People drive primarily because driving has been subsidized into being the best option. If Tyson's Corner is looking to progressively remodel the region, perhaps they should think outside the box and reimagine their transit options.

Labor Day Quick Links

2009-09-07T12:09:00.000-04:00

August and September are very busy months for me, so it's difficult to keep up with writing original articles regularly. But please, take a look at some of the links to the right, they are all interesting blogs. Here is a sampling.

DCMUD - More, better housing near a Metro station in a rapidly improving part of the city: Deanwood

GreaterGreaterWashington - Track Twenty-Nine's Matt Johnson has written three spectacular series on freight and passenger rail in DC, station motifs on Metro, and the naming conventions for streets in the District of Columbia

And Now, Anacostia - How soon before Anacostia has streetcars?

Southeast Socialite - Never mincing words, she comments on a critique of Marion Barry, and concern about Eleanor Holmes Norton's lack of responsiveness to public queries.

Bloomingdale (For Now) - Clarifies the location of a section of 7th Street being renamed in honor of the father of go-go

Fairfax Suburbanista - Fairfax City is suburbanizing its Old Town with suburban townhouses. I wonder why they don't just try a traditional plot of townhouses?

WalkLaurel - It's a new website that explains forthcoming pedestrian and traffic improvements in the city of Laurel

Just Up The Pike - Photographs of the ICC construction through an area where several people lost their homes for the sake of the project.

Baltimore Inner Space - Discusses the "low hanging fruit" plan for the Red Line

The Overhead Wire - Discusses the George W. Bush Presidential Library and its ironic proximity to transit

Extraordinary Observations - Are Whole Foods' high prices worth a boycott? Rob argues NO.

DC Sports Bog - While admitting to being on the wrong side of history, Dan Steinberg attempts to douse some of the fire over the Redskins ticket scandal.

Hope you check a few of these articles out. Hope everyone enjoys Labor Day in the seat of the free world.

Baltimore Yellow Line Boondoggle

2009-09-04T02:34:00.008-04:00

GGW's breakfast links yesterday had a troubling article at the bottom. The Central Maryland Transit Alliance wants to prioritize extending Baltimore's Yellow Line light rail to Columbia over extending the Green Line subway to White Marsh. I can't even begin to express how dumb of an idea this is.

The Green Line extension will hit developed areas in a large city with a burgeoning centralized train system in place. This is smart. The Yellow Line extension will connect Columbia to downtown Baltimore on a very long, very circuitous route that by-passes Fort Meade, the largest employment center in the state of Maryland.

Baltimore City needs transit connections. It needs an expanded system. It needs a centralized system. A Yellow Line extension would bolster businesses in Columbia and Towson. These are decentralized locations. A Green Line extension would bolster more centralized business districts like the Belair Road and Harford Road corridors. These are centralized areas. Baltimore has been decentralizing for fifty years, and it's not working.

From Columbia, the Yellow Line would take 42 minutes to get to BWI Airport, and then another 27 to get to downtown Baltimore. An hour and nine minutes to get from Columbia to Baltimore. The northern section of the Yellow Line is actually a good idea, connecting several colleges along a main thoroughfare through the city proper. But the southern portion is as circuitous and useless as the current plan for the CCT in Gaithersburg.

CMTA, if you want light rail connecting Columbia to the city, why not push for the US-29 light rail project that was once promised to run from Silver Spring to Columbia? A direct route to the city, not a circuitous one, that hits several established communities along the way is what Central Maryland Transit Alliance ought to be seeking. I don't know how long Dan Reed's alignment (linked above) would take to get from Columbia to downtown DC, but I bet it's faster than 69 minutes.

And if Maryland does decide to run light rail further away from Baltimore, can you at least make some effort to hit the 50,000+ job center at Fort Meade before it is completely choking the region with traffic? I bet you a rail right-of-way that a lot of those employees live in Columbia.

You Have To Play To Win

2009-08-12T23:27:00.002-04:00

This is a follow-up to last week's post on youth sports.

Silver Spring is a wonderful town by virtue of the dynamic population. I believe it is rare to find a town as diverse. But with the good come the bad.

There are about 300 boys who play football for the Silver Spring Saints. A good portion of them come from single parent households, many others have two working parents. Ironically, since my last post, my team has lost two players who are unable to find transportation to the practices and games. One of those boys played in our program last year, and had been concerned about avoiding gangs in his school. With a single working mother and no extra curricular activity this fall, it raises my concern for him.

I have also been humbled by the immense sacrifices some parents and players make to participate in these programs. Two years ago, a player for my team took two buses to get from school to football practice, and another two to get from football practice back home to Rockville. All in all, every night he had practice was an additional four hours of transportation and walking along unsafe roads. An hour and a half each way between Silver Spring and Rockville on the bus. His single mother had no car, and they relied on coaches to get to and from games. At the time, there was no program in Rockville for which he was eligible to play, and he chose Silver Spring over one other program where he could take the bus to practice from his school.

Many families scrape to come up with the fees to play in a well-organized league. These fees generally run around a couple hundred dollars, and fundraisers and donations are often used to help out families that might not otherwise be able to afford them. When transportation has a negative impact on a child's ability to engage in constructive activities, these children will become isolated and be far more likely to become absorbed into unfavorable activities. No matter how much money is raised, fundraisers and donations will never safely help a young man get to and from our football field. Because of this, how many children will be unable to play youth sports in our region? I know about a handful that had to quit. I'm quite sure there are many more who were never even able to consider it.

Youth Sports and the Automobile

2009-08-04T14:30:00.000-04:00

It's August, the time of year where I return to my favorite volunteer activity coaching youth football in Silver Spring. Youth sports, despite my lack of athletic prowess, were a big part of my childhood and were probably the only thing that kept me reaching the age of 20 with any semblance of physical conditioning. To a suburban child, youth sports will offer exercise and teach social integration in a safe environment.

My 2008 squad.

Exercise is a valuable commodity in the suburbs. You don't burn many calories from the passenger seat of a minivan. The extreme, of course, is Saratoga Springs, where a student was recently punished for riding his bike to school. The policy against biking to school is of course disguised in the name of safety. Social integration is also more valuable in the suburbs. Suburban children grow up cloistered in pods that effectively segregate socio-economic classes from each other. And despite the marketing, the suburbs are not the safest place to be a kid. So a program that offers exercise, social integration, and safety ought not be undervalued, be it football, swimming, ballet, or whatever.

Are youth sports a rare positive side effect of suburbanization? The Mid Maryland Football League has 26 programs spread out over Montgomery, Prince George's, Anne Arundel, Howard, Baltimore, Frederick, and Carroll Counties, and could never survive without the suburban infrastructure. I used to think youth football could not survive without it at all.

***

The Silver Spring Saints, for whom I coach, are one of the oldest youth programs still in existence in the DC area. When I played on this team as a youth, however, it was Saint Bernadette's, a Catholic Youth Organization program. CYO football went under in 1995, however, and the Silver Spring Saints rose from the ashes, playing their home games at Saint Bernadette's field. When It was Saint Bernadette's, however, the program had two teams with about 23 or so players per team. At its peak, the CYO had 40 or 50 such teams in Montgomery, Prince George's, and DC, and they were broken into geographic-based divisions. It was the premier youth football program in Maryland for decades.

When the Silver Spring Saints joined the Capital Beltway League in 1995, the one-time parish-oriented program had to struggle to field teams in six weight classes, effectively tripling the size of the program overnight and drawing in players from a much larger area. As it struggled with finding enough players, the notion of playing games close by started to disappear. Montgomery Village, Clinton, Germantown, and Bowie were now the away games as opposed to other small teams in Silver Spring, Wheaton, and Rockville. This season, the Saints have joined the Mid-Maryland League to escape the poor organization of the CBL. They are now required to field 12 teams. Many of them will only have about 15 or 16 players. (For those of you not familiar with the sport, there are 11 on the field at a time. An NFL team has 53 players. 24 is an ideal number at the youth level)

I love the Saints organization, and what it does for young men between the ages of 6 and 14. Growing up in a single parent household, it gave me male role models, goals, and a sense of belonging that every boy should experience. But in the time between when I played and now that I coach, it has gone from a "mom and pop" program belonging to a community organization to a "big box" program. The parish still has a strong influence on the program, which in my opinion has kept it about the players and not about championships and egos (though we win our share of games).

No, it's hard to imagine youth football now without cars and giant parking lots at each field, where 12 games are played by each program every Saturday and teams drive as many as 80 miles to play each other. But it hasn't been that way throughout the history of the Silver Spring Saints. For their very first game 58 years ago, the first 12 Saints played Saint Micheal's of downtown Silver Spring, two miles away from Saint Bernadette's. To get there, they took a Capitol Transit Bus.

Imagine the Beltway at New Hampshire Avenue

2009-07-30T11:00:00.001-04:00

The Beltway is a dangerous road full of daunting lane shifts and bottlenecks that bring the ire of even the most seasoned drivers. The area around its junction with I-95 receives a lot of attention, but the problems on its northern counterpart often go ignored.

Westbound 495/95 is four lanes until the interchange with US-1. Both ramps from US-1 to The Beltway create additional westbound lanes, making it six lanes wide at the 95/495 split. Four lanes continue westbound. The ramps from Southbound 1-95 swell the roadway back to six westbound lanes. One lane splits off as an exit for northbound New Hampshire Avenue. A flyover ramp replaces it, creating a weave-style merge for cars entering the westbound Beltway from NH northbound and exiting the Beltway southbound. After the interchange, the highway quickly bottlenecks from 6 lanes back to four. Sound confusing? Try diving it.

A driver who wants to exit the Beltway at New Hampshire Avenue northbound must cross two lanes of traffic even if they were in the far right lane before the I-95 merger. For drivers wishing to head southbound on New Hampshire, they must still cross an extra lane of traffic and then contend with merging across the cars entering the Beltway.

View NH Av Interchange in a larger map

My idea would be to remove one westbound lane where northbound 1-95 splits off to the north, making the stretch between northbound I-95 and southbound I-95 three lanes. When the two southbound lanes join the Beltway, it will be five lanes wide.

Next, remove the exit to southbound New Hampshire Avenue, eliminating a dangerous merge area. Instead, direct that traffic down the northbound exit to a left turn, much like the Georgia Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, and University Boulevard exits off the westbound Beltway. The intersection at the end of the northbound exit is already signaled, it would only need provisions for left turning (southbound) vehicles.

In addition to making this interchange safer for Beltway drivers, it creates a safer environment for pedestrians on New Hampshire Avenue. Not by much, but it would be a start. But just for kicks, I threw in a small street grid, in hopes that Hillandale may one day be a little more pedestrian friendly. They already have a LEED Gold building, perhaps more positive change is on the way.

Circular Logic

2009-07-28T00:15:00.004-04:00

Tonight I did a very friendly thing and helped a buddy of mine move from Columbia to Gaithersburg. It's a cumbersome route to drive, but I was determined to avoid the rush hour freeways and see what little remained of the northeastern Montgomery County rural areas on the back roads. It is not actually a bad route, if not for the constant stop-and-go through Ashton, Olney, and Gaithersburg.

Woodfield Road, which is currently being widened, at Fieldcrest Road. This intersection could have been a roundabout, but instead the county has decided to induce more demand along this route. (Photo by thisisbossi)

Most of my route (MD-108 to Fieldcrest Road/ to Woodfield Road/MD-124) was two lanes roads, but these two lane roads would mushroom to as many as seven lanes at major intersections. This phenomenon is obviously to prevent long backups at these traffic lights. And in such suburbanized areas, people are driving to get anywhere, hence the percieved need to prevent such backups.

But I noticed that, even during the end of rush hour, I would sit at a traffic light for as many as 90 seconds without a single other car at the intersection in any direction. This made me think of something I read via GreaterGreaterWashington's Dinner Links a few days back; roundabouts as a traffic solution.

As time goes by, intersections grow wider, adding capacity to these suburban intersections. the stretches between the intersections are often are widened shortly after. I noticed this happening on Woodfield Road during my drive. Once this happens, the overall capacity of the road is increased, which induces demand, ultimately contributing to more traffic.

Perhaps before we widen roads in suburban Maryland, we ought to try putting roundabouts in at these intersections. They would improve the flow of traffic without adding more capacity and inducing more demand. Overtime, this would save billions in construction costs. It would reduce the maximum speeds of the cars driving the routes, making the roads safer. But it would not add more time to the trip. During off-peak hours, it might even speed up trips. Other safety bonuses: roundabouts decrease the number of points for a collision to take place by 75%, and also eliminate people speeding up to make a green light. It would save gas, as the article in the above link mentions, accelerating from a dead stop is the least efficient thing an internal combustion engine can do. This would decrease the need for that greatly. And if Gaithersburg ever decides to return to its once-progressive planning style, it would facilitate pedestrians more safely and efficiently.

The fact of the matter is that this could serve as a solution at suburban intersections anywhere, and even many urban intersections. Once the capacity is added and the demand is induced, however, it would be a lot tougher to implement. So why haven't we started doing this on our two- and four-lane roads? Why perpetuate a cycle of increased traffic when we could more easily perpetuate a cycle of efficient traffic flow on our suburban routes?

Imagine a Better Rail Link to Frederick

2009-07-03T11:00:00.000-04:00

I have always hated Interstate 270. Always. It is a little confusing with the local and HOV lanes. It is much, much wider than it ought to be, creating huge bottlenecks in northern Montgomery County and at the Beltway. It is preposterously ugly, unbearably congested, and I feel particularly unsafe driving it. It is, in my humble opinion, very poorly planned. The last thing we need is more of it. But that is what they want to give us.

Lots of people travel this corridor in both directions every day. Frederick County has a population of a quarter million and growing. The Bethesda-Gaithersburg-Frederick corridor has a population encroaching on five times that number, or roughly 20% of the Metropolitan area population. Downtown DC and Frederick are about 40 miles apart from each other. So this is a long corridor with a lot of people on it. A transportation solution must be found.

Obviously MARC's Brunswick Line is not getting it done. Its circuitous route through Brunswick adds several additional miles to the trip. Stops at small stations like Garrett Park, Washington Grove, Boyds, Barnesville, and Dickerson. Only 7000 people are riding this line daily (warning: pdf), and it is pushing its capacity. Even MARC's 2035 plan (pdf) only raise the capacity 26,000 per day (pdf). Meanwhile, between 75,000 and 108,000 vehicles clog I-270 every day. Imagine if we were talking about a solution that was faster than an expanded freeway or an improved MARC.

Widening I-270 is a colossal failure of an idea. Creating a bigger bottleneck at the Beltway for commuters from Frederick is just going to increase the number of cars that will sit on the parking lot that is 270 southbound in the morning. Here is my vision for a rail solution:

View Frederick Line in a larger map

If local transit (light rail, buses, etc.) ferried these commuters to a few stations, the trains could make fewer stops and travel at higher speeds. A system like this, I envision an average speed of 90 mph. Eight stops along the way, that's it. Stops at major transit centers and major suburbs along I-270.

There is nothing on the books for a direct high speed service between DC and Frederick. There are plenty of other transit priorities at this time. And I understand that some people have no choice but to drive to their jobs. I am one of them. But I live six miles from my job. If I am going to subsidize someone else's extra-long commute, I want to do it with a system that will work, not one that will only increase the number of cars that are wasting fuel while sitting idly on a congested freeway.

Do American Highways Make the Grade?

2009-07-02T12:08:00.000-04:00

During my recent travels to Germany, I was surprised and impressed by how much I enjoyed driving on the freeways. This past weekend, I realized exactly what it was that was so enjoyable about them. I drove a giant square from Laurel to Bethesda to Frederick and back to Laurel, on Interstates 95, 495, 270, and 70. I never thought I would say this, but our highways are under-engineered.

The A-6 in Germany above grade with an exit to an arterial road running at grade. Photo copyright David Murphy.

I drove through five different Western European countries on my recent business trip to Germany. The highways in all of them were straighter and flatter than our highways. Because of this, their footprints were much smaller, the lanes were not as wide, and their speed limits were much higher, if there was a limit at all. This placed much of the highway on bridges and in cuts, allowing for far less impact on the local road networks (which was already minimal because European freeways rarely run through cities like our interstates). The terrain of Germany, France, and the low countries is at least as hilly as Maryland's, so it was a very notable comparison between the grading of their freeways and ours.

Interstate 270 to Frederick is one of the straightest highways around DC, but after driving on the Autobahn it was very obvious that there are many more minor curves, and the road tightly hugs every elevation change along the way. The A-6 in Germany, by contrast, tended to remain flat through the dips and rises of the terrain. The sight lines were far greater; I could probably see at least a mile ahead at most points on the freeway. Speed limits were generally 100-130 km/h (62-81 mph) and most of Germany had no speed limit except around major interchanges. (Where Germany has speed limits, they are strictly enforced). Combined with laws prohibiting passing on the right and requiring slower cars to make way for faster cars coming up behind them, I saw little congestion on European highways, even during rush hour, even through construction sites.

On Sunday while driving down I-270 just south of Frederick, traffic slowed to about 20 mph for no apparent reason. Perhaps if this road had been properly graded when it was constructed, they would not be considering widening this stretch (pdf). Adding lanes will only generate more traffic (pdf) and make the bottleneck at the Beltway even bigger. Does this mean we should completely regrade I-270? Of course not. But it does mean that perhaps lack of lanes is not what is making traffic so annoying on 270.

Obviously, grading a highway this way is much more expensive. However, if it facilitates better traffic flow, in the long term it pays off. It pays off even faster when considering that the footprint of the highway will be significantly smaller. More even grading and straighter carriageways will also save fuel. Over time, this will add up to quite a bit of fuel. Perhaps it would help lower our per capita road deaths a little more. Right now the only thing decreasing our highway fatalities is the rising fuel costs. Instead, we allow new sub-par meandering freeways like the ICC wind their way through our rural landscapes without putting the structure into the infrastructure. It is no wonder traffic projections predict that the road will not alleviate traffic on any other area highways.

Am I saying we should tear up and rebuild all of our freeways in America? Absolutely not. But love them or hate them, freeways are the most important part of America's transportation infrastructure right now. Before the inevitable new highway is approved, it should be facing scrutiny over curves and small elevation changes like the ones on existing area highways. It could allow for better connectivity, more efficient land use, and it might even save fuel, money, and lives.

Imagine A Seperate Green and Yellow Line

2009-06-25T20:29:00.000-04:00

Naturally, there has been much written about the terrible Metro crash on the Red Line earlier this week. Had this been a nasty pile-up on the Beltway, we might have heard about it by by this point, we probably would have stopped talking about it by now, and it certainly never would have been international news. It is out of the ordinary, tragic, and was a failure of public infrastructure, unlike traffic accidents, which are usually the failures of individual drivers (we'll forgo the argument that fault may lie in road design). The fact that service disruptions continue on the Red Line is another reminder of this horrible accident. After all, these disruptions have a far greater impact on Metro than a bad traffic accident has on area highways.

If there is an accident on US-29 in Montgomery County, I can drive on Georgia or New Hampshire Avenues. But the stations that were shut down the past couple days isolated eastern Montgomery County from the rest of the Metro System. Originally, I tinkered with a map showing a separated Yellow Line for the sake of greater capacity and more geographic coverage for the Metro System. This week's accident has shown that adding redundancy to the system can be just as valuable as adding capacity.

Realizing the need for more redundancy on the system in the wake of this tragic crash is not an original idea. The Purple Line would obviously create alternate routes throughout the system. The Purple Line is both necessary and long overdue, however separating the Yellow and Green Lines would add capacity to existing track, much like separating the Blue and Orange Lines. In the case of the Yellow Line, it would allow for increased capacity on its Potomac River Bridge. If separated, the entire Green Line and the Yellow Line north of Pentagon would have the same capacity as the Red Line.

Here's what I would do with a separate Yellow Line:

View Separate Yellow Line in a larger map

This alignment is not 100% original either. Bringing Metro to North Capitol Street and Georgia Avenue is in no way a new idea. In these cases, however, people seem to want it for the geographic coverage, and not the additional capacity or system redundancy. Coverage is good, it brings transit to a new area. Capacity and redundancy, however, improve the entire system.

Perhaps I added a few too many stations, but they are just suggestions. While this would add service to the North Capitol Street and Georgia Avenue corridors, it would add redundancy to both the Green and Red Lines via Silver Spring, Georgia Av/Petworth, Union Station, and L'Enfant Plaza.

If this line existed already, the station closures on the Red Line might only have meant an additional transfer for Montgomery County commuters instead of the shuttle services to which Metro resorted after the crash.

First Car Trip Back in the US, I Witness a Bike Accident

2009-06-22T15:35:00.000-04:00

My first day back in the United States, the very first car trip I take (after jump starting my car, God help you if you don't drive them for 60 days) Just as I am acclimating myself back to American roads, I slammed on my breaks. The Ford Mustang driver in front of me had hit a cyclist. I did not see exactly what happened, but I did note that it occurred as the driver of the Mustang was pulling his car onto 198 from a curb cut entrance to an apartment complex.

The boy was okay, a couple nasty legions, but the bike was ruined. I offered my phone number and got the heck out of there, partly because I was in a hurry, and partly because I didn't want to take anyone's side int this one. After all, I didn't actually see what happened. The Mustang operator was polite and offered assistance, but when they you (probably about 19 or so) wanted to call the police, both occupants of the Mustang and another driver who had stopped after the incident insisted that the cyclist was at fault.

Again, I did not see the actual accident, but I can tell you for sure that on MD-198 in Laurel and Maryland City, the planners of the road were probably at fault. 198 is a six lane highway wrought with curb cuts. The sidewalks are widely traveled, but are only about four feet wide. And, in typical Prince George's and Anne Arundel County fashion, there are no bicycle lanes.

Ironically, as I was driving down the road, I was thinking about the best way to write about my recent travels in Europe and how easy it is to get around without a car. This was a sobering reminder of where I live, and how unwelcoming a place it can be. unless, of course, you are in your car.

Back In the States

2009-06-20T08:56:00.000-04:00

I have returned from Germany (the university town of Darmstadt, to answer previous inquiries) with a renewed sense of appreciation for the cities of both Europe and the United States. I will probably have several tales to tell about my travels on the Audobahn, local tram system, high speed trains, and airports.

The E-25 in Belgium. Photo copyright Dave Murphy.

It dawned on me that today marks a year of running this site (although there have been several obvious periods of lull) I have been most fortunate to have a good number of followers and I wanted to take the time to thank them, even the ones who don't often agree with me. This has been a fun and worthwhile extra curricular activity for me.

Naturally, while in Europe, I took advantage of the walkability and the ample mass transit. But what really surprised me was that I fell in love with the freeway system. I didn't drive often, mostly only on day trips to neighborhing cities, but Germany's Audobahn and European freeways in general are fun and exciting to drive. One thing in particular I noticed was that the expressways, often only two lanes in each direction, have much smaller footprints than interstate highways, and much less traffic. They are generally straighter and flatter than interstates, which allows the carriage lanes to be slightly narrower and the travel speeds to be higher (unlimited in Germany!). It made me wonder, for example, if the Beltway through Montgomery County might be able to survive with three straight, flat lanes instead of four lanes curving and weaving along Rock Creek.

Another thing I liked about the expressways were the ample underpasses. In the rare few areas where the expressways traversed an urban area or even a small town, the street grid was not sacrificed to make way for the new freeway. In Luxembourg, I noticed that it was common for freeways to tunnel underneath entire towns, something probably more affordable in a country as affluent as Luxembourg. The parts that run through forest or farmland are more engaging to their surroundings, making the drive much more scenic and pleasurable than say driving I-95 between Washington and Baltimore. Often in wilderness areas, bridges of vegetation would go over the roads to allow wildlife to pass across the highway. I know these exist in the US, but they were seemingly ubiquitous in the Ardennes Forest. In addition to being functional, they ad a bit more scenery to the highway.

Expressways rarely run through cities, however. They are connected by arterials that cross the freeways outside the cities. In the center cities, there is usually little if any vehicular traffic at all. Most cities that I visited have large pedestrian-only areas, but areas that are on the street grid. In Darmstadt, the main two streets drop below the center of town and intersect underground at a stop sign, a rather exotic layout by American standards. All of this made way for various layers of pedestrian, bicycle, and transit routing, roads often sharing all four modes of transportation.

Driving in general is not as dumbed down. driving through towns or even on the expressways is not quite as intuitive as it is in America. It makes American roads seem overengineered, oversigned, and generally dumbed down for drivers. Interestingly, Germany has far lower incidence of fatalities on the road compared to the US. The entire time I was in Europe I only saw a single traffic accident, whereas it is not uncommon for me to see two while driving the six miles from my house to work here in Maryland. Anecdotal evidence that our overengineering of roads results in drivers paying less attention to what they are doing.

Another great design of European Freeways: they focus your attention at a point on the horizon. Naturally, the narrower streets, usually lined with three storey buildings, direct attention straight ahead. But the expressways were often flanked closely by trees. One Expressway in the Netherlands is lined by 100-foot tall rows of trees, almost like a grand hallway welcoming you onto the freeway. In addition to looking nicer, I believe that this focuses the eyes forward and therefore makes driving that much safer on the road.

I found getting around Germany, France, and the Low Countries to be very easy on all modes of transportation. I was quite surprised to be so taken with the highway system. More posts will come as I get settled back in to the groove here at home. Thanks again for making the last year of blogging so enjoyable.

Update From Germany

2009-05-04T14:33:00.000-04:00

I am staying in a medium-sized city of about 120,000, or about the size of Columbia, MD. Any other similarity to Columbia ends there.

The city is very ethnically diverse, with lots of Turks, Africans, Russians, Irish, Americans, and Koreans, as well as countless others. It is mostly middle to lower middle class. The city is connected to the Audobahn by a spur. No freeways run through the town, and only one runs by it, with two lanes in each direction. The width of that entire freeway is barely more than a third of the footprint of I-95 in Howard County.

There is a light rail train with a complimenting bus service, all of which lead to a rail station with IC train service, meaning if I step out of the front door of my apartment, I can walk 100 feet to a tram station and get anywhere in Europe without getting into a car, taxi, or airplane.

The entire city is also covered in bike lanes. They have their own traffic signals seperate from cars and pedestrians. Their lanes cross into pedestrian sidewalks about as often as cars have to share lanes with buses and streetcars, which isn't much.

There is very little crime, people walk around care free and confident virtually all parts of the city at all times of day.

My (American government) job requires me to drive daily. The city streets are 2 meters (about six and a half feet) wide and rarely more than one or two lanes in each direction, if that. The automiobiles of residents are parked in courtyards. At least half the street parking is metered. Iäd say I've never had trouble finding aparking space in town, but I have never driven anywhere in town because I generally walk when I am not working.

Since I have landed in Europe, I have yet to see a single car accident, and I have driven over 1000km in two different countries. I have also not been in a single traffic jam that was not construction related.

The down is distinctly separated from other towns by large tracts of farms and forests. Virtually all buildings are

The city center is closed to automobiles except taxis. It is about a square mile of apartments above shops and businesses, including a shopping mall that is two blocks from the nearest legal parking space.

Best of all, I have been in my apartment for only two weeks and I am on a first name basis with my grocer, the proprietors of four restaurants, the staff at two bars, three of my neighbors, and the gentlemen who run this internet cafe. By contrast, I have lived in Laurel for five years and the only people who know my name are three of my neighbors and my barber.

I am not exactly staing in Mayberry, either. This is a very blue collar industrial town in Central Europe. There are no skyscrapers, no large business headquarters, and no attractions you are likely to find in most guidebooks. If anything, this is a sub-standard European town by comparison to the others I have visited. But the quality of life here is phenomenal.

This experience really makes me stop and wonder what places like Columbia, MD are doing wrong. Columbia certainly boasts a wealthier population that here. But this town has more parkland, more greenspace within walking distance, less traffic, less crime, and a community of people that actually know each other.

This would be an interesting litmus test for many of us: How many people in walking distance to your house know your name? For me, 4 in Laurel, and 14 here. That is the difference of living in a community focused on itself.

Imagine Europe

2009-04-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be in Europe on official business for the next two months. Getting ready for this trip has contributed to light posting lately, but it is likely that I won't be doing much posting at all until June. If I can, I'll try and sneak a post or two in while I'm over there.

I'm currently reading James Howard Kuntsler's Geography of Nowhere, and I'm sure that it will help appreciate the differences between American and European cities, architecture, and transportation. I'm looking forward to sharing when I return sometime in June.

In the mean time, take advantage of the DC spring weather, support your local sports teams and concert venues, and get to know the city!

Imagine Grosvenor

2009-04-07T23:39:00.000-04:00

I have often heard the question as to why Montgomery County's western Red Line has not enjoyed the vibrant urbanism or Arlington's Orange Line. There are several reasons for this, of course. The Red Line's stations are much further apart and further from the downtown core. MD-355 does not have the supporting road network that Wilson Boulevard enjoys. MD-355 also has several obstacles to maintaining urban continuity, such as the Georgetown Preparatory School campus, The Naval Medical Center, Rock Creek Park, and the Beltway.

But the constant comparisons between the two areas have perhaps driven Montgomery County to try to live up to the Orange Line. The White Flint plan has been taking effect in recent months, complimenting the 2007 completion of Rockville Town Square. But these two developments are islandscompared to the continuous row of urbanism in Arlington. It will be difficult to fill in the gaps, as the Red Line's stations are further apart, but it can be done.

Which brings me to Grosvenor, at the southern end or Rockville Pike. It is an important station, as it is the western terminus for half of the Red Line's rush hour trains, and thus recieves more service than any station to the north. It serves Strathmore Hall, MoCo's prominent center for the performing arts. But don't expect to get dinner nearby the idyllic odieum, there is nowhere to eat in walking distance. In fact, apart from some town houses, some apartments that would make LeCorbusier hot and bothered, and a couple of huge private school campuses, there isn't much near Grosvenor station. There is, however, ample space.

The Georgetown Prep campus (one of the oldest in America) is a solid obstacle against integrating TOD around Grosvenor to the planned urban fabric of White Flint, but it could grow them much closer together, and make Grosvenor a bit more of a desination stop. Surface parking replaced with parking garages, a more continuous street grid, and a couple bistros near Strathmore Hall might make this possible. It could also make the Metro station more accessible to the nearby Garret Park community. As it stands, several nearby amenities in walking distance are inacessible to pedestrians because of the overt suburban design of the area. not the least of these amenities are the two high schools practically touching the station.

Here is what I imagine for a road network that would support this sort of development in Grosvenor:

View Larger Map

Unfortunately, I presume that the station's location at a major interstate junction (I-270 and I-495) would be expected to have enormous parking requirements. Given the affluence of the area, however, I wonder if this parking could be consolidated into garages so that a walkable development could emerge. I also fear that this would be nearly impossible to accomplish without the destruction of a lot of housing stock, primarily because of the wasteful land use of the existing developments, which are laid out with the towers-in-the-park mindset. Unfortunately, the "park" in towers in the park is usually automobile parking.

Grosvenor will probably never see anything quite this urban, but hopefully someone will invest in the ample dead space, taking advantage of the Metro station and performing arts center. Perhaps a high end restaurant could become the hot reservation on performance night. Until then, Grosvenor will just be a questionably placed station at the junction of Rockville Pike, the 270 Spur, and the Beltway, not a destination station.

Stupid Growth: Palisades

2009-04-03T09:36:00.000-04:00

Early this week, DC Mud profiled a new development finally going for sale in Northwest. The post captures the "McMansion" feel of the development, which is at the intersection of Foxhall and W, in the shadow of Georgetown University. This development has quick access to Georgetown, Rosslyn, and Downtown. It is even a quick drive to the Beltway. This was the best and most lucrative use of land these developers could come up with?

Worse yet, this sets a dismal precedent for the rest of the city. Ryan Avent confronts the absurd 46 4500-to-9000 sqf houses by comparing this development with the District's requests for the Brookland neighborhood to embrace greater density while just across town prime land is being wasted in such a gaudy manner (or should I say gaudy manors?)

There are differneces between the two areas, of course. Most notably, Brookland is next to a Metro station and Palisades is not. However, to borrow a phrase from my fellow GGW contributor, areas like these in the favored quarter ought to be increasing in density, if not socio-economic diversity. Neighborhoods like Palisades, Berkley, Foxhall, Colonial Hill, Wesley Heights, American University Park, and Kent ought not be held to a different standard than neighborhoods like Brookland, Anacostia, SW Waterfront, or Petworth. As these areas grow, the absorb more density. Palisades, however, appears to be immune for some reason.

Don't get me wrong, I know Washington, DC is a capital city, the most important in the world. Foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, policy makers, and other VIP's need to live here, often with greater requirements for security than most people. However, high end neighborhoods like Cleveland Park, Kalorama, Woodley Park, and Dupont Circle house many such VIP's in a form much more conducive to the city's urban fabric. The book Suburban Nation argues that more traditionally designed neighborhoods usually offer better security due to the more prevalent street activity and human presence. Tucked-away low-density developments like this one offer less "eyes on the street", provide more empty spaces and hiding places, and tend to have much longer emergency response times.

We don't need enormous high rises popping up over Whitehaven Parkway, but 17,000 sqf properties with enormous "estate homes" will ultimately only serve to partition Palisades from the rest of the city socially and politically. The wealthy and the privileged certainly have a right to live in higher quality housing stock, but in an urban setting, that sort of development ought to be constructed practicing more responsible land use.

A Big Box Tale

2009-03-16T09:46:00.000-04:00

The massive parking lot of the College Park Ikea. Photo from Flickr by techno theory

When I moved into Laurel in late 2003, it seemed as if the city's primary industry was furniture sales. I found the jewel of the bunch, Carolina Furniture. I purchased the bulk of the furniture for my hew house at Carolina Furniture, then located on the corner of Main Street and Rt. 1. It was a small business, but had a very helpful staff and one of the best selections I have ever come across, especially impressive considering the modest size of the store. I loved it. I bought a couch and a love seat for half the price of what the Laurel Marlo (prominently located at Rt. 1 and Contee Road) was offering me for just the couch!

Then came the College Park Ikea. I'll admit, as far as big box stores go, I don't mind Ikea too much. But the College Park location was devastating to local businesses.

Carolina Furniture was the first to go. First it moved to an obviously cheaper site in an industrial park off Bowie Road. By early 2006, it had closed up shop. Galaxy Furniture, located on the site where Burtonsville's Dutch Country Farmers' Market was scheduled to move, fell shortly after. Another mile down Rt. 198 was Regency, a huge warehouse-like store located in a strip mall next to a Target. It closed up shop shortly after. Empire Furniture in Laurel Mall went next, followed by another smaller store that briefly opened in the mall. The tiny family-owned shop across from Galaxy closed just a few months ago. Several others have closed throughout the years in the industrial parks between Rt. 1 and the train tracks. Even the Peir One has closed its doors

Currently, Bargain Furniture is going out of business. This store sold scratched or irregular new furniture at a huge discount, and they offered delivery service only on a few select items. I thought this place would never close. It was always crowded with people looking for a deal on another store's rejected items. But today it is liquidating its stock, as you'll clearly see if you drive through the intersection of 197 and 198.

All in all, at least 9 furniture places have closed in Laurel in the last three years. The only furniture place left in Laurel is mega-chain Marlo, the only store in Laurel I've never recommended because of the poor service I recieved there when purchasing my furniture. All of them were either independent or small chains. I'm sure our recession has played a large part in shutting down these stores, but I can't help but think there were almost a dozen furniture stores before Ikea and now Laurel is down to one or two.

Ikea's iconic 200 foot sign visible from the Beltway for a mile in either direction draws people in to its acres and acres of parking. While the upper level features furniture, the lower level has all kinds of housewares, much like your average Wal-Mart (though of much better quality, generally). The store even features a Swedish cafeteria and a child day-care center. The furniture, however, is do-it-yourself. It is difficult at Ikea to find the country-style furniture I prefer. All the furniture is self-assembled. And no matter how friendly and courteous the staff at the store may be (they tend to be rather hard to pin down), you are one of thousands of shoppers. If you don't buy it, the next person will.

When I bought my living room and dining room sets at Carolina Furniture, everything was delivered and (if needed) assembled at my house at no extra charge. A year later, I took some Army buddies there who had just been stationed at Fort Meade. The sales rep recognized me immediately, even remembering my name and what I had bought. But in Laurel, it appears, those days are long gone. If I want to buy furniture locally, I have to stand in a long line at Ikea or get ripped off by Marlo.

Light Posting Lately; The Metro Vision Update

2009-03-12T20:11:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the light posting lately. I have been working a recession-induced second job, and much of my transit-nerd time has been devoted to poking around in Google Earth tweaking my Mass Transit Vision. I don't have much graphic design experience (read: I have none) and I'm slowly and painfully trying to learn how to use Inkscape, so it will be a while before I can post. it.

Shown right: a very early concept sketch.

Since I have gotten quite a few inquiries on this project, I thought I'd share some information. First of all, it won't be something we're likely to see in my grand-children's lifetime. It would probably cost a trillion or more to construct, and it would have far more capacity than this area could support with its current infrastructure and population. I haven't measured its current length, but I know it would be over 500 miles of track. I'll even go so far as to say it would be irresponsible to even study may of the proposed changes.

The concept I'm working has a core system with thirteen (!) lines, none of which share any track (i.e., separated the Green, Yellow, Blue, Orange and Silver lines from each other) so as to maximize capacity. There are six heavy rail and seven light rail/street car lines, a couple of the latter are spurred at the ends. I extended every single end of every existing and planned heavy rail line, though mostly only a station or two here and there. There are also several infill stations, particularly on the new separated routes. The light rails incorporate plans like the Anacostia Light Rail, the Columbia Pike transitways (both in VA and in MD), The Purple Line, and other DC streetcar proposals. There are two Purple Lines, in fact, both of which loop around the city (the Silver Spring-New Carrolton is the outer line). Much of it is completely unfeasible because it would require a fantastic amount of expensive tunnelling, right-of-way acquisition, engineering, and construction.

I expanded on MARC and VRE (but removed the Camden Line) and removed some of the smaller stations, treating them more like an integrated express service. Most of the smaller stops (like Riverdale and Clifton) were replaces with light rail stops. I put four Metro Lines at Union Station and likewise concentrated rail traffic to other MARC/VRE nodes like Silver Spring, L'Enfant Plaza, Rockville, New Carrollton, and King Street to emphasize their role as express lines.

Shown right: a later concept.

Also included in this plan are five supplemental services. In Maryland, the Corridor Cities Transitway, a series of light rail or BRT lines through Montgomery County (which I called Ride-On) and a light rail loop through Southern Maryland. In Virginia, I threw in a series of light rail/BRT lines for Fairfax and Prince William Counties, as well as an Aerotram along the "Techway" corridor from Shady Grove in Rockville to Dulles International Airport.

I have always felt like others' transit visions lack service in Prince Georges County and River East, so there is a concentration in those areas. I placed transit stops in close-in traditionally planned communities like Hyattsville's Arts District, Takoma Park, Old Town, and other places.

Denser areas that are poorly planned (Seven Corners, Tysons, Eastern MoCo, etc.) received lots of transit assuming they would be redeveloped into more transit oriented areas. Parts of the system are very far flung (Columbia, Fort Washington, South Riding, Woodbridge, Gaithersburg, Odenton, etc.)

I don't know if I'll include them initially, but I also have an integrated plan for Frederick, Annapolis, Baltimore, and the Atlantic Beaches.

Shown right: the current iteration of the project.

Basically, my goal was to visualize a Washington Metropolitan area that could support a population at least twice its current size, while allowing most of the city and closer-in region to comfortably live without a car. Hence its infeasibility. It has been a fun and interesting project so far, even if it has been overkill.

If anyone has the free time to teach me Inkscape, I would be much obliged, and would gladly provide a meal in exchange. Sadly I lack the graphic skills of the many other transit visions that have inspired me to embark on this project.

So please bear with me as I work my two jobs and attempt to get this into a nice readable map for everyone.

Map Nerdiness

2009-03-12T04:32:00.000-04:00

Serious nerds only. Several of my friends have enjoyed this.

Repurposing Urban Freeways

2009-03-08T19:01:00.000-04:00

I have stated several times here that I believe urban freeways have their place in most cities, particularly in cities with lots of industrial and military activity. These are the purposes for which a federal highway system was created.

Unfortunately, these highways were not created for what they are most commonly used to accomplish: commuting. Most traffic congestion is caused by commuting. It occurs in the morning and evening rush hours. It costs trillions in wasted fuel, wasted time, and wasted environment.

What if commuting on highways was illegal?

This is a highly unlikely and rather radical approach to solve widescale congestion problems, and I have no reason to think it would take anywhere in the US right now. But what if urban freeways (like 295 and 395, for instance) were reserved only for transit, industrial (trucks), military, and emergency vehicles? Naturally this would have to come with an unrealistically large scale repurposing of our suburbs, which is why it is obviously not feasible. This hypothetical line of thought could argue a couple of advantages in the case of Washington, DC.

This would mean commuters would need to find alternative means of getting to DC. This would undoubtedly result in thousands of cars being taken off the road. the lack of cars commuting into or through the city would result in less space needed for commuter parking, which could allow more parks, residences, and businesses to be constructed throughout the city. It would likely result in a massive drop in car owners. This would increase the disposable income of area residents who no longer have need to own a car. (I have stated before that for me, this would be about 20% of my take home income). That would result in a higher tax base for the city, making it easier to invest in an expanded mass transit system, perpetuating a cycle that would reverse the negative effects of sprawl.

Industrial and military vehicles would be less likely to use the surface streets. In fact, they could even be outlawed from using surface streets, apart from approaches to the highways. though it might inconvenience some industrial traffic, I imagine that having an uncongested freeway would be an overall benefit for them. I am vehemently opposed to having military traffic running down city streets. To me this is something that they do in Tehran and Pyongyang, not Washington, DC.

Naturally, the drop in gas usage, exhaust, and vehicle miles traveled will be good for our environment. One could even go so far as to suggest that there would be an overall increase in walking, which could lead to better health. But more directly, the decrease in CO2 emissions will have an obvious and immediate impact on air quality.

Freeways are valuable tools of industry in America. They literally shaped the landscape and united the country in a way the world had never seen before. But they have been rendered near useless in much of the country becasue we allow them to be used for purposes which they were not originally intended. Perhaps rethinking the modality of freeways on some level could benefit a the local, municipal, regional, and national landscapes.

Highway Prejudice

2009-02-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

I was reading this WaPo Roads and Rails Q&A session and I noticed a disturbingly high number of people commenting that HOV lanes and congestion pricing was unconstitutional because they discriminate against people who can't find another person to ride with them, and it is unconstitutional to discriminate on public infrastructure.

Oh Really?

I can't take my bike on the Shirley Highway. Are they discriminating against me? I can't even take a mo-ped out there. I sure as hell can't walk along the shoulder. You can't take your car on the Metro. Is that discrimination? Is it discriminatory for trail users to yeild to cars when they cross roads? I'd like them to tell me where controlled usage becomes discrimination, and why.

Now, I'm not endorsing HOV and HOT lanes (and certainly not any new construction of such roads) as any sort of a cure for our traffic problems here in Washington. But this is a very poignant reminder of how entitled we believe are cars should be.

Imagine Prince George's Plaza

2009-02-26T22:05:00.000-05:00

Though nowhere near up to par with Arlington's Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, Old Town Alexandria, or the central business districts of Bethesda and Silver Spring, Prince George's Plaza might be the best example of transit-oriented development in Prince George's County. It combines a Metro station with heavy retail, medium density housing, and a walkable street grid. Unfortunately, those things are not integrated with each other.

I love the City of Hyattsville. As soon as I can afford to do so, I plan on moving there. It has a ton of potential. Potential, however, means room for improvement.

Anecdotally, I was told by a Hyattsville Police officer that the city plans to annex and redevelop the suburban style medium-density apartment complexes north and west of the mall. In this same conversation, the officer, who was advising me on where the city experienced most crime, cited garden style apartment complexes like these (like Kirkwood near West Hyattsville station or the apartments on the southwest corner of University and Adelphi) as the worst offenders. I can only assume the isolation of the buildings behind PG Plaza makes them ideal places to engage in criminal activity.

Generally, I don't like the idea of putting heavy transit near a mall. Malls are inherently car-oriented, and over the past decade they have experienced severe decline in image and practicality. The Mall at Prince George's (which I will forever call PG Plaza despite its new name and this newfangled civic movement against saying "PG" in favor of "Prince George's") might be able to take advantage of the Metro station across the street.

Many of the larger development projects in Prince George's County have been greenfield developments outside the Beltway and far from transit taking on a semi-new urbanist format, but are far from transit and isolated from the better urban design closer in. Bowie Town Center and National Harbor are good yardsticks for what we can expect out of planned developments at Brandywine, Westphalia(pdf), Konterra, and Woodmore Town Center (pdf): far from existing transit, isolated pockets of walkable mixed use surrounded by parking. PG Plaza, if redeveloped, can present a retail design similar to that of Bowie Town Center with the added advantage of being across the street from a Metro station in an area that can easily be reticulated into the surrounding street grid.

Remove the roof, which PG Plaza didn't always have anyway, and lay down the grid. I give you new Hyattsville:

View Larger Map

With this, perhaps more pedestrian friendly changes will occur as well. East-West Highway has three shockingly bad design flaws on that stretch. First, the median fences. Anytime a street has a fenced median to discourage jaywalking, it's a sure sign of poor design. Pedestrian traffic is like water flow. It will find the path of least resistance from origin to destination, and will creatively by-pass obstacles. Instead of trying to force pedestrians to go out of their way to cross East-West, embrace the foot traffic with more crossings, traffic signals, and a parallel street to spread out the traffic.

Next, the pedestrian bridge from the Metro station to the mall parking lot has to go. Parking ought to be consolidated into a garage, and the street frontage should be developed. pedestrian bridges over suburban arteries like this are not functional, they encourage speeding on the road, they kills street life, and they are unbearably tacky. Perhaps if the street frontage has an arcade with an upper level of shops and whatnot, it could stay, but generally it looks horrible and it proves to be cumbersome for access to the Metro station.

Third, rename the damn road. East-West Highway (MD route 410) is a title unbecoming for a road passing through the CBD's of Bethesda, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and Hyattsville. In Takoma Park, 410 is actually called Ethan Allen Avenue. Perhaps Hyattsville could follow suit and rename it something like "John Clark Hyatt Avenue" after the town's founder. Apt, historical, and far less generic.

Hyattsville is evolving as a city. It has come a very, very long way in the last decade, and it continues to grow and improve. PG Plaza will undoubtedly emerge as a hot spot for good urbanism. Eyesores like the pedestrian bridge will be replaced by more of what we're seeing in the nearby Hyattsville Arts District, and instead of an island of good urbanism, it will grow into the fabric of the surrounding areas.

Lady Bird Johnson Park

2009-02-21T16:08:00.000-05:00

I have always thought Lady Bird Johnson Park was a little strange. Though closer to the Virginia shore, this island lies completely within the District, much like Roosevelt Island to the northwest. Although, unlike Roosevelt, this island is overrun with freeway spaghetti, most of it serving the Commonwealth and not the District. Also, this area is served by a Metro station, Arlington Cemetery. There is no residential, commercial, office, or industrial construction on the island, save a small marina on the south end. There are no park facilities. The entire area just seems like a serene setting to plop down a bunch of (confusing) highways.

Considering Lady Bird Johnson's efforts to beautify our nation's freeways, I suppose this is somewhat fitting (and probably intentional). though her Highway Beautification Act pertained mostly to interstates and ironically none of the highways on her island are interstates. Still, it seems like such a waste of a land. Why call it a "park" if there are no park facilities? It's not exactly the kind of place one can picnic or hike.

I would like to see the highway lanes consolidated, perhaps with some modest low rise apartments on the north side of the island oriented to the Metro station. And open the island up with some trails and waterside park facilities. Right now, the District seems to be allowing this land to be utilized only by the commuters in Arlington County.

Imagine West Hyattsville

2009-02-12T22:25:00.000-05:00

West Hyattsville Metro Station is one of the most underutilized stations on the Metro system, standing out even in TOD-beleaguered Prince George's County. It stands seemingly in a large field, discouraging the station's use as anything but a commuter stop. The County has plans (pdf) for vitalizing the area around the station, but I thought I might take a crack at it myself with some street connectivity.

View Larger Map

Queens Chapel Town Center has a great deal of potential to anchor a strong retail district. The area, at the intersection of Chillum, Mount Rainier, and Hyattsville, has the population to support retail progress. The success of the nearby Hyattsville Arts District has changed the image of the area. West Hyattsville, connected to the Arts District by a traditional suburban street grid, is poised to parlay the success of one of Prince George's County's most popular real estate ventures into success of its own. Only the presence of a Metro station,

The Northwest Branch runs just to the south of the station, but instead of serving as a barrier, I believe this watercourse can be embraced by development with small waterside paths. I included several new bridges over it, connecting potential new developments to the Metro station. The key element, in this case, is adding parallel roads. As I have stated time and time again (as with many before me), a street grid reduces traffic, lessens vehicle miles traffic, and eliminates car trips as the area becomes more walkable. Hopefully a developer with the vision will take advantage of the opportunity, and hopefully the County won't block any progressive efforts. Hyattsville could become the new Bethesda, it just takes some progressive leadership to make it happen.

Free Gas at My Grocery Store?

2009-02-02T13:53:00.000-05:00

This past Saturday, I was shopping at the Safeway in Laurel Lakes. Upon checkout, I received a surprise: $9 worth of gas at any BP station, a figure based on the amount of money I had spent on groceries over my last few trips. I was completely unaware of this program until the cashier handed me a gift card. The program gives $1.50 in gas for every $100 spent at Safeway. For me, 9 bucks is about a third of a tank, which will get me to and from work for an entire week.

This is a powerful sentiment presented by Safeway. To me, this implies that Safeway's business model assumes that consumers MUST use an automobile (and a gasoline powered one, at that) to use their stores, and therefore ought to subsidize automobiles. Personally, I would prefer imrpved crosswalks on Rt. 1 and better passage through the monstrous parking lot in front of Laurel Lakes Shopping Center. I would never drive to Safeway again. This furthers the notion that large grocery store chains ignore walkable urbanism in their business models despite its success in denser areas. In less dense places like Laurel, I'd like to see the two concepts at least coexist.

This has other implications. Since such grocery stores tend to be far fewer in areas with lower average incomes, this implies that a gas subsidy is the best way to get less fortunate people to the grocery store. In the automobile paradigm, this is somewhat of a charitable act on Safeway's part. However, not owning a car could save working class individuals a very significant percentage of their monthly take-home salary (25% for me!) , a savings that would far supercede the buck and a half I save on gas every time I spend a hundred dollars at Safeway.

I don't want to demonize the automobile. I own one, I use it daily, and I enjoy the freedom that driving provides. However I live 1600 feet from the entrance of the Laurel Lakes Safeway, and the only "safe way" for me to get there is to drive. I don't want to impose any major paradigm shift on anyone, nor do I want to take away their free gas or the parking in front of the store. For this particular shopping trip (which was rather large), I probably would have used a car no matter what the pedestrian facilities were. However, the simple fact that I can't walk 1600 feet from the grocery store to my house without risking my life in the process is inexcusable, and I really wish my local grocery store would acknowledge that this is a problem.

Greater Greater Risk to Life and Limb

2009-01-27T23:01:00.000-05:00

Tonight I attended a a get together with several of the other writers at Greater Greater Washington, which I really enjoyed. It was my first experience meeting urban planning bloggers face to face, and a lot of thought provoking conversation ensued. Greater Greater Washington has been a great forum, and meeting the other writers it is easy to understand why. I look forward to seeing them again at the 1 Year Anniversary at RFD next week.

The downside to this meeting tonight was that it was in Penn Quarter. No, I have nothing against Penn Quarter (other than the ground-map of the World at the Navy Memorial that has a very outdated rendition of the Aral Sea), but it is quite an ordeal to get down there from Fort Meade in sleet.

On the way home from Greenbelt Metro Station at around 10 pm, I had to call 911 to report a very bad accident 7 car accident on Route 1 that looked like it had just occurred. I think a southbound snow plow side swiped a northbound minivan and a chain reaction ensued. I slowed down, made sure everyone was alright, and called 911 to report it.

Another mile or so up the road (just north of Contee Road), I got a good scare when driving up a hill I saw a Ford Explorer facing sideways and sliding right towards me. I stopped and waited for impact, but fortunately the SUV hit one of the few curbs on that stretch of Rt. 1 and came to a stop. Thank goodness.

Of course, all I could think as that truck was careening towards me was "I can't have anything happen to my car". I wouldn't be able to get to work, or anywhere else for that matter.Car culture has left me putting my property ahead of my health. But hey, I can get to work with a broken arm. I can't get to work without a car. It's too bad, because even trains slowed by the weather would be safer (and probably faster) than driving in this horrible weather.

Fortunately, That was not a problem. But tomorrow when all the tens of thousands of employees of Fort Meade drive to work, how many of them will risk a car accident? For us, we don't have any other choice. For the most part, we don't have any other way to get to work.

New on Google Maps

2009-01-24T18:03:00.000-05:00

I noticed on Friday that Google Maps has updated its imagery for Washington, DC. How did I notice? Well, this wasn't there before:

View Larger Map

Other cool areas you can check out changes:
-NoMa
-Columbia Heights
-Silver Spring

I was disappointed to see that National Harbor hasn't been updated. Post any other cool areas where you've seen a change. I love watching the city evolve over time. And we're lucky to be living in a city that's changing for the better.

Gentrification

2009-01-22T02:51:00.000-05:00

I love watching areas go from urban blight to prime real estate. 14th and U is a great example; when I was in high school, the very names of the streets carried horrible stigmas, but nowadays that corner is perhaps one of the most famous non-government areas of DC. Okay, maybe after Georgetown... but even parts Georgetown were very neglected while I was growing up.

Yes, in a perfect world, we'll all have our four story house in Kalorama right near a Metro station and some nice shops. But the fact of the matter is that the meat and potatoes of a city's population can't afford to live in such fancy digs, and it is unwise to over-gentrify a city for this reason. Plumbers, teachers, fire fighters, custodians, and other working class professionals demand more moderately priced housing.

Gentrification can be a good thing for some parts of a city. But recently I came across one very controversial blogger (warning: coarse language) from Brooklyn who is an extreme case of just howout of control gentrification can get. Gentrification causes tension between socio-economic classes, which often translates into racial tension. Even when it doesn't, it prices out workers who are vital to the day-to-day function of a city... the EMTs, bus drivers, carpenters, police officers, and mechanics. These (and countless others) are all noble professions vital to any community. It sends the very wrong kind of message when a city forces out its lower-wage residents.

But this is no reason to stop progress in working-class neighborhoods. There is a right way to fix these areas. It can be cost effective and productive for the city, and it doesn't have to include wholesale outpricing of the neighborhood's residents. One such project in Southeast (tip: River East Idealist) has shown that an area can be rehabilitated while keeping the people who brought the sense of community there. The investment in the Wheeler Terrace development was largely the product of the residents, who, faced with losing their homes to gentrification, fought to have their development refurbished instead of razed in favor of luxury condos.

Though this level of community activism is admirable, it shouldn't take this much effort for a struggling community (particularly one neglected by the city for so long) to keep their homes while the neighborhood recieves a makeover. Mixed use and mixed income ought to come with new developments, but older working-class residential developments should not be stomped out when a city gets refurbished. They ought to recieve the type of elbow grease that encourages their working class residents to want to live there, a sign that their city recognizes its need for a blue collar workforce

Who Has the Day Off?

2009-01-16T03:08:00.000-05:00

Considering the unprecedented transportation challenges that we'll experience on Tuesday, much of the region is taking the day off work. Much of the DoD at Fort Meade is not, however. My colleagues in Virginia are kind of screwed by this. I have taken the day off to guide visiting family around the event, but that's a vacation day for me.

So do you have the day off? Where do you live and work? How is your employer treating the day off? Is it for practical or patriotic reasons? Are you planning to attend the Inauguration? Share your thoughts.

How I'm Getting to the Inauguration

2009-01-13T12:34:00.000-05:00

Hopefully I'll be over my cold by then, but I do plan on attending the Inauguration, which is now only a week away. But with massive transportation issues that day and estimates as high as 5 million people coming to town, getting there seems to be a scary proposition.

I'll have two out of town visitors that I'm putting up at my home in Laurel. My usual stations of choice are Greenbelt, College Park, Cheverly, and New Carrollton. But considering that the Green and Orange Lines are located on the Beltway, I think I'm going to try a different approach.

I'll be heading to Silver Spring Metro station. Here's why: first of all, the other stations on that end of the Red Line (Forest Glen, Wheaton, and Glenmont) will certainly see a great deal of volume, but I do not believe that the gobs of out-of-towners will be flooding them the way they will at Shady Grove, New Carrollton, and Greenbelt, considering the much more "ideal" locations of those stations being at major highway junctions. Forest Glen is right off the Beltway, but it is a tiny station, and it is not marked on the Beltway the way other stations are.

Second, Silver Spring has plenty of stuff to do. If for some reason I make it down there and there is good reason not to go into the city, there are dozens of places to go and watch history unfold on TV. I plan on catching dinner there after the festivities, and showing the area off to my cousin and his friend.

Third, ample parking. As a car-oriented person, I have to take this into account. Hopefully you won't have to do so. Silver Spring has ample garages, and there ought to be enough folks getting off work to make parking there a viable option. Also, I don't believe that tour buses will be flooding this station in the same manner that they will be flooding other outer stations.

My the first reason is my primary reason. I figure people coming from points south will flood the VA stations. From the northeast, they'll all head towards Greenbelt. From the northwest, Shady Grove, and from the east, New Carrollton. Perhaps Huntington and Branch Avenue might be decent options by that logic. Does anyone else have any good plan for getting down there? Are there major flaws in my logic? How are you getting down there?

Stupid Growth: St. Elizabeths

2009-01-12T12:08:00.000-05:00

What does this look like to you:

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Does it remind you of this?

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Or this?

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Using St. Elizabeths Hospital to house the new Department of Homeland Security headquarters is a bad idea when the land would be much better suited to house a new UDC Campus.

Metro Question

2009-01-09T02:33:00.000-05:00

Can Metro run 24-7 if it is single tracked during the hours which it is otherwise closed? I'm sure many people would love 24/7 Metro, but I have been told the primary reason we cannot do this is because Metro lacks the ancillary tracks of the New York City System. Track maintenance would be impossible if the lines never closed... but if they single tracked during the overnight alternating tracks each night, would it still be possible to maintain the tracks while running trains, say every hour or so?

Another Great Metro Vision

2009-01-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

Beyond DC, GGW, and Track Twenty Nine have all done incredible visions of what Metro could look like in the future. Now Цаrьchitect has envisioned something entirely different for the Blue Line.

I highly recommend checking Цаrьchitect's map and his description of the proposal. One of these days, I promise I'll get my own out onto the internet.

Stupid Growth: Landover Metro

2009-01-06T03:14:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that PG County is lousy at developing around its Metro stations. But check this madness out by Landover Metro station on the Orange Line:

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In the bottom right (southeast) is what at first glance looks like a bunch of huge single family homes. on second glance, I'm pretty sure they are apartments. But even if they are, they are incredibly suburban considering their proximity to Landover station. And proximity is something that station has in short supply.

To the north and west, the station is bulwarked by US-50. No pedestrian facilities to serve the neighborhood a stone's throw away on Parkwood Street. Instead, you have to drive almost a mile via Landover Road and Pennsy Drive to get to the station. At that point, most people may as well drive to Stadium-Armory or Eastern Market. Even low density neighborhoods should have access to their nearby stations.

But back to that residential development on 75th Avenue... granted, I've only been to Landover station once or twice, and I've never seen this development in person. But it doesn't appear to have any safe and direct access to the Metro station a couple blocks away. The only close thing to Landover station is ample parking. And there are few places where Landover station is more convenient than New Carrollton or Cheverly, or even driving. This is not how development around stations ought to look. This is why Landover and Cheverly are among the least used stations on the Orange Line

Industrial super-blocks around Metro stations definitely need to be broken up and repurposed for mixed use. Otherwise, the incentive to use trains is diminished, which increases traffic and devalues the investment in Metro. This is an unfortunate patter on the eastern end of the Orange line. More practical development practices must be embraced at these stations, otherwise they could become a financial strain on the rest of the system, obsolete stops slowing the trip from New Carrollton to Downtown.

Imagine Seven Corners

2009-01-02T15:43:00.001-05:00

Yikes. Just the thought of an area named "Seven Corners" makes me not want to drive there. Wilson Boulevard, Roosevelt Boulevard, Arlington Boulevard, Leesburg Pike, Broad Street, Sleepy Hollow Road, and Hillwood Avenue all converge in nearly the same place at the southern tip of Falls Church. I have only driven through this area a select few times, always on weekends, and only once on purpose. It is a nightmare. No doubt that in an area named after it's intersection, the intersection would be the most dominant feature of the landscape.

Michael Perkins over at GGW suggested that I use this area to start my New Year's resolution to write more on Virginia... and it couldn't be a more desperate region for a street grid. Serving mostly strip malls and car-dependent medium-density apartments, the roads through this area operate with a series of frontage roads, bridges, and quasi-interchanges. One might argue that this area is too sparse to merit much investment in the road system. But I believe a better working street grid could reduce the painful traffic jams while at the same time accommodating pedestrians and transit, perhaps even catalyzing further growth. Here's what that part of town might look like if it had a better street grid:

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The region could start by improving pedestrian facilities from the East Falls Church Metro station, located just under a mile north of the intersection at Wilson and Roosevelt. Keeping Arlington Boulevard up to its current semi-freeway standard would be possible with lots of overpasses, but of course this would be far more costly. A sunken freeway, however, has far less impact on connectivity than an at-grade route.

Traffic will of course be relieved by the addition of new roads, guiding cars around the disastrous intersection for which the area is named. This approach is known to work better than widening roads, as it cuts down on the number of vehicle miles required for a particular car travel, reduces traffic (particularly if there is an emergency situation blocking one of the roads), and induces more pedestrian travel. The added capacity allows some reduction of automobile capacity on the existing major roads to make way for transit and/or streetscape improvements. In the end, cars, pedestrians, transit riders, residents, and business owners tend to benefit more from well connected streets. Seven Corners would no doubt benefit immediately from reduced traffic jams, before any other changes are made.

Centralized locations such as Seven Corners shouldn't be unsavory destinations because of traffic. With attractions such as the unique Eden Center, a predominantly Vietnamese shopping district on Wilson Boulevard, Seven Corners could be a great destination, not just a clogged interchange out in the burbs. I have limited experience with this location, so strongly encourage comments with suggestions or further information.

New Years Resolutions

2008-12-31T11:41:00.000-05:00

I'm making a few resolutions for 2009 to try and make it the year of the urbanist:

-I will write my congressman, senators, governor, mayor, county executive, and other government representatives more often to promote productive transportation and development projects.
-I will use Metro more when I go into the city.
-I will continue to make waves about the lack of mass transit service at my job on Fort Meade.
-I will write more, on both Imagine, DC and GreaterGreaterWashington.
-I will do everything within my power to move somewhere more transportation friendly
-I will participate in Car-Free day.
-I will shop more at locally owned businesses.
-I will show out of town friends and relatives around DC.
-I will learn my local bus system
-I will combine and reduce car trips and make sure that my car is running as clean as it possibly can.
-I will ride mass transit in other cities when I visit them.
-I will try and plan a trip using AMTRAK instead of flying or driving.
-I will write more about Virginia and other areas I don't know very well yet.
-I will seek alternative transportation modes for my neighborhood, including pedestrian and bike facilities.
-I will attend area events via Metro, including sports, concerts, and events on the Mall.
-I will take suggestions from comments on this post!

Car Oriented

2008-12-30T10:00:00.000-05:00

I chose to live close to my work at Fort Meade thinking I would drive less. I live close to the base on which I work, and since there's bubkes for transit options to the base, I figure it is best to shorten my commute. It will save money. I'll drive less.

But instead I drive more, since I can't go anywhere from my Laurel neighborhood without driving... not even the grocery store two blocks away, as no sane person would attempt to cross Route 1 while carrying something. And considering that I'm a single 29 year old with an active social life, I like to venture out of Laurel as often as possible. I have a part-time night job in Bethesda, volunteer with a youth program in Silver Spring, I have a ton of friends that live in places like Capitol Hill, Rosslyn, and Dupont, my familiy lives mostly in Silver Spring, and I like to attend sporting events in DC and Landover. All of those locations have one distinct advantage over Laurel: Metro stations.

The buses on Route 1 is painfully slow even during off-peak hours. It doesn't run past 8pm, which is generally when I get off work, and is less reliable on the weekends. Greenbelt and Cheverly Metro stations are where I usually hop on the Metro if I'm going into DC or Virginia, but even those are 15 minute drives in light traffic.

I won't shy away from the fact that I enjoy a good glass of scotch or two from time to time, but I have to plan carefully if I want to go meet friends in Bethesda, Old Town, or H Street for a couple of drinks. Fact is, 100% of drunk drivers are driving at the time. I wonder how many DUI's Metro has prevented over the years.

I try to combine trips as often as possible, but walking anywhere from my house is laborious. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood. Route 1, where every road in my neighborhood empties, has few sidewalks on my stretch and even fewer crosswalks. Most retail near me is hidden behind a sea of paking lots, including the moribund Laurel Mall, where I only shop when I am absolutely desperate (although here's a great secret: the Macy's there is always fully stocked because no one shops there).

For someone who hates paperwork as much as I do, driving is a nightmare. There is insurance, an expensive necessary evil to legally drive in most of the US. If you live anywhere near a city, the price goes up significantly. MVA (which is Marylandese for DMV) registration, tags, and drivers license are relatively cheap, but minor oversights are costly. Should insurance, tags, license, or registration lapse, there are heavy penalties. Then there is the occaisional parking ticket (I have had plenty at work when parking was particularly bad and I chanced it in a reserve space) and if you're really not paying attention, speed camera ($50 for 36 mph on Minnesota Avenue at 3 a.m. last month... I'm not complaining about speed cameras, but ouch).

The real cost of my car oriented lifestyle is huge. I make a decent living on a federal salary. I'm certainly not loaded, but I make a decent wage by most standards. My car is a modest American sedan that gets 30 mpg that I purchased used on a 5 year loan. My car payment, insurance, scheduled maintenance, and gas (to and from work ONLY, assuming $2/gal) eats up over 20% of my take home salary, which includes my federal salary, my VA disability, and my night job. I don't care how much anyone makes. 20% of any living wage is ludicrous. And that 20% doesn't include emergency repairs (like a new set of tires that wasn't covered by my insurance, $600), tickets, MVA fees, or gas to get anywhere besides work. And to add insult to injury, my tax dollars are now going to bail out the automakers. I already gave them my money when I purchased my car. Rest assured that when I purchase another one, it will not be a GM, Ford, or Chrysler.

That's 20% I can't spend on improving my house. If it comes down to it, an emergency repair on my car takes precedence over one for my house, because I can't get to work without my car. The irrational prioritization I am forced to uphold for my automobile is absurd, but it is a simple fact that most Americans take in stride. Supposedly offering the freedom of mobility, many Americans are in my position, and I consider myself a slave to my car.

Why did I take this in stride most of my life? I was raised in a car-oriented suburb in Silver Spring, a quarter mile from a Beltway exit. The only thing I could walk to from my house without a very long trek involving significant distance along a six lane highway was the community swimming pool, which of course was only open three months a year. I attended high school four miles from my house at a private school with no bus service. I would take Metrobus home from school often, however the school has since relocated far away from the a Metro station and I would not have that option today.

Furthermore, as Rob at Extraordinary Observations points out, previous generations (i.e., the parents who raised us) venerate automobiles. Cars were status symbols and not necessary evils. Where our parents dreamt of moving out to the suburbs, today's young adults are flocking back to the cities. To the Cold War generation, riding transit could be compared to people today who use Walkmans instead of iPods... it spurned progress while at the same time it was a sign of weakness. He also points out that young adults enter the work force from college with enormous debt, which most of our parents did not face. Six figure debt at age 23 is not uncommon in our society, as medical costs and especially college tuition increase have greatly outpaced income increases.

After high school I attended Montgomery College in Rockville, to which I drove, and worked at a store in Cleveland Park, to which I took Metro when feasible. After college, I joined the Army. I have repeatedly stated that it is nearly impossible to get by in the US Army without an automobile, an overpowering irony for the service that prides itself on "beating feet". So when I purchased my house five years ago, I thought I was doing the responsible thing living close to work. And perhaps, to a degree, I was. But living far from transit has cost me a great deal, even if I can't take transit to work.

Don't get me wrong, I love driving. I find it cathartic to be on an open road. For liesure, I used to drive out to northwestern Montgomery County and take in the sights. I always offer to drive on road trips. I love that I can hop in the car on a whim and go just about anywhere in America I choose. But there is a distinct difference between chosing to drive and being wholly dependent on an automobile. There is a difference between driving for leisure and driving because you are forced to drive.

Currently, the extra money that goes into driving is ironically prohibiting me from improving my location by moving somewhere more transit accessible. I probably will never give up driving, but I am committed to driving less. More importantly, I will continue to remind myself and those around me how expensive it can be when you lead a car-oriented lifestyle.

More Freeways = Worse Urbanism

2008-12-29T12:10:00.000-05:00

An ironic fact about freeways is that while they are designed to connect towns, they effectively partition them as well. A look at the south suburbs of Baltimore tell the story. The area between I-95, MD-100, and the Chesapeake Bay is criss-crossed with eight interstate-standard freeways. Interstates 95, 195, 695, 895, and 97, along with Maryland routes 10, 100, and 295.

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The area is served by MARC and the MTA Light Rail, however the stations in this area are predominantly park-and-ride. Home prices in these neighborhoods are significantly lower than in other parts of Howard and Anne Arundel Counties. And crime is not uncommon in these suburbs.

Further south, 95 and 295 cut through DC suburbs in Prince George's, but are currently only crossed by the Capital Beltway. Though this area is of similar size and similar geography, the population is much higher than northern Anne Arundel and eastern Howard counties. House prices are comparable, but they have been rising lately, particularly around the Metro stations.

I blame much of this on street connectivity. When the landscape is drawn and quartered like it has been in Baltimore's southern suburbs, it naturally has a negative effect on street connectivity. Lack of street connectivity can lead to higher incidence of traffic accidents, longer response times for emergency vehicles, and greater traffic jams.

Of course, this is a very unscientific and opinion based overview of how lots of highways can ruin an area. I'm sure there are lots of people who think Glen Burnie is a much better town than Hyattsville, so I encourage comments here.

Highways Schmighways

2008-12-27T08:58:00.000-05:00

Last night, I was the designated driver, and me and my friends wound up out in down town Bethesda past Metro's closing time. So I drove my one buddy back to Rosslyn. At his request, I took Old Georgetown Road to the Beltway, then the GW Parkway to the US50 exit to get to his place.

On a whim, I decided to take the Key Bridge to M St and then Wisconsin Avenue back towards Bethesda to see how much longer it would have been. Now mind you, this was 3 a.m., but it took 8 minutes less to shoot up Wisconsin, and that's including a stop for gas.

Just thought it was interesting.

Bus Parking for the Inauguration

2008-12-26T07:35:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post put out a map of the charter bus parking plan for Inauguration Day. 10,000 buses are expected to flood the city with tourists, and it's a good idea to have a plan to deal with them. The map states that cars parked on the designated bus parking routes will be towed after midnight on the 20th. It also indicated that no buses will be parked on residential blocks.

The plan, however, is a little vague... according to the map, the neighborhoods between P, K, 12th and 21st Streets NW appear to be fair game. Same with NoMa, Near Southeast, and all of Southwest. Are these buses just going to park on the street? Did the area residents and businesses have any chance to chime in on this? Who exactly created this plan? (The Post's graphic is sourced to D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency)

It appears that RFK's lots and perhaps the garage at Nationals Stadium will be used. This makes a lot of sense to me. But 10,000 is a lot of buses. I think if the city plans to park them on residential streets like the WaPo map suggests, the people who live and work in those neighborhoods ought to have a say.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays

2008-12-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

I wanted to wish all my readers the happiest of holiday seasons, no matter what you are celebrating. I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank the folks who inspired me to become more active in urban planning and local politics.

I was always interested in human geography and city layouts. I started drawing towns on maps at age six, and I've been a religious Sim City player most of my life (Tradopolis in Sim City 4 got up to 9 million people!) I lacked good opportunity to study urban planning during my first crack at college, and my Army career pigeon-holed me into a completely different line of work (which I greatly enjoy, but I'd rather be doing this stuff).

So let me give a couple of unsolicited plugs here.

BeyondDC- the first site I ever staggered across that got me involved.
GreaterGreaterWashington- an excellent site that covers all things planning DC
Just Up the Pike, Silver Spring Singular, and Scenic Wheaton- who write about where I grew up
Laurel Connections- who focus on my current home
Track Twenty-Nine- has some amazing transit visualizations that inspired me to start writing
Trip Within the Beltway- Without whom there would be few discussions on this site

And I encourage readers to check out any other sites I link on Imagine, DC. They are all interesting, well written sites, some updated more often than others, some quirkier than others, but all informative and enjoyable.

So whether it be Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, Yule, the Solstice, or just plain old New Years you are celebrating, I sincerely hope everyone out there has a happy one. Keep our troops overseas in mind and heart, and have a peaceful end to 2008.

Imagine Wheaton

2008-12-24T01:09:00.000-05:00

GGW's Cavan has written a couple of posts about Wheaton, a bustling suburb with an unfairly negative reputation in the heart of MoCo. Wheaton is near and dear to my heart, as I spent a lot of time there in high school. My old high school (since relocated to Olney to keep "transit people" from applying) was a quarter mile from the Metro station and the Wheaton CBD.

It's a gritty area with significant Central American cultural ties, lots of unique little shops, and, as Cavan will tell you, a schizofrenic approach to good urbanism. But I like the potential of Wheaton, it has something many inner suburbs don't enjoy when seeking to grow smarter: the framework of a good street grid. A few roadway connections here and there, and Wheaton could be the very model of transit oriented development. Okay, so maybe there are a few other things before that could be the case... but here's my vision of what Wheaton would look like if its streets were better connected:

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Blue lines are new street connections. Blue place marks are new traffic signals. Zoom in and see how my lines mesh with the road network.

Wheaton has a few other issues. It's one of the only places I've ever been where there is street parking with meters fronting free parking at a strip mall (Ennals Avenue between Grandview and Viers Mill). Crosswalks are often poorly marked. The three main roads through Wheaton (University Boulevard, Viers Mill Road, and Georgia Avenue) are 6 lane traffic nightmares with little street parking and no bus lanes. There are curb cuts for strip mall parking all over the place. And of course, there's a giant freakin' mall.

Though Wheaton has plenty of interesting and quirky independently owned shops, Just Up the Pike points out the failure of the Montgomery Cinema 'n' Drafthouse, blaming some of the above examples of bad urbanism. JUTP also points out a shooting that occured at the mall this week as being the fourth major crime at the mall since its renovation. Would removing the mall and replacing it with mixed use high density transit oriented development (and less surface parking) lower crime? I like to think so.

In the mean time, Wheaton is a guinea pig for inner suburb redevelopment. It slowly gets more walkable as it fights new fights and teaches the rest of the region the lessons we must learn to develop a better sense of place around the Beltway.

High(way) Speed Rail

2008-12-17T03:30:00.000-05:00

Beyond DC has a great post about the Department of Transportation soliciting proposals for high speed rail corridors. This is a great development, one step closer to catching up to the rest of the civilized world with a real train network.

As these corridors are planned, I really hope there is a serious effort to build the HSR lines along interstate highways. This minimizes the need for right-of-way acquisition, and it makes our interstate corridors multi-modal. I imagine in some areas it may drive up the cost of construction, but as long as we have these corridors already built and engineered for high speeds, I believe it makes the most sense to put the trains there too.

In any event, I'm very excited about the prospect of being able to hop a train to Chicago and get there in less than 20 hours. With any luck, I'll be able to do that before I retire.

The Little Freeway That Couldn't

2008-12-15T12:13:00.000-05:00

The Anacostia River could be one of the most iconic urban waterways in the US, but instead it is blockaded on both shores by freeways. DC/Interstate 295 cuts off the east bank virtually the entire length of the river in the District, and the Southeast Freeway blocks of Boathouse Row on the west bank.

One of my chief complaints about the use of land in the District of Columbia is the gross underutilization of river frontage. And something must be done to make the river more accessible. Removing the highways, however, would raise strong concerns over dumping what might otherwise be freeway through traffic onto city streets, which, as we've seen on New York Avenue between the 395 tunnel and 295, can turn a city boulevard into a traffic sewer.

Removing highways diminishes induced demand, thus reducing vehicular traffic through the area. For the most part, I don't believe this to be an excuse for the wholesale removal of all the freeways through the District. The District does not have too many highways, but rather a horribly inefficient highway system that dumps dead-end freeway traffic onto city streets. What needs to be removed are the dead end highways, and what remains should be logically and thoroughly connected to the rest of the city's highway system in a manner that minimizes the highway's physical impact on the cityscape.

Douglas Willinger of A Trip Within the Beltway would be decking over our freeways, which in theory may be the best way to diminish a highway's impact on urban landscape. The obvious downside is, of course, cost. Would it be worth it to deck over the Southeast Freeway between Barney Circle and the 11th Street Bridge? Only if the plan included extending the Southeast Freeway past Barney Circle, conducive to the original plan for freeways in the District of Columbia. That full plan, for the record, was not exactly in line with city's current movement toward smart growth (to say the least). Otherwise, we are decking over a largely useless stretch of freeway that ultimately dead ends, dumping freeway traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Another option would be one that I had suggested back over the summer, building the Barney Circle Bridge. This plan, which also called for boulevardization of part of the Anacostia Freeway, might be a good alternative, but it would be cumbersome and expensive to implement. I also foresee this plan going through but without the boulevardization of the Anacostia Freeway, which would go against the notion of making the river more accessible.

The 1.39 mile section of the Southeast Freeway east of the 11th Street Bridge (unsigned but designated Interstate 695) is six lane freeway becomes a two lane access road to RFK Stadium as it passes under Pennsylvania Avenue, and the only purpose this route currently serves is getting traffic to the Sousa Bridge. I use it regularly to get to northbound 295 when I am driving out of the city (there is currently no access from the southbound 11th Street Bridge to northbound 295). JD Land offers insight to the fate of this route. In the plan, the virtually useless ramps from the Bridge to the RFK access road will be completely removed, and that portion of freeway will be replaced by a boulevard.

What about the aforementioned problem of inefficient freeways lacking logical connectivity? Removal of this section of highway could ostensibly be completely mitigated with a couple of ramps which, in my opinion, should have been built decades ago. Ramps between the 11th Street Bridge and the northern route DC 295, along with a ramp from southbound 295 to westbound Pennsylvania Avenue would create a more functional, logical, and efficient highway network, making the undesirable section of the Southeast Freeway virtually obsolete, as it would have all the same functionality of the freeway it parallels on the east bank of the river. Below shows the three new ramps in pink, and the obsolete (ready for boulevardization) stretch of freeway in green.

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I don't have statistics, but I imagine that construction and upkeep for three new ramps would be more than offset by the economic development that highway removal could ostensibly bring to that stretch. The result: less through traffic on city streets like Pennsylvania Avenue and South Capitol Street, no induced traffic, and an overall reduction in vehicle miles traveled.

And Boathouse Row on M St. SE is now accessible to the rest of the adjacent neighborhood, right? Well, no, not exactly.

There is still another bulwark: the CSX line. Certainly, it is much easier to build an at-grade crossing for these railroad tracks which parallel the highway before going underground at the 11th Street Bridge. However the physical and psychological barrier between the river and the neighborhood will remain an impact of developing this area to its full potential as premier riverfront destination.

So is removal of this stretch of freeway worth it? Absolutely. But better connectivity between the remaining freeways is constructed and plans to remove, deck, or realign the CSX track must be devised. Removing an urban freeway is often very good for a city, but the plan must go far beyond simply the physical removal of the roadway. In Near Southeast, simply removing the highway will not be enough for the neighborhood to achieve its full urban potential.

Wish List

2008-12-13T04:19:00.000-05:00

Most people are fortunate to have birthdays far removed from Christmas. I am not one of those people. So here's what I REALLY want for my birthday, but I probably won't get it.

-A high investment light rail for the Purple Line.
-Streetcars!
-Extend the Green Line to Laurel, or better yet Fort Meade
-Drastically improve pedestrian facilities in PG County
-Removal of some of the parking lots at the Pentagon, Andrews, and Ft. Meade
-The Silver Line and associate redevelopment of Tysons Corner
-Mixed use development with mixed income housing on the power plant site in River Terrace
-Better street connectivity in Wheaton, Silver Spring, Southeast, Arlington, Fairfax, Gaithersburg, and a slew of other towns.
-A better economy so I can sell my house and move somewhere closer to decent transit
-A commuter car
-24 hour Metro, even if it was single tracked
-Some kind of Metro station in Georgetown, Adams Morgan, Laurel, National Harbor, Fairfax, Bailey's Crossroads, Seven Corners, Andrews AFB, Fort Meade, and a bunch of other places
-UDC getting a new campus at Saint Elizabeth's West and helping make them a serious university
-Removal of all reversible lanes in the DC area
-Redskins in the playoffs
-Nationally regulated coast-to-coast high speed rail
-Separated Blue Line
-A Purple line that circumnavigates the entire city
-Federal policy creating better urbanism on US military bases throughout the world
-Jeanette Sadik-Khan for Transportation Secretary
-Better urbanism for affordable housing
-More green roofs
-Smarter/more beautiful stormwater runoff management
-The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
-An overhaul of federal and state policies regarding urban planning geared toward smart growth
-Less pollution along the Anacostia watershed, and other watersheds
-Anything that will lower my BG&E bill!
-Sidewalks and crosswalks in my neighborhood, particularly on Route 1
-Legal allowance of ancillary units (granny flats) in all jurisdictions in the DC area
-Replace cloverleafs with SPUI's
-Relaxation of the height limit laws in parts of the District, particularly near Metro stations
-Better highway connectivity in the District, and removal of useless freeways like I-695
-MARC service to Ocean City
-Something, anything faster, cheaper, and with more coverage than Acela
-DC voting rights
-The ICC bike path, and a light rail along the highway while we're at it
-High speed rapid transit along US 29 between Silver Spring and Columbia
-Realization of the Baltimore Rail plan
-Fewer traffic deaths
-The Columbia Pike (VA) light rail
-Urban infill in PG County, Southeast, Northeast, and western Alexandria, among other areas
-Better DC Public Schools
-The Fillmore in Silver Spring
-Peace on earth, good will toward man

If anyone out there can facilitate any of that for me by Sunday, it'll be a happy birthday.

Banks, Banks, and More Banks

2008-12-04T00:24:00.000-05:00

There was another bank robbery in sleepy little Laurel last week. I'm starting to wonder if the rash of crimes at banks around here is due to the overwhelming number drive through bank branches that have been popping up on Route 1 the past few years.

Drive through banks are bad urbanism. They take up a great deal of space, they require curb cuts in addition to parking, and they encourage car-oriented development. Are they attracting crime as well?

Last Week's robbery occurred in the shopping center just north of the mall. A shoot out occurred. This sort of thing is starting to become commonplace.

There are five branches of Chevy Chase bank on or just off Route 1 in Laurel. Five. We're talking about a two and a half mile stretch of one road. Is this entirely necessary? Do they all need to be drive-throughs? Chevy Chase, Sandy Spring, M& T, Citibank, Sun Trust, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, Citizens, Bank of America, Navy Federal, Provident, and PNC all have drive through or strip mall branches (mostly drive through) on the ONE MILE stretch of Route 1 between Contee Road and Cherry Lane. Chevy Chase has three, all of them drive-through.

You know what most of that stretch does not have? SIDEWALKS. CROSSWALKS. I live halfway between Contee and Cherry, and I have to walk a half mile in either direction to get to a crosswalk to access the shopping center accross Route 1. But they have no problems making curb cuts for new drive through bank branches by the dozens... Perhaps because much of route 1 doesn't have curbs on that stretch. Then what happens? People like me are forced to drive a half a mile to get to the Safeway 300 yards away, creating more traffic. Thus begins the cycle, because then we need more parking, more lanes, and more drive through banks, since you can't walk anywhere.

Is this the best use of streeet frontage on the main road through the city of Laurel? Much of the route between Contee and Cherry is not in the corporate limits of the city (yet). But still, this densely populated area is horribly unsafe for the people who live, work, and shop along this route, which is rapidly getting more unsafe with each drive through bank that springs up there. It is becoming a suburban bank ghetto. Don't let this happen in your town!

Help, I'm Trapped in My Neighborhood!

2008-11-28T03:07:00.001-05:00

Looking Down Briggs Chaney From Cloverly
Originally uploaded by thecourtyard

I'm very fortunately to have my entire family nearby for the holidays. Our family has deep roots here, and my brothers and sisters have all stayed pretty close to the DC area. But they are all spread out over suburban Maryland, and they have a diverse set of problems they face getting around.

This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving with my sister and brother-in-law at their house in the Silver Spring enclave of Spencerville, a semi-rural area just west of Burtonsville in northeast Montgomery County. My brother-in-law tries to stay involved in planning issues in his area, such as the revitalization of Burtonsville, so we have plenty to talk about at these family gatherings. But this time he struck me with a problem I'd never really considered: during rush hour, he can't get out of his neighborhood.

There are two main roads cutting east to west across the area, MD-198 and Briggs Chaney Road. They are both two-lane highways with few traffic lights and horrible congestion problems. I consider them two of the primary reasons for the justification of the ICC. Along the section between New Hampshire Avenue and Old Columbia Pike, 198 has no traffic lights, a speed limit of (I'm pretty sure) 45, and virtually no pedestrian facilities. Briggs Chaney Road has a few traffic lights, but it is not much better. When these roads experience rush hour traffic, it is virtually impossible to make a right turn on to 198 from a neighborhood street, and don't even think about a left turn.

So what do they do in the exurbs when they face problems like this? Well, my brother-in-law has been attending meetings discussing the widening of 198 between New Hampshire and Old Columbia, which he agrees will be a not-so-smart idea. The state is building a freeway through the area, why the heck should the people of Spencerville have to widen their roads? Wouldn't this option encourage people to use the "rural" roads from which the ICC is supposed to be removing traffic?

He then went on to tell me about another solution, one that I rather liked: traffic circles. These have been a success a few miles away on Fairland Road. They don't induce more traffic like a widening would, and access to and from the neighborhoods would be greatly improved. It would slow traffic down, too, which would discourage using these once-country roads as short cuts between Rockville and US 29. At the very least, a traffic signal or stop sign at a few intersections would do the trick.

I don't believe this is an isolated problem. Rapidly-suburbanizing Bowie, Upper Marlboro, and Clinton all have similar road construction to the Spencerville area. Unfortunately, Prince George's County has an affinity for wider roads at the expense of smart development. Loudon County already has plenty of traffic woes, I'm sure inability to egress a neighborhood is among them in some areas. Same with Prince William. I'll bet even parts of Fairfax have some issue with this.

The fact is, our outer suburbs already utilize a disproportionate amount of government coffers with the cost of running utilities, road construction and maintenance, school busing, postal delivery, and other services that good urbanism here is just as important as it is down town. Otherwise, we face the expensive prospect of concentric rings of highways serving more of the environmentally unfriendly spread-out suburban landscape.

I hope my brother-in-law helps win the fight against road widening, and I hope he and his neighbors are successful in pushing for a smarter way to get out of their neighborhoods during rush hour. But most of all, I hope Spencerville sets a good example for Bowie, Upper Marlboro, Dale City, Ashburn, and the rest of DC's exurbs.

Casual Observation

2008-11-18T23:31:00.000-05:00

If you're taking the freeway that runs between the Douglass and Sousa Bridges, it's the Anacostia Freeway. But if you keep driving north, people will refer to what ultimately becomes the Baltimore Washington Parkway as simply "295". In Bethesda, it's Wisconsin Avenue, then it becomes Rockville Pike, but further north nobody calls it Hungerford Drive or Frederick Road... simply "355".

This has always bugged me. It seems that the further away from good urbanism you get, the more major roads are called by their route number instead of their name. I have often thought of this strange fact to be a symptom of bad urbanism. Close in freeways and arterials have common street names by which they are referred, like the Southeast Freeway, New York Avenue, Shirley Highway, and the Beltway. But sprawl areas tend to latch on to the rural custom of referring to just the route, like 198, 28, or 97, referring to the Maryland routes. But this even happens with routes that came with the sprawl, and weren't there when the areas were rural, like I-97, MD-100, and VA-28, which on large portions aren't even given another name.

Why do I think about crazy things like this? I live off of Route 1 (which fits this pattern for the most part). Even I never say "Baltimore Avenue". I have even incorrectly referred to it as Baltimore Boulevard when trying to remember the actual street name!

I wonder if encouraging colloquial street names might have a positive impact on good urbanism? If "East-West Highway" were renamed, say, Hyatt Avenue (i.e. after the founder of Hyattsville) perhaps it would have a psychological effect on what sort of growth developers would push there. East-West Highway sounds like a great place for a Wal-Mart and an office park, whereas Hyatt Avenue sounds more like sidewalk cafes and brick walk-ups. Okay, that's pushing it a bit, but I'm just trying to think outside the box here.

Traditionally, urban streets have odonyms like "Avenue" and "Street". Should we promote these in our inner suburbs over "Highway" and "Road"? I think it has the potential to add to sense of place. Anyone have thoughts on how we ought to name our streets?

I Thought Crime Took Transit?

2008-11-18T00:50:00.000-05:00

Last month, the ridiculous argument that transit brings crime into the innocent little suburbs was revisited in response to this article in Freakonomics. More recently, Just Up the Pike followed a shooting that occurred on a Silver Spring bus recently, prompting more discussion on the possibility that mass transit has an effect on crime.

I eventually had to defend this argument to a good friend of mine who happens to be a Baltimore City police officer. His anecdotal claim: the subway in Baltimore has done absolutely nothing to positively impact the safety of the surrounding areas, and if anything has made them worse.

I argue that it has more to do with the bad urbanism for which the Baltimore Metro is now notorious. I believe even bad transit can positively impact crime rates in many cases, if for no other reason than by potentially lowering the cost of living. But perhaps the fact of the presence of transit has no impact on crime whatsoever, perhaps the onus lies entirely on the good urbanism that ought to come with transit. Maybe large, spread out parking lots are what really draw crime. Many transit stations have those, and it's bad urbanism. I certainly feel much safer getting off at Gallery Place late at night versus Greenbelt for that reason.

Recently, some federal employees at Fort Meade received an email alert cautioning them to stay away from Arundel Mills Mall after dark. Think about that: stay away from the largest shopping center in Central Maryland while the holiday shopping rush looms upon us. Why? Inside Charm City points toward this Baltimore Sun article that tells of a woman and her young child being robbed at gunpoint in the parking lot. Most disturbing is the fact that police believe that this crime is unrelated to two other robberies that took place around the giant oasis of auto-oriented commerce near the MD-100 interchange with the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. I did some further pecking and found another Sun article published just Thursday. There have been five robberies in the Arundel Mills parking lot in just the last month. Concerns over the robberies were echoed on MyFoxDC.

Urbanism doesn't get much worse than at Arundel Mills:

View Larger Map

But in most of the robberies reported there, did the criminals hop on the light rail back to Baltimore city? No, they hopped into a car and then disappeared into traffic. But no one ever says "That new highway is going to bring more crime!"

Thank Your Veterans by Lobbying for Better Bases

2008-11-11T02:02:00.000-05:00

Today is Veteran's Day, and I encourage all of you to thank your veterans for serving. We live in an area rich with military tradition, and it is important to remember the millions of men and women who have served our country either voluntarily or as conscripts. They fought wars so we wouldn't have to fight them on our own soil, and they continue to serve selflessly today. No matter what your opinions on the current wars may be, I believe we should all be thankful for the soldiers we have willing to fight them.

I'll also take this opportunity to encourage lobbying the Federal Government and the Department of Defense for more economical use of their lands. As I have mentioned in the past, some of America's most deleterious use of land happens in and around military bases. Particularly in our region, places like Andrews AFB, Bolling AFB, Fort Meade, Fort Belvoir, Quantico MCB, NAS Anacostia, and of course the Pentagon have some of the most uneconomical, pollution-causing land use policies.

As I continue my fight from the inside to improve transit, pedestrian, and environmental policies on Fort Meade, I ask anyone who works at any of the other military bases to fight for them at their locations. When bases are set up in suburban-style sprawl, a great deal of the cost associated with that is passed on to the taxpayers: utilities, fuel for civil service vehicles, land acquisition, parking lots, road widening, traffic, and pollution, to name a few. The best thing we can do for our veterans is to give them better living and training facilities, help them not need to own a car, and clean up their natural environment by demanding better planning for military bases.

***

In other news, I would like to let everyone know that I am now writing semi-regularly for GreaterGreaterWashington, and a couple of my recent posts have been cross-posted there. Since I'm sure I have very few readers that don't read GGW, I'm sure you already knew that. But in case you've never read GGW, I highly recommend it as a source for information, links, and analysis about urban planning and local issues for the DC metropolitan area, and I'm grateful to be a part of it.

Rumination: 14th Street

2008-11-06T00:29:00.000-05:00

I am not a political voice. I am a 29 year old Irish-Sicilian-American mid-level federal employee with just an associates degree. I have no political background other than growing up just outside the DC line. But I feel compelled to share my experiences on election day.

Politically, I liked both candidates. I am sorry John McCain will never get to be the president. I wish he had been 8 years ago, he would have been a much better president through 9/11. And as a war vet who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think he would have caught bin Laden and I don't think Iraq would have turned out how it did. But as he gave his very inspirational concession speech, it reinforced to me that now is not his time.

I then watched Barack Obama's victory speech, and for the first time in my adult life, I felt inspired watching a leader of this nation speak. I knew I would have an easy time getting behind whoever won the presidency (after working for W for 7 years, it wouldn't be that difficult to do) but President-Elect Obama's words left me with a sense of pride in serving the country.

But what really inspired me, really got me excited, was the people in the streets at 14th and U.

Growing up, we suburban kids threw around "14th Street" as a metonym for prostitution in DC. From the '68 riots until about 6 years ago, I was very wary about that part of town, which was blighted, crime ridden, and worn down. And for a "white boy" growing up in the suburbs, it represented a horrible racial stereotype, one that many were too ignorant to see past. The scars of the '68 riots were more than abandoned storefronts and crime, there was a psychological scar that was handed down to me and my generation, remnants of a different time where people saw something different and met it with fear and hate.

In 2002, I visited the African American Civil War Memorial for the first time, and I fell in love with the life that the Green Line brought to that part of the city. It was the DC I always wanted to see, the town my parents described to me, not the city that was abandoned and stereotyped from behind picket fences.

Last night, seeing this neighborhood once destroyed by race riots as an area where all types of people gathered to celebrate the election of the United States' first African-American Commander-in-Chief was a beautiful thing. It was a microcosm for the progress that makes this country so special, and it showcased the diversity and vibrancy that ought to be found in the capital of such a great country. I have always been proud to claim DC as the city of my birth, but never as proud as I was last night. It was a good night for DC.

Election Updates (Before the Polls Open)

2008-11-04T01:22:00.001-05:00

Voting is Patriotic (USA)
Originally uploaded by farlane

This is the third presidential election I will be enjoying my constitutionally granted right to vote, And I plan to make the most of it. I encourage everyone out there to do the same, on both the local and national levels. A couple of election day-related tidbits I wanted to put out there:

- I said gas would bottom out on election day. The Exxon at Rt. 1 and Cherry Lane is at $2.13, and it's $2.09 at the BP down the road if you get a car wash. It didn't drop below $2 around here as far as I can tell, but apparently it has in other parts of the country.

-Good news for Barack fans: In the Redskins last 17 pre-presidential election games, the incumbent party shares the same fate as the Redskins. In other words, if the Redskins win, the party in office wins. If the Redskins lose, the party in office loses. The Redskins lost to the Steelers on Monday Night Football, so your forecast is full of Hope with a chance of Change.

-If you live in DC, GreaterGreaterWashington has some helpful posts on local candidates which I find relatively objective and very informative.

-Virginia is a swing state this year, so get out and vote, Old Dominion!

-I don't generally spout off political views in this forum, but I encourage everyone to vote for candidates who will ultimately give more of a voice to the residents of the District of Columbia.

Hope everyone has a fulfilling day at the ballots. I'm hoping for a smooth democratic process and looking forward to an end to campaign ads.

Are You Ready For Some Metro

2008-11-03T00:08:00.000-05:00

Monday Night Football, the NFL's major prime time network(-cum-basic-cable) broadcast has come to FedEx Field once again. Even more exciting than the normal hyperbole of MNF game is the fact that the 6-2 Redskins are playing the 5-2 Pittsburgh Steelers, a game that lots of people are actually going to care about for a change. Redskins Nation is buzzing.

If you commute on the eastern half of the Beltway, however, your afternoon drive will probably be much slower, as FedEx Field opens the lots four hours before the 9 pm kickoff and tailgaters will likely be jamming exits 15, 16, and 17 during the evening rush, as happens for every weeknight home game at FedEx Field. But Metro is pulling their weight, just like they did for the last Monday Night game at FedEx, the 2006 season opener. The system will be staying open until 1 a.m., with additional personnel at Morgan Boulevard and Largo stations.

Considering that FedEx Field opened in 1997 but Morgan Boulevard and Largo stations did not open until 2004, Metro use during mega-events at the stadium does not make headlines like Nationals Park did when it opened atop a Green Line station this spring. People took notice that Nationals games were not choking the Metro system, even when Nationals games were getting high attendance at the beginning of the season (interest naturally waned by the middle of their dismal 59-102 season).

Of course, FedEx Field has over twice the capacity of Nationals Park. Then again, FedEx Field is suburban, fed by highways, and surrounded by acres of surface parking. Where Navy Yard station is a block from Nats Park, FedEx Field lies almost a mile from Morgan Boulevard. Even if one were to envision a future Purple Line station at FedEx Field, it wouldn't be much closer, and would likely augment rather than replace Morgan Boulevard as the primary stop for the venue. In any event, an awful lot of people would have to give up driving before Metro started to have major issues on game day, even when games impacted the weekday rush hour. For now, the Blue Line is a viable alternative to driving. I'll take walking a four fifths of a mile for free from the Metro over walking two fifths of a mile from a $30 parking space. And it never hurts to take a car off the Beltway, while you're at it.

cArmy Base: Fort Meade

2008-10-31T00:34:00.000-04:00

Military bases dot the landscape all around the Capital region. This is a unique presence, as many cities in America are largely defined by the one or two military bases near their boundaries, cities like Fayetteville, NC; Pensacola, FL; Kileen, TX; Norfolk, VA; and even San Diego, CA. Washington, DC, however, is home to the entire Federal Government, so the fact of a few military bases is pocket change in comparison. among the more prominent is a WWI-era base halfway between DC and Baltimore called Fort George G. Meade.

Nestled at the northeast corner of the junction of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and MD-32, Fort Meade is by far the largest single job center in the state of Maryland and, after Downtown and Tysons Corner, the third largest in the metro area, and this does not account for National Business Park, a huge complex of government contractor buildings right across the B-W Parkway. Fort Meade is home to tens of thousands of military personnel from all five branches, plus retirees. It houses several major Army units, including the Defense Information School, Defense Courier Service, and the US Army Field Band. The Environmental Protection Agency has a large facility, and let's not forget about the National Security Agency, which housed over 30,000 jobs according to James Bamford's 2000 book Body of Secrets. No doubt that number has increased in recent years. Additionally, 5,700 jobs are being relocated to Fort Meade in the Base Relocation and Closure.

The continued growth of the base is of great concern, considering the institutional problems within the defense department when it comes to planning policy. The Pentagon, for example, sits atop two lines of Metro, yet it still has the largest surface parking lot in Arlington County. Fort Meade's total surface parking rivals (if not overtakes) FedEx Field's. This is particularly alarming considering the surface parking's negative effects on storm water runoff into the adjacent Patuxent Research Refuge (to the point where the NSA has an entire section devoted to it on its website). But the base's planning priority? Two 18 hole golf courses to "maintain soldiers' quality of life".

Surely with all these jobs, thousands of residents, and an explosion of growth in the near future, there must be some kind of transit node on the base, right? Not really.

The base is served by a single bus, a 24-seater that runs only twice in the morning and twice in the evening and serves only portions of the city of Laurel to the NSA's main gate. Various agencies on the base offer shuttles that run a few times a day from the Odenton and Savage MARC stations, which are two and five miles from the NSA main gate, respectively, and each three miles from the nearest regular base gate. It is literally illegal to walk any of those routes, as they are largely along MD-32, a freeway of interstate standards. Even servicemen living on base are likely to commute by car, as the base is so spread out that it is a long walk from any of the housing to any of the jobs on post, including almost all of the shopping and recreation amenities.

The first thing I did when I got stationed at Fort Meade? Buy a car. Sure, I wanted a car to go home and visit my family regularly. But I would not have been able to attend my morning physical training without a car. And this was when I lived in the battalion barracks!

So what do you care about a base 20 miles outside of DC?

Consider that a traffic nightmare reaching the base would have a major impact on transportation between Baltimore and Washington. The economic impacts of the resulting disconnect between the two cities could be drastic. Ryan Avent considered the positive impacts that a high speed rail between DC and Baltimore would provide. clogging the highways between the two cities would likely have the opposite effect.

I have often considered Fort Meade an ideal place for the Baltimore and Washington rail systems to meet. I know many detractors consider it wasteful to run the system all the way out to Fort Meade. But smaller jobs centers in Chantilly and Reston, similarly unserved by transit currently will be getting Silver Line service within a decade. And transportation implications in northwestern Fairfax County do not affect passage between two major cities. Other bases involved in the BRAC, such as Andrews AFB, Bolling AFB, Fort Belvoir, and Bethesda Naval Medical Center, have all had plenty of proposals thrown around to improve transit access to the bases (in some cases, like Bolling and Bethesda Naval, increasing existing transit efficiency). Fort Meade has not, despite the unique opportunity of potentially being able to serve the base by two major cities' transit systems. To alleviate traffic at enormous (50,000+) job centers, connector shuttles from commuter rails (i.e. a necessary modal shift) just won't do the trick. Perhaps for a Metro station, the NSA could donate some of it's 900+ acres of parking.

But today, long before ground will ever be broken on any kind of rail connections, wouldn't it at LEAST be appropriate for Fort Meade to receive some sort of express bus service from Greenbelt Metro? Perhaps more regular service from towns like Columbia, Laurel, Odenton and Annapolis? A bus system for the base itself so that a young GI doesn't have to waste his first few paychecks on a new car?

It blows my mind that 18 year old privates are not allowed to drink alcohol, but they are expected to be mature enough to finance, purchase, insure, and properly operate their own heavy machinery, which they may legally store on base free of charge. Shame on Army bases across the country, but particularly Fort Meade, which has the resources nearby to outgrow ridiculous and deleterious planning policies. For a service known for moving on foot, the Army's bases certainly don't embrace any mode of transportation beyond the car.

Home Sweet Home...

2008-10-30T03:05:00.001-04:00

Laurel, MD 20707
Originally uploaded by rwilso_laurel

I bought my home in November 2003, at the very beginning of the housing bubble. I consider myself lucky. I had considered moving out and renting for a little while when I got out of the Army in 2005, and I wish I had. My house today is worth less than half what it was worth in when I got out of the Army. Thankfully, still slightly more than I paid for it.

I count my blessings that I wasn't one of the poor souls who got wrangled into a sub-prime mortgage. Considering that I was a naive 23 year old Army specialist when I purchased my house, I very well could have fallen for that. So I'm not on the streets, and I am not totally broke. I count my lucky stars for that.

But now I find myself in a different type of bad situation: one where I want to relocate, but I can't. Sure, it's an excellent time to buy. But even the most motivated seller would have a difficult time selling an old starter home behind the strip malls of Route 1. Tonight I realized just how stuck I really am, and I've all but abandoned my goal of moving by next summer, unless I hit the Powerball or find a much, much more lucrative career field.

I bought this house because of my job on Fort Meade (I'm a civilian now, I was in the Army then). I wasn't thinking that I would be here for a particularly long time, and I was hoping to relocate somewhere more convenient to Metro once I got established in my civilian position. Of course, with the minimal transit capacity on Fort Meade, living near Metro would do me little good, though I might be able to take MARC to work once in a while if I'm in a pinch. The 3 mile shuttle ride from the MARC station to my building is long, infrequent, and inconvenient, and doesn't mesh with my later work schedule, but there are days where anything is better than spending half an hour looking for parking in a lot comparable in size to the lot at FedEx Field for a space that is likely to be virtually inaccessible when I get out of work at 9pm and several of the access gates are long closed.

The parking situation alone leaves me bewildered at people who oppose having Metro come out to Fort Meade, where there are 50,000 jobs plus several thousand more across the B-W Parkway (mostly government contractors, not unlike parts of Tyson's Corner). This massive job center has virtually zero direct transit access (very few shuttles from Savage and Odenton MARC stations), and literally thousands of acres of Fort Meade have been converted to parking lots in order to maintain growth.

Alas, I'm a slave to my car, which soaks up so much of my income that I can't afford to invest the money into the house that I would like in order to sell. Not the worst problem in the world, but just another way the bad economy is hurting an average joe.

Stupid Growth: The CCC

2008-10-28T00:47:00.000-04:00

When the Arc and the Dove landed on the shores of the lower Potomac in 1634, Southern Maryland was as pristine as it had ever been. Beautiful estuaries, diverse flora and fauna,
and verdant landscapes have always highlighted the area, and they no doubt helped contribute to the success of the first European colony in Maryland.

Most recently, parts of Charles, Calvert, and Saint Mary's County have come to look more like the off-the-highway towns I came to know in the remote parts of the Midwest back in my Army days. Car culture, big boxes, and inefficient land use has taken its toll in places like Waldorf and Dunkirk, and the effects are spreading. Vital wetlands in the Potomac and Patuxent watersheds are bearing the brunt of the ecological damage.

And now a new highway is moving forward.

The Charles County Connector. Consider it the baby brother of the ICC. And thanks to the big brother, you're not likely to hear anything about it. I myself have had a difficult time finding up-to-date information on this highway, but I managed to dig up an old National Environmental Policy Act report (warning: PDF).

I first heard of this freeway through a colleague of mine who is a member of the Maryland Ornithological Society. The group is of course concerned about the outright destruction the vital wetlands of the Mattawoman Creek as well as increasing impervious surfaces that will feed polluted water into the wetlands, home to scores of species of Maryland birds. These concerns are shared directly by the Mattawoman Watershed Society, who is urging people to write the governor in opposition of the plan. In all, the four-mile, $60m highway would require the destruction of 74 acres of forest and 7.5 acres of wetland. Much of the surrounding area is slated for development upon completion of the new road.

Tim Wheeler at the Baltimore Sun's Bay and Environment blog points out that this deleterious construction would be carried out under the guise of the Maryland Smart Growth initiatives. This to me is incredibly bizarre and most frustrating. Obviously, keeping development in the northern portion of Charles County makes sense for a number of reasons. It is closer to DC, there are larger towns (Waldorf, LaPlata) that are already somewhat developed, and there are ample road and utility connections already present. But smart growth by definition would dictate that development would take place in and around those towns, not in brand new developments around them. Smart growth implies LESS use of the automobile, quite contrary to the notion of constructing a highway.

Granted I have only skimmed the NEPA report, but nowhere have I seen any plans for sidewalks, trails, or transit along the highway. Of course, If they are there, they may get canceled for "environmental impact" reasons like the ironic fate of the ICC bike trail.

For those that argue that they need the highway to alleviate traffic in the area, consider the following analogy: building highways to alleviate traffic is like scratching poison Ivy to get rid of the irritation. It will be better for a short while, but ultimately you are only spreading the problem. Perhaps before Charles County partitions and destroys its most valuable resource, denser construction and transit around Waldorf ought to be considered. That's real smart growth. And if they do, perhaps Southern Maryland will keep a bit more of its idyllic charm from getting eaten up by cul-de-sacs and parking lots. And perhaps my friend from work will be able to spot a common snipe on the Mattawoman for years to come.

Crime Rides the Train

2008-10-24T02:08:00.001-04:00

Trail from Anacostia Metro
Originally uploaded by volcrano

I have seen a million things like this since I started reading about mass transit expansion. Ryan Avent pointed me towards this article complaining about crime rising in a shopping center once a transit connection was made in East St. Louis. Mass transit will connect ruffians to places decent people like to shop. Reminds me of the Purple Line. I've established a modest readership of decent people, so I'll subdue my urge to curse like I did back in my Army days.

I'll admit, mass transit can get groups of people to visit areas they might not otherwise visit. Silver Spring is a good example, with its Red Line and ample bus line service, clientele from Northeast DC flocks to the area regularly. Are we to view this as a bad thing?

Fact of the matter is, kids from Northeast flock to down town Silver Spring because there is nothing to do in a good sized chunk of Northeast. Fortunately, Silver Spring is a very diverse area, and only a minority take issue with "bad city people" impacting their quality of life.

This xenophobic and often racist attitude is, in my opinion, largely counter productive. First of all, transit access does not increase crime. It may relocate some of it, but the fact of the matter is that right now, roads could just as easily connect criminals with whatever hangouts much easier than trains do.

Now, what do we do if crime moves into our lovely Christian suburb? You stand up to it, and make it known that it is not tolerated in Bethesda or Silver Spring or Falls Church. Then perhaps that mentality will follow the would-be thugs back to Hillcrest Heights or Deanwood, where perhaps they will be that much less tolerant of crime in their own neighborhood. Perhaps allowing people to take advantage of these wonderful amenities will inspire them to go back to Trinidad or Chillum and demand those amenities in their neighborhood, which might give the kids there something to do, and keep them off of crime. Who knows, maybe one day you'll leave your little upper-middle class bubble in Great Falls or Olney or Potomac and visit the shops at Langley Park or a new restaurant in Benning Ridge.

The change is going on right now in Anacostia, Hyattsville, and Capitol Heights.

But if we as a society are going to quarantine "undesirable" people to the "undesirable" parts of town, we are only guaranteeing that they will remain undesirable.

Besides, who gets to decide what is "undesirable"? Perhaps it is undesirable for lower income residents in parts of the region to be required to spend a good portion of their paycheck on an automobile to get to their job. Perhaps it is undesirable for University of Maryland students to trek a mile to the Metro station because the same type of xenophobia kept the train far from the campus.

I've lived in this area my entire life. Let me assure you that as recent as 20 years ago, there were parts of Georgetown that most well intentioned suburbanites wouldn't dream of visiting. While I was in high school in the mid 1990's, Columbia Heights was considered unsafe, and there were was practically nothing to do there. As recent as five years ago, the US Army banned soldiers at Fort Meade to go to Near Southeast unless they had some kind of official business there.

Without transit, U Street probably never would have recovered from the 1968 riots. NoMa would be just a bunch of empty parking lots. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor would just be a bunch of derelict garages and warehouses. Rockville Pike would look more like Route 1 in Howard County.

So to Saint Louis, I say stand up to the crime there. Force that agenda on anyone wishing to visit the nicer parts of your town. force them to bring that back to East Saint Louis, and eventually it will be a place you might want to go visit. That's what we do here in DC.

A Humble Prediction: Fill Up on Election Day

2008-10-18T11:24:00.001-04:00

Do You Remember GAS PRICES Like These?
Originally uploaded by jeffHopeck.com

Now, I want to start by declaring that I am independent of any political party at this point in my life. Four years in the Army left me with some pretty conservative values, and going to war twice for the Bush administration left me an utter hatred for the oil trade. So I don't really fit in to either major party.

However, I have been noticing a trend, and it's not as subtle as it was in 2000 or 2004. The best day to buy gas this year will be November 4th. Mark my words. In the last six weeks, the price of gas has gone down almost $1.40/gal at the Exxon near my house. I'm guessing that by election day it will be a shade under two dollars.

Granted, I don't have anything scientific to back this up, but living in Laurel I am a slave to my automobile and I am always on the lookout for the best time to fill the tank. Take that for what it's worth.

...Fight For Ol' DC

2008-10-15T02:31:00.000-04:00

Talk of bringing the Redskins back inside District lines is abound lately. Cost estimates for a domed stadium are roughly in the $1 billion range. The stadium would be designed to host all the Redskins' home games with hopes of bringing the Super Bowl or the NCAA final four to Washington, DC in the future.

Let me start off by saying that I am the biggest Redskins fan around. Apart from military a few obligations, I haven't missed watching a Redskins game since the 80's. One of my goals in life is to be well-off enough to get season tickets. I have accumulated a very extensive memorabilia collection. You get the idea.

It is important to point out that the Washington Redskins have been a part of this city since 1937. The team has set NFL attendance records eight years in a row, and it is the third most valuable sports franchise in the world. The team has sold out every home game since 1967. The NFL is by far the most prominent professional sports league today, and the Redskins are the second most valuable franchise in the league.

Which was why I was a little troubled by something I read on Richard Layman's blog regarding the notion of relocating the Redskins' stadium back into the District:

"SPENDING MONEY ON SPORTS STADIUMS IS A WASTE OF TIME....

...NOW IS THE TIME FOR LEADERSHIP.

NOT PANDERING ON RIDICULOUS STUPID THINGS LIKE GUYS RUNNING AROUND IN COLORED UNDERWEAR AND SIMILAR STUFF."
(Emphasis was in the original text)

There are an endless stream of reasons that building a new Redskins stadium in the District would be a bad idea, but I must strongly object to this language when approaching this topic. Professional sports are a very, very important cultural institutions for the cities where they exist. Sports institutions are just as large a part of the culture of a city as its cuisine, art, music, and theater. Spending money on sports venues is just as important as spending money on other cultural venues like the Kennedy Center or the Corcoran Galleries.

I was for the Verizon Center. I was for Nationals Park. and I am for DC United Stadium. But as much as I love the Redskins, I cannot foresee any parcel of land where a new Redskins stadium would be a good thing for the city. For starters, this new stadium is going to be larger than FedEx Field, the Redskins current home, a 92,000-seat stadium in Landover. It will also likely be larger than the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium, a 100,000+ monstrosity. Even the most casual football fan knows that the Redskins and the Cowboys are constantly one-upping each other.

So now we are talking about a stadium with almost DOUBLE the capacity of RFK's 57,000. RFK didn't have too much more capacity than National's Park, and Metro could handle the game day rush. I'm not so sure that this would be true if the numbers were doubled. Assuming three quarters of ticket holders (75,000) live outside the District (which I feel may be conservative, but I don't know where to get the numbers on that), that means that on game day, the population of the city swells by about one eighth. This project has absolutely no chance of getting rid of the surface parking that plagues the area, especially considering the significantly larger footprint of the stadium structure.

Football fans are going to drive because football fans are going to tailgate before and probably after the game. This is why they open up parking five hours before kickoff. When I go to a Redskins game, it usually winds up being a 10 hour ordeal. Most of the folks I know have rather elaborate tailgating set-ups. This phenomenon certainly is not unique to the Redskins. Any team, any city, any weather, there will be tailgating. And why not? At $8 a beer and $5 for a bratwurst, may as well have a party outside the stadium in the parking lot. I imagine this also has to do with the fact that venues as large as football stadiums would flood local businesses on gamedays, and therefore you don't see too many NFL stadiums surrounded by commerce like the Verizon Center. The difference between 17,000 fans and 91,000 fans is... well, do the math. Then imagine five or six times as many people cramming into RFD and Fido in Chinatown on game night.

I poked around, and I can't seem to find an inner-city NFL stadium that appears to have a positive impact on the surrounding area. Soldier Field in Chicago appeared to be among the best:

View Larger Map

Lambeau Field in Green Bay didn't appear to have any surface parking around the stadium, but Green Bay is the smallest American city with a major pro sports team. However, if it were possible to build a stadium with that small of a relative footprint, I'm all for it. Unfortunately, the majority of NFL stadiums wind up looking more like Detroit's Ford Field, vast expanses of surface parking in the downtown. Just like FedEx Field, only FedEx Field's parking is effectively in the middle of nowhere.

This raises the question, is the payoff from the stadium worth the bad urbanism? Well, Ryan Avent doesn't think it's such a good deal to begin with. This enormous chunk of land will host 10 football games a year, eight regular season and two preseason. Best case scenario, another two if my Skins suddenly make a run at the Super Bowl. There may be a Super Bowl or two held there, plus a couple of NCAA tournament games every couple of years. Let's also throw in a major concert, like the HFStival once a year. Maybe another major event or two a year that I'm not considering. My most generous estimation gives fifteen events at this venue in one year. Nationals Park hosts 81 Nats games alone every year. As for the Phone Booth, I've seen the Capitals, Wizards, Georgetown Hoyas, multiple concerts, and a three ring circus there. every other day there is a major event at that place.

GreaterGreaterWashington argues that if all this venue will bring is civic pride, $1 billion is too too costly. This place is going to be sitting vacant for 350+ days a year, occupying riverfront property and containing surface parking that will no doubt contribute to pollution in the Anacostia River. GGW points out the National Capital Framework Plan would have a much more positive economic impact on the city. I tend to agree.

Fedex Field is only 12 years old. It is currently the largest stadium in the NFL. It has sufficient parking, it is convenient to highways, it is served by Morgan Boulevard Metro station, and it is at a location close in and relevant to the city. It may not be inside the District, but it is at least inside the Beltway. As I mentioned in the post linked above, the stadium (and the Metro station, for that matter) have not led to any fantastic economic development in Landover, why on earth would it lead to such progress in East End? RFK Stadium never did.

So here it is, coming out of the mouth of the most die-hard Redskins fan on earth: There is no place for a new stadium in the District of Columbia. Perhaps an adjacent site in Landover or elsewhere in Pringe George's County (hopefully a little more convenient to Metro), maybe something in Virginia along the Silver Line, but certainly not anywhere in DC. I'd love to see this town host a Super Bowl. But not at the expense of acres of some of the city's most valuable real estate.

PS- if you're at the game on Sunday, I will be tailgating in Green Lot F60. Look for the eccentric guy with the knit cap with the ball on top.

Fairfax County In the Red

2008-10-14T22:42:00.000-04:00

58.2 million dollars is the total. Huge cuts are being made. Huge budget cuts are being made. Plummeting home values are exacerbating the problem by severely reducing the county's tax base. It's a scary prospect. WTOP reported that the school system is making drastic cuts. NBC's 11 o'clock news said that the county is going to nix new vehicles for county fire, police, and ambulance services.

Fairfax County is one of the wealthiest jurisdictions in the United States.

Something that draws me to the study of urban planning is the way the landscape can affect every other facet of the human existence. I wonder how much more stable property values would be if Tysons Corner already had its master plan realized. I wonder how much cheaper emergency services would be if the county was organized into concise, navigable, interconnected neighborhoods. I wonder how much extra money the average Fairfax resident would have if they didn't need to own a car to make their ends meet.

I will not claim to have anything beyond a very rudimentary rudimentary understanding of economics, nor have I ever lived in Fairfax County, but hearing news like this is somewhat disconcerting, particularly when I find myself being hit by uncertain financial times. I see my state burning money on infrastructural projects that will further encourage a region of people to accept poor choices in land use as the status quo.

Help a Fledgeling Blogger + Morgan Boulevard

2008-10-10T04:44:00.000-04:00

I always appreciate the input of all my readers, especially the ones who disagree with me. It makes this project a little more interesting, and it allows me to experiment with some new ideas that might otherwise go unsaid. So I appreciate everyone who (respectfully) shares their opinion, whether they agree with me or disagree.

I have had an interest in urban planning since before I knew what it was. I used to draw maps of neighborhoods when I was a kid as young as six. Unfortunately, I never found the field of study until after I'd already settled into another career. Now I'm trying to position myself for a career switch, so of course I am using Imagine, DC to help me figure out where my interests lie.

Unfortunately, I'm a relative newcomer to blogspot, and I'm having trouble with a few things... my captions, particularly on Flickr pictures (you know, the part where I give credit to the photographer?) keep disappearing once I post the blog. Anyone know how to fix that?

***

So this weekend I had my first experience with Morgan Boulevard Metro Station on the Blue Line. Normally, I'm a tailgater, but this weekend I didn't have a parking pass to the Redskins-Rams (a very frustrating loss, unfortunately) game so I decided to try Metroing it with my friend Walter. Our jumping point was Takoma, a ten minute walk from Walter's house. The ride is about a 45 minute trip with one transfer at Metro Center.

Frankly, I was a little disappointed at how few Redskins fans take the Metro, but I have a couple of guesses as to why. For starters, it is almost a mile walk down Summerfield/Garrett A. Morgan Boulevard. The sidewalks weren't exactly designed to usher tens of thousands of people down to the stadium. The road is fronted by townhouses in a remarkably car-oriented community with no visible retail, astonishingly poor use of areas sitting atop a Metro Station. For Prince George's County, however, it is not nearly as depressing as many other stations (including the stop before it, Seat Pleasant, which is completely surrounded by single family houses).

Next, it is a bit strange walking down a very suburban road through dozens of houses, particularly on the walk back when the stadium is not on the horizon. I felt like I was meandering aimlessly through some distant suburb, not walking between a 94,000 seat stadium and a high speed transit station. I can imagine how that might deter the average football fan from making the walk. Perhaps this is why few other events are held at the venue throughout the year.

At the end of the day, however, I am astonished that more people don't take Metro to the games. With parking passes STARTING at $25, plus time spent in traffic, the casual fan really ought to consider huffing it a mile from Morgan Boulevard. Unfortunately, tailgaters will always have to drive.

Incorporated

2008-10-10T03:43:00.001-04:00

City of Hyattsville MD Sign
Originally uploaded by Mr. T in DC

As a Prince George's County resident, I tend to focus my posts more on this area not only because it directly affects me, but also because I feel that it is widely overlooked on issues of urban development and sprawl prevention. This is all too common in Prince George's County... Someone gets struck by a car going at a high speed while crossing a street designed to serve cars and not pedestrians. My last post alarmed me when I saw how many roads are becoming freeways thanks to superfluous interchanges here in my home of Prince George's County. It is horrifying.

I have noted that incorporated towns in Prince George's County seem to be significantly more immune to this "freewayification". Unincorporated areas like Largo, Beltsville, and Greater Upper Marlboro seem to get the brunt of the poorly implemented car-oriented development. Certainly there are may be other factors, but perhaps an incorporated town with direct, small scale representation is less likely to be tolerant of a lack of a sense of place in the town.

Baltimore Inner Space posted this piece (via GGW) on Owings Mills, and its egregious display of poor urbanism, highlighted by a fence and 'No Trespassing' signs that keep mall patrons from accessing the Metro station even though the two are adjacent. Owings Mills, like every other town in Baltimore and Howard counties, is unincorporated. There is no mayor or council to petition against such poor urbanism. residents of the Owings Mills area are at the mercy of developers and a larger government that oversees the entire county of three quarters of a million people. Perhaps this is why Largo looks like this and downtown Hyattsville does not, even though Largo is centrally served by Metro and Hyattsville is not. Even when Hyattsville fell into blight, its primary artery, US-1 remained a four lane road with a speed limit of 30, plentiful cross streets and traffic signals.

Beyond DC writes about Prince William County's future plans to upgrade transit and create more walkable town centers. Beyond DC is skeptical of the plan's ability to succeed, but applauds the idea of improving one of the most populous counties in Virginia. There are only four incorporated areas in Prince William; Occoquan, Quantico, Dumfries, and Haymarket (Manassas and Manassas Park are both independent cities but are completely encompassed by Prince William County). I would be interested to see the success of this plan in those areas versus unincorporated areas like Dale City and Gainesville.

Not to say unincorporated towns can't thrive with good urbanism. Silver Spring and Bethesda are prime examples of unincorporated areas that have exercised a very intelligent master plan. Both those areas are among the most popular walkable areas outside the District. Of course, those two areas are atop Metro stations and they are both adjacent to the DC line situated on prominent corridors into the city. Wheaton, while not enjoying the same level renaissance, might be a good example of an unincorporated exception. It too has a Red Line station (home to the western hemisphere's longest escalator), and has been improving steadily for about the last twenty years. I ought to know, I went to high school there.

If the Tysons Corner plan gets off the ground, that will be another unincorporated area that enjoys smart redevelopment. Of course, the sector plan for the area seems to treat the area like an incorporated town (strict boundaries and districts, guidelines and regulations specific to the area, a council to govern the plan, etc). Obviously the existing density and planned metro stations have a great deal to do with this overhaul as well.

My Prince George's County seems to have a clear dichotomy between smartly designed incorporated towns working to improve their walkability and livability and unincorporated areas that are draped with high speed roads, poor pedestrian facilities, big box stores, and a depressing lack of a sense of place. Even my neighborhood, technically outside the corporate limits of the City of Laurel, lacks the sidewalks and curbs present in the neighborhoods to the east, north, and west. Does that mean it would be smarter to incorporate more towns? Beltsville, Chillum, Langley Park, Lanham, Clinton, Suitland, Largo, Oxon Hill, and Camp Springs, should we look into incorporating them?

The mayor of (incorporated) Kensington commented on my MARC post informing me that Kensington too will be making improvements to the downtown. Does a government directly serving a smaller group of people help an area create, grow, and preserve their sense of place? Perhaps the incorporation provides more organization for the residents to vocalize their desire to improve the state of their surroundings. Whatever it is, it will likely ensure that my next house will be in an incorporated town.

Ambitious Transit Advocacy

2008-10-06T21:33:00.000-04:00

I really liked a point Ryan Avent made this week:

The point that highways are built speculatively all the time while transit is not is a very good one, and one which never fails to get my goat. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that speculative transit isn’t really about building lines into the wilderness. It’s about building lines into places people already live in order to take better advantage of valuable land there.

For instance, if we imagine a sunbelt boomtown, it’s easy to see an exurban ring road being built to accommodate “future development.” At the same time, a rail transit system through the downtown area would be nixed in a heartbeat because that area lacked an appropriate density for transit. But transportation linkages shape development whether they’re road or rail. When you fail to use the same speculative criteria for one mode that you do for another, you are making a judgment about what kind of development is appropriate. For decades, government has essentially said that in the overwhelming majority of cases, auto-oriented development is appropriate and nothing else. Considering the effects of that decision, it must be one of the most momentous government interventions of all time.

This is an excellent point, and one that ought to be further explored within the DC metropolitan region. We can build roads to support future development, but rails? Forget it. Furthering this point, Richard Layman had a good post on the sort of fundamental paradigm shifts we will to need to undergo in order to take the economic and environmental burden out of transit provision.

But if we could build rails anticipating future developments, I believe areas such as incorporated, close-in, traditionally-built suburban towns ought to be among the to speculate transit expansions. Incorporated towns because the local government may have a shorter route to approving smarter development around transit, close in so that they are relevant to the heart of the transit system, and traditionally-built neighborhoods because the open connectivity is conducive to residents reaching the transit station. Places like Hyattsville, Takoma Park, Kensington, Falls Church, and Forest Heights ought to be considered for such speculation.

I have been toying around in Google Earth trying to imagine a transit system for the DC area that would make it easy to live anywhere in the region without a car, much like Manhattan. It is probably not a very feasible system, with 14 lines and 550+ miles of heavy and light rail track, plus the fact that my quasi-scientific formulas for designing my system have no way of predicting ridership or optimal routes. But I'm kind of curious as to why the DC metropolitan area and other cities aren't advocating for such a system that takes cars off the roads.

The extremely ambitious highway plan of half a century ago makes such a system of passenger trains seem rather small. Freeway revolts nixed much of the more detrimental inner city freeways, however much of the freeway infrastructure in our region has come to fruition. Remember, freeways don't necessarily have to be interstates (much like Metro doesn't necessarily have to be heavy rail, it can be light rail)

Below, I've listed the limited access divided freeways of our region (DC, plus Montgomery, Prince George's, Arlington, Fairfax and northeastern Prince William County and Alexandria City) Lengths approximate:

Mostly or completely pure freeway:
I-95 Maryland (College Park to Howard County) 8 miles
MD/DC-295, Balt-Wash Parkway (Anacostia to Fort Meade) 21 miles
I-495, Capital Beltway (loop around the city) 66 miles
I-270 (Bethesda to Frederick) 33 miles
I-95/395, Shirley Highway (Dale City to Downtown) 26 miles
I-295, Anacostia/Southeast Freeway (Oxon Hill to Downtown) 8 miles
Suitland Parkway (Anacostia to Andrews AFB) 10 miles
US-50, John Hanson Highway (Cheverly to Annapolis) 25 miles
US-50, Arlington Boulevard (Merrifield to The Mall) 11 miles
I-66 Custis Memorial Freeway (Gainesville to The Mall) 32 miles
Clara Barton Parkway (Georgetown to Potomac, MD) 10 miles
I-370/MD-200, Intercounty Connector (Gaithersburg to Laurel, under construction) 18 miles
George Washington Memorial Parkway (Alexandria to Great Falls) 15 miles
Dulles Toll Road/Greenway (Arlington to Loudon County) 16 miles
Key Br/Whitehurst Fwy/Potomac River Fwy (Rosslyn to The Mall) 2 miles
US-29, Columbia Pike (Silver Spring to Howard County) 11 miles
MD-4 Pennsylvania Avenue (Suitland to Anne Arundel County) 11 miles
MD-5 Branch Avenue (Suitland to Brandywine) 12 miles
VA-28 Sully Road (Manassas to Dulles International Airport) 21 miles
Montrose Parkway (Rockville) 4 Miles
Rock Creek Parkway (Woodley Park to The Mall) 3 miles

Rapidly becoming pure freeways:
US-301, Blue Star Memorial Highway (Bowie to Waldorf) 26 miles
MD-210, Indian Head Highway (Forest Heights to Accokeek) 11 miles
VA-7100, Fairfax County Parkway (Herndon to Springfield) 35 miles
VA-3000, Prince William Parkway (Woodbridge to Manassas) 16 miles

451 miles of freeway in Washington DC and adjacent counties. Sure makes the downtown sections that didn't get built seem like small apples. This doesn't include "mini freeways" embedded into the traffic system. It does not include the express tunnels on North Capitol, South Capitol, Connecticut Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, or K Street. Nor do they include spur freeways like the Cabin John Parkway, 270 spur, Spout Run Parkway, or the E Street Expressway. Nor does it include roads that become freeways for short stretches, like Central Avenue in Largo, Military Road west of 14th Street, North Capitol Street north of the Hospitals, or Franconia Road in Springfield. Nor does it include interchanges at non-freeways, like Tyson's Corner, Glenmont, University Boulevard at Route 1, or Kingle Road. Nor does it take into account express lanes, HOV lanes, or exit ramps. I figure all of this combined ought to add up to at least 100 miles.

I'm curious about the percentage of area residents that live within walking distance to fixed transit versus the percentage of area residents that live within walking distance to a freeway or an interchange. I'd be willing to bet that the latter is the larger number. If highways can have their 550 miles of coverage, why not rails?

Perhaps highway advocates threw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Perhaps it was the relentless lobbying. But whatever it is, it is the highway lobby had more ambition than our current transit advocacy currently exudes. If we can emulate one thing from the freeway lobby of the mid-20th Century, it is the ambitious fortitude with which they lobbied for what ultimately became the largest public works project in world history.

I'm not going to settle for a transit system that doesn't allow most of the metropolitan area to survive without an automobile. I'm going to keep pushing for my 550 miles of fixed rail.

MARC =/= Metro

2008-10-03T01:14:00.001-04:00

Marc Train - Kensington, MD
Originally uploaded by th.musicman

A lot of people criticize me for not liking MARC. I do like MARC, but I don't think it is a viable service to be integrated with Metro, and I think it only truly serves people who live and work along one of the corridors. Since it is not fully integrated with Metro, switching between the two services is an expensive inter-modal shift that deters people from using the system.

MARC's availability is another problem. Right now the system is wildly overcrowded. It only runs during the work week, during the day. The trains are overcrowded, and the availability to add more daily service is hampered by the fact that much of the system shares tracks with CSX and AMTRAK.

What really bothers me about the system is the fact that in the DC Metro area, MARC does not appear to influence transit-oriented development. Sure, some stations have good development, or at least plans for such development: Rockville, Silver Spring, Greenbelt, New Carrollton... of course, those stations all have Metro stations as well.

An excellent example of this would be the Kensington station. Kensington is on the Brunswick Line between Silver Spring and Rockville. Kensington is an incorporated town with a business district adjacent to the train station, but this station has done little to influence pedestrianism like in Rockville and Silver Spring, which have Metro stations. Kensington is merely a confluence of three rivers of cars, with a few office buildings and restaurants surrounded by parking.

View Larger Map of Kensington Lots of Parking fronting traffic gutters

I live on the Camden Line, perhaps the most useless fixed rail line in the region. I'm about halfway between the Laurel and Muirkirk stations. Muirkirk is a middle-of-nowhere station useful only to commuters who drive there from Beltsville. It serves no one. The Konterra development will be just across Rt 1, but it has seemingly little connectivity to the MARC station. It has been implied that Konterra's town center location along I-95 would support a new Metro station along I-95. Laurel is in the blossoming downtown of Laurel, a city of 30,000 people, but the station has little impact on development plans in the city. It seems that more of the development (such as Laurel Commons) has been more in anticipation for a future Metro station a mile or so south on an expanded Green Line.

View Larger Map of Muirkirk Station Office parks and no sidewalks

To make MARC a more viable system, it would require additional tracks along pretty much the entire system. Why not, then, build Metro tracks along the DC, PG, and MoCo portions of the system and connect those areas to the rest of the system with seamless transfers? Leave MARC as it is, a REGIONAL system that gets people between Baltimore, Washington, and Frederick. Heck, add another MARC line to Annapolis. We need MARC, but we can't treat it like a system that integrates areas into the greater transit system of the DC Metropolitan area.

MARC is not a suitable compliment to Metro. It may connect DC and Baltimore, but it doesn't connect Laurel, Bowie, Kensington, and other DC suburbs to the urban fabric of the metropolitan area.

My thoughts on replacing the stations on the lower portion of MARC with Metro:
Brunswick Line: Use the Yellow Line, build a spur at Ft. Totten and run along the Red Line to Silver Spring (Or better yet, run it under Georgia Avenue from Petworth Station to Silver Spring) and then along the Brunswick Line to Rockville.
Penn Line: Instead of terminating the Silver Line at Stadium-Armory, run the Silver Line along the Orange Line to New Carrollton and then extend it up to the BWI stop on the Penn Line. The Silver Line would then connect two major regional airports.
Camden Line: Bring the Green Line up to Laurel. Route One can support the TOD.

Of course this doesn't appear feasible, but as I have mentioned before, I believe our rail initiatives ought to be at least as ambitious as the Freeway Plan of the 1960's. Leave MARC. It is a great redundancy system for traveling between Baltimore and Washington. But instead of giving MARC more tracks, build tracks for a system that is going to effectively enhance the region's ability to develop more environmentally friendly transit-oriented suburbs with convenient transit access.

Imagine A Train on the Shirley Highway

2008-10-01T21:39:00.000-04:00

Yesterday i discussed the possibility of putting a Metro-integrated light rail train in the median of Interstate 95/395 in Virginia. Through the magic of Google Earth, I give you what I have dubbed "The White Line"

Shown here starting in Woodbridge and terminating at L'Enfant Plaza. The segment up south of the Beltway runs off the freeway along the heavy rail right-of-way. North of that, the line runs in what is now the reversible HOV lanes in the middle of the Shirley Highway.

This stretch of asphalt is one of the most recognizable routes into the city. Ten years ago, I-395 was averaging a quarter of a million in annual average daily traffic. In the last ten years, added lanes and improved intersections have made it easier for cars to travel on this road. But are we making investments to move the most people along this corridor? Could a train move more people quicker than HOV lanes? I bet it would be worth finding out.

An I-95 Train?

2008-10-01T02:18:00.000-04:00

I've always wonder what DC would have looked like if they had built all the freeways that had been proposed in the '60s. I'm glad they didn't, but I do have fun driving on urban freeways like the BQE in New York, the Mass Pike in Boston, or the Southeast-Southwest Freeway here in DC. I gripe about how in DC (and Baltimore, for that matter) Freeways basically dead end in the city, dumping ridiculous volumes of automobile traffic in concentrated areas that ought to be more geared toward pedestrians. Either connect them, or get rid of them.

What is now I-395 was supposed to have connected along the Metropolitan Branch train line and connected to the stub at the I-95 interchange in College Park. Instead, it dead ends on New York Avenue, dumping thousands of cars onto what was intended to be a grand boulevard with vistas to the White House. Many of the funds from those abandoned highway projects were ultimately diverted to Metro. But the highway system proposed was far more in-depth than Metro today. Why didn't we match that ambition with trains?

Frankly, I don't care if the Shirley Highway is backed up. That highway is about six lanes wider than it ought to be anyway. I say, get rid of all those HOV lanes in the middle and add another Metro line, perhaps a light rail. Make it useful. Start it in Dale City, and have it run all along 95 and then 395 in the center lanes, all the way up toDC where it can connect underground to L'Enfant Plaza. Virginia commuters would then have the option to eschew the traffic on the freeway with a different kind of high occupancy vehicle: transit. Those giant empty spaces in the middle of highway exits? Throw parking garages in there. Giant park and rides taking tens of thousands of cars off the road every day.

I am curious to see what a study would say might happen if those HOV lanes were replaced with perhaps a light rail track with seamless connectivity to Metro stations (Franconia, Pentagon, and L'Enfant, perhaps).

Maybe this new line could even fight its way through the city and connect to I-95 in College Park, then head on up to Columbia. Sure it would be a long line, but it would do what ambitious freeway planners wanted I-95 to do: connect the region. Only this would be a far more responsible way of doing so.

Normally, I don't believe transit lines should run completely on freeways. I think freeways stifle the ability to place transit-oriented development around stations. I think a rail running along Rt. 1 in Maryland is far superior to one running along I-95, a parallel freeway a few miles west with no chance for promoting the same kind of good urbanism. But the Virginia portion of the above proposal would ostensibly replace a freeway, the one-way HOV lanes from Woodbridge to DC. Could trans move the same number of people during rush hour? They certainly would move people faster, considering they wouldn't have to suffer through Mixing Bowl traffic... they'd just speed right past it.

I wonder, has this proposal ever been thrown out there? Have such studies been conducted? Could a light rail move as many people as the HOV lanes, or would it have to be Metro, or something of even higher capacity?

Moving on from highways is going to take a plan as ambitious and extensive as the plan that put them here in the first place; a plan that can equal or best the largest public works project in human history. Why not start with superfluous lanes on a highway bringing thousands of people into the city every day?

BRAC =/= Community Building

2008-09-30T01:22:00.001-04:00

Nuclear Free Zone Sign (Takoma Park, MD)
Originally uploaded by takomabibelot

Today I was talking to a good friend of mine at work about Takoma Park. She is a relative newcomer to the area, moving up here from the South just over a year ago. She works with me at Fort Meade, lives in Annapolis, and goes to church in Takoma Park. She was considering moving closer in to the city, but wasn't too fond of Takoma Park, her only experience with it being the two mile drive down University Boulevard from the Beltway to her church on Carroll Avenue.

This, of course, is right by where I grew up. So naturally, I had to chime in and offer to take her on a tour of a town much more pleasant than the snippets that she has experienced over the last sixteen months.

I could sing Takoma Park's praises for hours. It's a very pleasant streetcar suburb. It's very friendly, clean, and safe. It houses a very diverse spectrum of people. And it's close to everything. Frankly, I was perturbed that this hadn't been exposed to her previously. Why was this? I can attest that she is highly intelligent. But when she moved up here for her job at Fort Meade, my guess is that the hiring office pointed her toward the drab car-oriented apartment complexes of Central Maryland so that she could be (relatively) close to work. To her credit, she moved to Annapolis and not Columbia or Odenton, but nonetheless, after a year of suburban isolation, she wants to move closer to one of the cities.

She chose the DC area because that is where her church is, in Takoma Park. But a word she threw around often during our conversation was "community". Not just church community, but community as a place to live. Her apartment complex, though safe and quiet, offers no such sense of community.

I explained to her my philosophy on choosing an apartment complex (I've only once ever lived in one, and would never do it again now that I own a house, but I love offering my unwarranted advice). If you can enter an apartment building from a sidewalk along a street and you don't have to walk across a surface parking lot, it is more likely to be better than other apartment buildings in the area.
-Apartments with street entrances generally make better use of the land on which they lie, leaving fewer dark corners for crime to breed.
-They encourage pedestrian activity, which adds eyes on the street, detering criminal activity.
-People walking around are more likely to interact every day, and thus less likely to behave poorly towards each other (as I've found the anonymous neighbor might tend to do).
-Pedestrian activity also implies less dependence (real or perceived) on the automobile.
-Less automobile dependence ipso facto means less money spent on the automobile, which in turn implies a larger disposable income, raising their socio-economic status
-People of higher socio-economic status demand a higher standard of amenities and are less likely to tolerate crime or unsanitary conditions in and around the building.

Again, the above is just my own little method of choosing a decent apartment, and it is entirely unscientific. But I use the example of down town Silver Spring: The apartment buildings on East-West Highway between Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road are far superior than those just a quarter mile away in the Summit Hills complex (Slummit Thrills, as my college buddies who lived there call it) at East-West and 16th Street. Better urbanism makes a more palatable place to live. Thing is, we're seeing that transformation to urbanism in Silver Spring and Takoma Park... not so much in Anne Arundel and Howard Counties.

It got me to think about where I live. I work at Fort Meade, which I've stated before is absolutely horrible for the region as a whole. I live in Laurel, because it is close to work. My father, who also worked at Fort Meade, chose a much longer commute, coming from Silver Spring... because it was near my parents' church, good schools, a community. And he moved there in the car-happy early '70s. And now, I find myself driving to Silver Spring at least four times a week to partake in that community (my church, the football team I coach, my family, many of my friends). And drive I must, because Laurel doesn't have convenient transit for me to bus or train it to Silver Spring.

So now you have me driving 13 miles round trip to and from work every day, plus 25+ miles round trip to Silver Spring several times a week. Then there's my friend who drive about 41 miles round trip every day for work, plus another 62 miles round trip every Sunday for church. If we could commute to work via transit, chances are we'd both live near a transit hub, set our roots there, and that would eliminate 300+ miles driving a week right there. Richard Layman points out the dangers of sending thousands more jobs to military. If there are going to be thousands of new jobs sent out here with the BRAC, perhaps there should be an initiative to encourage these folks settle in an area-- a community-- that minimizes their impact on the highways (and their wallets) with the commute.

After the BRAC takes full effect, Fort Meade will have over 50,000 jobs on it, and thousands more around it. And Fort Meade doesn't have a single transit station. It's a ticking time bomb.