What do you if your city is built around a narrow river and needs a major grade-separated rapid transit line, but for whatever reason you can’t afford a subway? Why, you build a rivertop monorail, of course!

That’s what the city of Wuppertal, Germany did way back in 1897, when it built the Schwebebahn, or “floating train.” It’s been open and running ever since, except for a time during World War II when it was damaged.

Monorails have a fairly limited useful niche. They’re more expensive and less flexible than light rail, and have a more limited capacity than heavy metro rail. Their main advantage over traditional elevated rail is that their structure can be airier-looking, and therefore prettier.

Generally speaking, monorails are only useful if you’re going to build a rail line that you know will be 100% elevated, and if you’re worried a lot about aesthetics. A line running on top of a river is basically the perfect place. Just about anywhere else, you’d build something more traditional.

Anyway, the Schwebebahn is fascinating. Certainly it’s one of the world’s most unique transit lines. Here are a couple of pictures:

Schwebebahn in 1913. Public domain image linked from Wikipedia.

Schwebebahn in 2007. Image from Flickr user Ian Fisher.

This lulzy internet graphic has been floating around for years. Unfortunately, it really does often work this way.

Flowchart drawn by David Alpert at GGW.

CCT’s adopted route map, showing two phases.

Maryland has officially finalized its planning for the Corridor Cities Transitway (CCT). In so doing the state has finally answered a number of lingering questions about the Gaithersburg-to-Clarksburg route.

• The line will be BRT rather than light rail. With light rail being advanced for the Purple Line and Baltimore Red Line, the more suburban Corridor Cities Transitway would have been one rail line too many for the state to afford. Everyone would rather have light rail, but as I said in 2008 and again in 2009, doing BRT for the CCT is the right decision given the constraints.
• It will be built in two phases, with the first phase ending at Metropolitan Grove in northwest Gaitherburg, where there’s a MARC transfer available.
• The route will follow its long-planned alignment along King Farm Boulevard, despite objections from some neighbors.
• The Crown Farm station will be located to maximize the planned TOD at that location.
• There will be four stations in the Life Sciences Center office park, which will serve a lot of workers and help to redevelop that area, but which will also slow down buses considerably.
• The Kentlands station is sensibly placed on the west side of Great Seneca Highway, where it will be ideal for future infill.
• The final station is at Comsat office park in Clarksburg, which means the route unfortunately misses two potentially major nearby centers, Clarksburg Town Center and the Milestone shopping center.

Overall, the adopted plan addresses many of the problems I identified in 2006. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable, and it will have a hugely positive effect on how Gaithersburg operates.

Maryland can now move the project into the federal government’s New Starts process, where it will compete with other projects around the country for funding. Ideally they will move into more specific engineering in another year or so, with construction beginning in 2018 and service beginning on the first phase in 2020.

Baltimore’s bikes will use this model, which is different than Capital Bikeshare. Photo by Doug Grinbergs.

Last week Maryland announced $2.5 million in grants to develop bikesharing in the state. The money is on top of funds already dedicated to bikesharing in Baltimore and Rockville.

Since plenty of funding is now committed and planning work is well underway, it seems like a good time to catch up on where bikesharing stations are due to be installed. This information doesn’t seem to be available at any other centralized location, so here you are:

	Proposed mixing zone design.
	A possible warning sign.

It’s very exciting that DDOT is advancing the L Street cycle track. When complete, it will be by far the best way to bike from west to east through downtown DC.

Unfortunately, the design of the cycle track doesn’t completely separate bicyclists from cars, which is usually the main point of cycle tracks. DDOT is concerned about narrowing L Street too much, and about potential left-hooks. So the design of the cycle track calls for cars planning to turn left onto cross streets to cross over the cycle track, and then turn left from a turn lane located between the curb and the cycle track.

Although it’s unfortunate that this design doesn’t eliminate mixing, it’s probably a good experiment. Cycle track design is still an evolving field in the United States, so it makes sense to try different techniques. If this doesn’t work, DDOT can theoretically go back in a few years and fix it. Meanwhile, we’re getting at least a pretty good solution right away.

But since the point of cycle tracks is to separate bike and car traffic from each other, and since this plan doesn’t fully accomplish that, DDOT will need to be serious about its signage and pavement markings. To make this work, they must do everything possible to send an un-missable message to car drivers that they should expect to encounter and yield to bicyclists on L Street.

One good thing they are doing is painting part of the bike lane green. That’s a good way to increase visibility and remind drivers to watch for cyclists. However, they aren’t going to paint the most crucial mixing area - where cars cross over the bike lane. That omission should be addressed. DDOT should modify their plans to include green paint in the cross-over area.

Finally, there will need to be excellent, colorful, signage warning drivers. The standard federal sign instructing turning drivers to yield to bikes isn’t adequate for a cycle track situation, where full separation is expected. Other options, such as this or the one pictured at right, should be considered.

DDOT should be commended for innovating a workable solution to a difficult context, but if complete separation isn’t possible then they should do everything they can to make sure drivers know they are crossing over a major bike facility. The mixing zone should be painted green, and colorful signs should be installed.

Proposed amphitheater. Design by OLIN + Weiss/Manfredi.

The National Mall is not a perfect space. Although millions of people visit it each year, many sections are oversized and underused. It’s poorly integrated with the surrounding city, and its aging components are in need of maintenance. What can be done?

No one would propose demolishing the Mall, or seriously changing its basic character, but clearly there is room for improvement.

The Trust for the National Mall agrees. They sponsored a design competition to rethink 3 important sections of the Mall: Constitution Gardens, the Washington Monument grounds, and Union Square. The winning entries are filled with interesting ideas.

Constitution Gardens

Design by Rogers Marvel Architects + Peter Walker and Partners.

Many Washingtonians feel that Constitution Gardens is the best part of the Mall already. Certainly it’s the most unique, with its informal pond and romantic pathways. The winning design, by Rogers Marvel Architects + Peter Walker and Partners, will build on the gardens’ strengths to make it even better.

They propose to introduce a new pavilion at the east end of the existing pond. This pavilion would become the centerpiece of activity in the garden. It would contain a restaurant and a dock for model boating. In the winter, the eastern section of the pond would be used for ice skating.

These additional active uses are good additions, although one wonders if another ice skating rink can survive so close to the existing rink at the Sculpture Garden.

One negative aspect of this plan is that it actively turns its back on the street. It proposes to raise new hills along Constitution Avenue in order to “provide separation” between the park and downtown. This is entirely the wrong approach, and will contribute even more to the segregation of the city’s cultural amenities from the city’s residents.

Washington Monument grounds

Design by OLIN + Weiss/Manfredi.

In contrast to Constitution Gardens, the Washington Monument grounds are probably the worst section the Mall. The giant grass lawns are not destinations to anyone but a few softball players. Rather, they are long, empty voids that must be traversed.

The poor condition of the grounds is even more unfortunate because they are the geographic center of the monumental core. In theory this should be the most heavily-built and formal area of the Mall, but in reality it is the least.

The winning entry for this section, by OLIN + Weiss/Manfredi, is disappointing in its scope. Rather than address the fundamental deficiencies with the grounds as a whole, the design focuses closely on the southeast corner and largely ignores the rest.

To the designers’ credit, what they have proposed is excellent. They would replace the afterthought that is the existing Sylvan Theater with a wonderful new grass amphitheater. It would blend seamlessly with the surrounding landscape, would face and help to frame the Washington Monument, and would vastly improve the theater experience in every way.

They also propose a cafe and bookstore, to be built into the side of a small hill so that they appear as one with the rolling landscape. These are good additions that will improve the edge condition between park and city, and the proposed architecture is both appropriate and totally unique.

Union Square

Design by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol + Davis Brody Bond.

Better known as the Capitol Reflecting Pool, Union Square suffers from many of the same problems as the Washington Monument grounds. It’s visually impressive, but usually empty. There’s not much reason for people to go except to pass through, and its monumental components are so oversized that they are a barrier to walking.

The winning design, by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol + Davis Brody Bond, does much to improve the situation.

They propose reducing the size of the reflecting pool and carrying additional pathways through the site, creating new connections with the Smithsonian area to the west.

They also propose to narrow Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues, and to convert them from parking lots to more pedestrian-friendly streets.

Unfortunately, the garden areas north of Pennsylvania Avenue and south of Maryland Avenue are afterthoughts in this proposal. It would have been nice to see a new building on the north end of the site, mirroring the location of the US Botanical Garden. That area is a nether-zone between the Mall and Senate Park, and would be more valuable as the site for a future museum.

Next steps

The Trust for the National Mall does actually intend to build these designs. Fundraising will begin soon, and the first ribbon-cutting could take place as early as 2016.

That’s good news.

Overall, these ideas would improve the National Mall. It would still be an imperfect space, poorly connected to the living city around it. But it would, for the most part, be better than it is today.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

Germantown Town Center is not a triumph of urbanism. Of all the suburban “new downtowns” built in the Washington region in the last 20 years, Germantown’s is probably the least impressive. It is essentially a suburban strip mall, anchored by a grocery store, with a handful of liner shops fronting onto a short “main street.” It’s surrounded by suburban-style apartment complexes, and has a library, a nice performing arts center, and a whole ton of surface parking lots.

And soon it will have a park. And actually, the park is pretty interesting.

Most of the parks in Germantown are either nature preserves, athletic fields, or playgrounds. There is a small town square, but nothing like DC’s Meridian Hill Park. Nothing where residents might visit on a Sunday afternoon to sit on a public bench, read a book, and watch the passers-by. No central community gathering place that hosts picnics, frisbee, and romantic strolls.

Thus the new central park, which broke ground last week. It will have a formal layout, with sculpted lawns, stone-faced trails, and a central pergola.

Park site plan.

The park is a nice enough design, and it’s very encouraging to see planning in a place like Germantown (which has almost 90,000 residents) move forward towards a more livable and sustainable urban model.

One major criticism of the park, however, is that it fails to produce an urban room. The best urban public spaces have clear walls that frame and help to define the space. They’re surrounded by buildings that front onto them, providing a sense of enclosure as well as activity and safety, and from which pedestrians can move freely. More than anything else, this is what separates the character of a good urban park from that of a rural path through the woods. A walk through the forest is a nice experience, but a different one.

Unfortunately, Germantown’s new central park is surrounded by parking lots, wide highways, and the backs of randomly placed buildings. Rather than providing a seamless connection to every surrounding property, most of the park’s boundary is blocked to pedestrians, who will have to enter and exit from designated walkways. There will be scant enclosure, and little if any sense that this is the center of Germantown.

Park location.

Internally this will be a nice enough park, and it is undeniably a step forward in Germantown’s urban design. But the same suburban conservatism that has hampered Germantown Town Center since its inception is also at work here. Neither the town center nor the park will live up to their potential as long as so many concessions to suburbanism are included in their design.

Sooner or later, the half measures will no longer seem impressive.

Arlington County produced this map showing ART bus routes color-coded with service frequencies. The thicker the line, the more often that bus comes. This sort of thing is very useful to riders.

It would be really cool to see a similar map for Metrobus.

Pretty darn awesome. The old style PCC trolley even says “Capitol Transit” on the side. Produced by Etsy seller TeaOlive.

Maryland is beginning to take the idea of grass track beds for light rail very seriously. For years renderings of the Purple Line have shown grass tracks in some sections, and now the state has installed an actual grass track as a pilot project in Baltimore.

Actually, they are testing a variety of green track beds, grass being only one of the options. They’re also looking at sedums, another type of ground cover plant that is often used on green roofs, and which use less water and are easier to maintain than regular grass.

Here are some pictures of the test project:

MTA has also been repainting its light rail cars with new color schemes in recent years. This is apparently part of a refurbishment project for its oldest railcars. The original blue stripe livery is slowly disappearing, as cars are repainted with the more colorful 2010 and 2011 liveries.

Original 1992 livery.	~2003 livery.
~2010 livery.	~2011 livery (left).