The storm was harder on people who live in places like this.
I’ve had a lot of fun this weekend. The snow has been a novelty, has resulted in a day off work, and my ability to go about daily business has not been particularly impacted. On Friday evening I walked out my front door, went less than a block around the corner, and ate a lovely dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. On Saturday I walked four blocks to take part in a giant community snowball fight. On Sunday I went out to lunch and ran errands to CVS and the grocery store while out. I haven’t had need to use the Metro, but since I live where it runs underground, using it for longer-distance transportation was an option. I didn’t lose my power, but had it gone out I would have been able to kill time at any number of nearby cafes or bookstores.
Contrast that with the experience of my family, living out in the suburban wilds of Fairfax County. They’ve been trapped in their house since Friday, literally unable to leave. Their subdivision is two miles from the closest store and accessible only by car. Their 45-foot-wide “local” two-lane street wasn’t plowed until Sunday morning, and once it came the plow just made things worse, since it only got one lane and left a giant snowdrift between the driving lane and my family’s parked cars. Of course there have been no snowball fight-esque community events within walking distance because there is no community to speak of; population density is too low to support such a thing. Their next-door neighbors are friendly, sure, but there aren’t enough people within walking distance to support any kind of neighborhood event. Luckily, they weren’t among those who lost power. Stuck at home without TV, internet or heat would have been really miserable.
Of course, one shouldn’t base life decisions on the possibility of a freak event. A once-a-century storm isn’t necessarily a good basis from which to determine how we shape communities. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that because of how our respective communities are shaped, a storm that has had nothing but positive effects for me has completely put my family’s lives on hold.
Two flickr photo galleries of this weekend’s blizzard. The first is simply a collection of photos from around my neighborhood. The second is from the giant snowball fight in Dupont Circle, attended by thousands and internationally famous. The individual photo descriptions within the snowball fight gallery form a narrative of the event.
Last year Arlington County bicycle/pedestrian planners requested volunteers to help collect counts of users on Arlington’s bike/ped facilities. They are asking for help once more. Volunteers will be asked to camp out at a specific location for two hours on February 18th or 20th, counting bikes and peds that pass by. If you are interested in participating, contact bikepedcounts@arlingtonva.us. More information is below.
Arlington County transportation programs BikeArlington and WalkArlington are looking for volunteers to help collect bicycle and pedestrian counts in Arlington County on February 18th and 20th. This regular data collection is part of a national project to document walking and cycling as modes of transportation. Collecting better data on usage and demand is essential to building long-term support for walking and cycling. More information about the national effort can be found at http://bikepeddocumentation.org
Count locations in Arlington include shared use paths, urban sidewalks and intersections, and on-road bike lanes. Many of the sites are easily accessible by Metro. Arlington transportation staff will provide training and materials. Shifts are two hours long in the morning and evening on Thursday, February 18th and Noon to 2:00 PM on Saturday, February 20th. At some locations, volunteers may be asked to observe directional information, helmet usage, and other demographic data in addition to the number of cyclists and pedestrians.
If you’d be interested in helping with this effort, email: bikepedcounts@arlingtonva.us. Arlington County’s staff coordinator will help you choose a count location and time. We’ve had up to 50 volunteers help with previous counts — let’s see if we can provide even better coverage this time.
Every year the Virginia General Assembly meets in Richmond, and every year they debate hundreds of proposed bills having to do with transportation. Some bills are good, some are bad, and others, well, who cares. One of the worst bills up this year is hilariously numbered Virginia House Bill #666, like as in the Devil’s legislation. The bill would require that at least 50 percent of the proceeds of Virginia transportation capital bonds would be used for new highway construction. Not transit, not maintenance of existing roads, not anything but new highways. It would literally make it illegal for Virginia to spend more bond money on transit than new highways. That’s some heavy-handed social engineering for you so-called Libertarians out there.
The good news is that according a source in Richmond, Lucifer’s legislation died a quick death in committee this afternoon. No official confirmation yet, but hopefully correct.
The FTA announced grants today that will support the construction of over $11 billion worth of major new transit investments, most notably in Denver, Honolulu, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. These grants come from the same pot of money that FTA is using to support the Metrorail Silver Line to Tysons Corner. The DC area didn’t get any new money this year, but our funding agreement for the Silver Line is already in place. Here is the full list of funding agreements, new and existing.
Yesterday I promised some Northern Virginia transit planning hotness from DRPT. Unfortunately the study I had planned on posting isn’t publicly available yet, so readers will have to wait. Sorry.
DRPT’s official vision is shown at right and is available for download. It more or less duplicates BeyondDC’s Virginia Beach and Naval Station extensions of the light rail starter line, but veers dramatically from my plans from there. Absent is any line to the airport, but present are lines to the peninsula, and a more logical Portsmouth connection.
Good on DRPT for such a forward-thinking document.
Tomorrow BeyondDC will share some more of DRPT’s recent planning work, this time from Northern Virginia.
With increased passenger rail such a hot topic in Tidewater Virginia, it seems a good time to consider what the future of rail transit there might look like. Assuming light rail is a success, as it is virtually everywhere it’s built, where might it go next? That Virginia Beach extension is the obvious next direction, but it’s far from the only option.
BeyondDC has extremely limited personal experience in Hampton Roads, but with satellite imagery from Google Maps available to anyone with a computer, it’s easy enough to get a pretty good sense of land use and density. Using that information it’s possible to make reasonably accurate assumptions about where transit might work best. Of course Google Maps is no substitute for real on-the-ground experience, but at the very least it’s enough to start a discussion. So here goes.
What a larger light rail system in Hampton Roads might look like:
Diagrammatic map. Click to enlarge.
Geographic map, for context. The red line is light rail currently under construction. The orange lines are potential extensions. Click to see it in Google Maps.
In total there are about 48.5 miles of light rail on these maps; 7.4 miles of under-construction-starter-line, plus a little over 41 miles of new proposal. The existing starter line is costing $288 million, or $39 million per mile. At that same per mile cost it would be another $1.6 billion to complete the entire system. That’s comparable to the cost of the DC streetcar system, for a much larger population. Obviously it is much less than the $5.1 billion Metrorail Silver Line.
Obviously there’s some weird stuff going on here. Those trips from downtown Portsmouth or Virginia Beach’s oceanfront to downtown Norfolk would take such a long time that I can’t imagine very many people would be interested in making them via rail. Nonetheless, those lines could be good corridors if you think of them as primarily serving downtown Portsmouth and the oceanfront, with the connections to the larger system merely a bonus. Hampton Roads is such a polycentric region that the normal of rail may not apply.
One last thing. There are probably critics who suggest that the Hampton Roads region is too small for such an ambitious system. That claim would ignore the experience of other mid-sized American metropoli, most particularly Salt Lake City, which is smaller and more suburban than Hampton Roads by just about every metric, yet has a successful system of 20 miles of light rail and 44 miles of commuter rail already in operation, with significant expansions to both planned.
Central Crown Farm, at the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway station.
Crown Farm in Gaithersburg is a really good development. Putting asides its relatively far-flung location, the development team did everything right. It’s dense, it’s walkable, it’s got a good mix of uses, solid architectural guidelines, good public space, and good integration of transit (assuming Maryland can ever get the Corridor Cities Transitway built). The Gaithersburg city-administered plan is everything that the near-by Montgomery County-administered Gaithersburg West is not.
And now, apparently, it is back on track. According to a story in the Gazette, a new set of developers purchased the property a few weeks ago. Since a strict annexation agreement with the city controls what can be built there, the new developers are moving forward with the same plan already in place, for 2,250 residential units and 320,000 square feet of commercial, mostly retail. With the basic plans already in place, the new team has set to work already on getting the individual plats approved for construction. No word on when construction will actually begin, but it’s nice to hear progress being made.
Metro’s safety problems are serious, but as BeyondDC noted last year the statistics show it is still overwhelmingly more safe than driving. Statistics don’t tell the whole story, though. They don’t account for things like this:
“My name is Penny Everline. I live in Arlington. I cannot drive due to a visual impairment, and I ride ART and Metro bus and rail to work, to shopping, to appointments, to classes, and to social activities. I grew up in a small town with no transit and moved to the DC Metro region as an adult. I know it sounds corny, but I believe transit saved my life… or at least helped me get a life.
“Before I had access to transit, I wondered how I would be able to do the basic things—go to work, pay my rent, go shopping, meet up with friends, etc. Now I do all of these things with great ease. I can honestly say that Metro and the other transit providers in our region opened doors for me and, hopefully, will continue to do so.”
Penny is a member of WMATA’s Riders Advisory Council. She started SaveMyTransit.org to provide a place for people to tell their stories, so our elected officials know just how important it is to have reliable, safe transit.
If you have a story to tell, give her site a visit and put it on the record.
Last June when an automated Metro train plowed into another in Takoma, the correct response was to demand more money for capital maintenance of the system. The problem was primarily technical. Metro is getting old, and unless we keep it up accidents will happen.
When a a couple of workers were hit this morning by a maintenance truck being manually operated, the only explanation is that there was a breakdown in communication between workers on the track and the driver of the truck. We’ll have to wait for the investigation to know whether that breakdown was caused by inadequate safety protocols, unfollowed ones, or something like a broken radio.
If it turns out to have been an equipment problem, that’s a clear indication that we need more money. If it turns out to have been inadequate or unfollowed protocols, that would beg the question of who isn’t taking safety seriously, and why aren’t they.
Features Transit Vision: BeyondDC's plan for regional transit expansion Framing The Mall: BeyondDC's comments on the NCPC plan for the areas around the National Mall
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