BeyondDC is in archive mode. Obviously.

You can continue to read my urbanist writing at ggwash.org/dan ❤️

Once upon a time, having a walkable, urban city was a niche idea in our region, one special interest among many. Today it’s a mainstream discussion topic all over the region’s cafés and living rooms.

Greater Greater Washington helped make that happen, and it relies on reader donations to survive. Please consider giving GGW a donation, so it can keep fighting the good fight.

Read more about why you should give to GGW, or skip the pitch and donate now!

Donation link

Greater Greater Washington wasn’t the first blog about urbanism or local policy-making in Washington, DC, but it’s the one that changed the discussion. It’s the one that brought arcane subjects like zoning and transit planning into the city’s mainstream.

By the time I first discovered Greater Greater Washington, I’d already been writing BeyondDC for many years. I was one of a cadre of bloggers writing about development and transportation, along with people like Richard Layman, and DCist’s Ryan Avent,.

But we were few and far between, and most of us either had other jobs or split our writing with other subject matters. DC’s online urbanist community, such as it was, had no home base and no leader. We were a niche network of geeky wonks, great at expressing opinions but not so good at building broad support.

Greater Greater Washington changed all that.

When David Alpert showed up, with his mountain of energy and dedication, that was a game-changer. David had the skills and time to do what the rest of us couldn’t. He went to public meetings, he drew maps, and he wrote, and wrote, and wrote. All of it was accessible to anybody. All of it was interesting, and exciting. All of it elevated the public discussion about what Washington could be.

And the readers poured in. Then some of the early readers started writing too, and the whole thing grew exponentially.

At first, I admit, I was a little jealous.

But it took me about 3 seconds to realize what was happening. A mere blog was becoming a community, and that was too wonderful a thing to pass up. I had to be part of that.

And become a community Greater Greater Washington did. With more writers and more readers, we started to have an impact. Not only on other policy wonks, not only on the editorial pages of other media, but on the tone of the discussion itself, and later on elected officials.

Now, everyone in town knows the practicality and benefits of car-free or car-light living. We can swing budgets, and change construction plans,.

Thanks to Greater Greater Washington, urbanists in the DC region are a political force. We’ve gone mainstream, and we’re making a difference.

Please help us keep making a difference. Please donate what you can to GGW, so our community will still have the strong voice it needs.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

…Obviously, if you are looking at this.

Here’s what happened: Someone modified BeyondDC to display spam links leading to predatory financial webpages. The website had to be locked for a while in order to clean out the infected code.

I’m in Hawaii this week. Blog posts will be intermittent, if at all.

Probably I’m the only person here taking pictures of the buses.

Honolulu. Photo by John Fowler on flickr.
Technically there are probably some buses in this picture somewhere.

The BeyondDC home page has been long overdue for some housekeeping. I’ve moved things around a little bit, taken out some obsolete links, and rethought the navigation bar at the top of the page (nobody ever used that anyway). You may continue to see additional minor changes in the coming days.

The winter solstice came and went at 6:12 am this morning. Shockingly, the world didn’t end.

I’ll be on holiday until a few days into the new year, so this is probably the last blog post of 2012. I’ll continue to tweet through the holiday, so see you there.

DOOM!.

I’ve installed a new commenting system, using the Disqus platform. I’ve noticed that it doesn’t update the number of comments that have been made on a post right away, but other than that it seems to work fairly well, which is a big improvement from the not working at all status of comments for the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately the old comments are lost.

The commenting problem was actually only the most visible aspect of a whole series of back-office technical problems that had to be worked out, but hopefully everything is ship shape now. Hopefully.

The comment system BeyondDC uses is down. It will be a few days before I fix it. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I was interviewed by WAMU radio for a piece reporting on Arlington’s green painted bike lanes. The piece originally aired on Saturday, but you can hear it online via WAMU’s website at Arlington Bike Lanes Going Green, Literally.