Albany skyline. Photo by Daniel Langer on flickr.

I’ll be on vacation from August 19-26, in upstate New York. Although I’m not actually spending my vacation in Albany, odds are I’ll be there at least one day. Any suggestions for what to see? My previous experience there consists of a layover and transfer at the Rensselaer Amtrak station.

There won’t be any blog posts here on BeyondDC while I’m gone. I will tweet periodically though.

Meet Market

In the mean time, drop by the DC Meet Market at 15th and P on Saturday the 18, where I’ll be manning a booth for my wife’s shop, selling urbanist-, DC-, and geography- themed paper goods.

Comments on BeyondDC posts have been disabled since June 22, due to a technical issue. They are now back (although obviously there haven’t been any since then).

Most of the posts on BeyondDC are about transportation. Stupidly, these have always been clumped together under a single broad transportation tag.

I’m now going through the 700-some posts tagged with transportation and adding new mode-specific tags, so readers will be able to pull up all posts about streetcars, or bike issues, or whatever.

So far I’ve added mode tags to posts through late 2010. It’ll take a while to finish.

BeyondDC is very slow today. I’m not completely sure why, but one of the reasons appears to be that the comment system isn’t working right. Because of this, comments are temporarily disabled. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Today BeyondDC steps outside its usual urbanist role to help raise awareness of a big problem: Congress is considering breaking the internet with a set of radical new laws that would give private corporations nearly unlimited power to accuse anyone of copyright infringement, and to then effectively shut down that person’s website. The effect of such far-reaching and broad regulations would be catastrophic to the free exchange of ideas on the internet as it exists today.

Several of the internet’s largest sites are participating in a “blackout” today, shutting down their main content in protest of a law that could shut them down for real if passed. BeyondDC may not be Wikipedia or Reddit, but everyone needs to know about these proposed bills. We cannot let them pass without a fight.

Here is more information if you are interested. Below are some screencaps of major webpages taking part in today’s blackout.

Wikipedia

Google

Reddit

I’m in Norfolk at the Virginia Governor’s Transportation Conference the rest of this week and therefore probably won’t be blogging. I will be on Twitter if anything interesting happens.

Wedding bike. Image by iz.mendoza on flickr.

I’m getting married in a week and a half.

Between now and then, I’ve got to get ready for the wedding, wrap up business at work, and help my fiance prepare her booth at this Saturday’s gigantic Crafty Bastards Arts & Crafts Fair (drop by for some awesome urbanist-themed paper goods).

After the wedding there’s our honeymoon to the Pacific Northwest, which we’re putting off a few days so I can attend Rail~Volution. Yes, I’m a lucky guy to have found a girl who will literally put off our honeymoon so I can geek out to transit.

Needless to say, I’m busy. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to blog much. And so, don’t expect many posts on BeyondDC for the next month. You’ll still be able to find me on Twitter, where I’ll live-tweet Rail~Volution and send greetings from Portland’s streetcar, but here on the main blog it’s going to get lonely.

Cheers, and have a good month.

Writing about the ICC, as I did yesterday on BeyondDC and today for the Washington Post, is a nostalgia-filled experience for me. It’s a little like coming home.

The ICC was big news in Gaithersburg in the late 1990s, when I was in high school. Newspapers were filled with op-eds debating the merits of the road. I was fascinated, and read them all. I became a big proponent of the highway, because I was bored with suburbia and wanted Gaithersburg to be more like a big city, and in my suburbanite mind big cities had lots of big highways.

Of course I was wrong about what constitutes a big city, and about what relieves traffic congestion, and about a lot of things, but one key epiphany was there: Transportation affects land use. Whoa.

And so it was that I became interested in transportation planning. And so it was that I started writing about it, in letters to the editor of the Gaithersburg Gazette.

So while my position on the ICC has evolved over time, I continue to have a soft spot in my heart for it. The ICC is what started me down the path that has brought me here, to BeyondDC, to the Washington Post, to Greater Greater Washington, and of course to that day job as a professional transportation planner.

I can’t help but be a little nostalgic.

I’m back in town. Miss anything important? How did Gabe Klein’s community bike ride go? Did A&R Development ever release info on that 4th WalMart? Did DC do away with the height limit?

I’ll share my photos from Florida – including the Town of Celebration and the Disney monorail – when I get them off my camera. Now: Back to the grind.

I will be out of town for the holidays until the day after Christmas. Don’t expect much blogging in the mean time.

There has been a lot of interest in the fourth WalMart design, so I want to give readers an update. The development teams of the first three locations were all extremely friendly and cooperative. They did a great job taking the community’s concerns seriously and answering questions promptly. Unfortunately, the developers of the fourth site, A & R Companies, have refused to answer any questions about the site. Their policy is that they don’t give interviews, and don’t talk about developments that are in the pipeline. WalMart’s representative has been very friendly, but apparently has not reached an agreement to provide information on this fourth site.

I can tell you the fourth site will be at the Capitol Gateway development, on East Capitol Street just inside the District border, near Capitol Heights Metro. WalMart will be part of the commercial component of the development, which takes up multiple blocks and includes several new residential buildings. Here is a site plan, from an old DCmud post.

On top of that, there’s not to much say. Rumor is that none of the four WalMarts will have surface parking, but that alone doesn’t guarantee urbanity. We could be looking at a design as bad as this one in Salt Lake City, or one as good as the H Street proposal in DC. Unfortunately, we’ll just have to wait to find out.