This is the cover photograph on today’s Post Express. It illustrates the ongoing construction of the new Nationals ballpark in Southeast, and in the online version is attached to a giddy narrative of Mayor Fenty and Nats President Kasten gushing over the stadium’s fresh Kentucky Bluegrass and ginormous HD scoreboard.

And then of course there’s the view.

Baseball stadiums, as we all know, are supposed to be part of the city. One of the features that makes them feel so is the view. Here’s what you get at Wrigley, here at PNC in Pittsburgh, and here at Camden Yards. Compare those views with the one above. Granted they aren’t all taken from the same elevation, but one thing should be jumping out: In DC our view will be dominated by parking garages.

It didn’t have to be so. It wasn’t supposed to be so. All the stadium plans called for attractive mixed-use buildings beyond the outfield walls. Unfortunately, the cars-first-all-the-time mentality took over, and quality urbanism was once again ruined by the demands of cars. And not even that many of them – even assuming a totally unrealistic four people per car, the two garages together have enough spaces for less than 12% of the stadium’s 41, 222 person capacity.

Richard Layman of Rebuilding Place has consistently noted that the Lerner’s suburban mentalities were responsible for Atlanta’s Turner Field, one of the worst “neo-traditional” ballparks yet, urban in name only, where “sense of place” means painting a baseball diamond on top of the parking lot. BeyondDC disagrees with Richard on some key points regarding the stadium (we think the basic concept of a stadium in this location was a good one, for example), it’s clear that on this subject he is correct. Nats Ballpark will never be like the Verizon Center so long as people like the Lerners are making decisions. We are getting a stadium meant for Tysons Corner on what should be prime real city land.

Hopefully we’ll come to our collective senses and knock the garages down inside of a decade.

For more than 50 years Marylanders have argued over the benefits of an Interstate highway between Gaithersburg and Laurel: the InterCounty Connector. Proposed last century during the heyday of road building, the ICC has been buried and revived more often than Wile E. Coyote.

As of Thursday, November 8, it’s as close to a done deal as it has ever been.

Championed by former Maryland Governor Ehrlich, the ICC was set to begin construction months ago, when a group of environmentalists requested an injunction due to perceived inadequacies during the review stage. The ICC’s EIS, they argued, failed to consider non-highway alternatives such as mass transit, and was therefore an invalid study of potential effects. That injunction was officially denied by a federal judge on Thursday, removing the last hurdle to building. Construction is now expected to begin in a matter of days.

BeyondDC stated our opinion some time ago. As new highways go the ICC isn’t objectionable. It will divert growth from rural upper I-270 towards already-suburban eastern Montgomery County and will better connect the eastern part of the region with the west. Worthy goals of Smart Growth. The question is whether building the ICC will bankrupt the state’s ability to get the Purple Line, Corridor Cities Transitway and Baltimore Red Line built.