The proposed platform at Wiehle Avenue.

The Washington Post is reporting that the FTA has reversed its earlier decision and is now set to approve funding for the Tysons Corner Metro extension. FTA boss Mary Peters is supposedly on a conference call with Virginia Governor Kaine and other officials right now, literally as BeyondDC types this post, to give them the good news.

More info as the story develops.

The big question now, assuming the Post’s info is accurate, is whether a neutered NVTA poses a major problem for the local portion of funding. We’re not sure it does. Last BeyondDC knew, the State funding match is coming from tolls on the airport access road, and the County match from a real estate tax on businesses in the corridor. But given this project’s history, we’re still holding our breath until we can get confirmation.

Update 1:10 p.m. – Amy Gardner of the Washington Post just finished a very informative online question/answer session about the project. The most important of several revelations: What was approved today was NOT a full construction grant, but $150 million for final design. That’s still a big deal, though. The total amount spent on the Silver line so far is about $140 million, so this will more than double the money invested. We can’t think of a better illustration of support.

Update 1:50 p.m. – The Post has put online an updated article pulling together much of the information available so far. One tidbit: Approval is coming with strings. VA and WMATA have to find a way to guarantee adequate maintenance investment in the Metro system.

Update 2:50 p.m. – It’s a big day for Mary Peters. In addition to the news about the Silver line, she’s launched a new official USDOT blog, Welcome to the Fast Lane. Never mind the highway bias in the name, two of the first five posts regard Tysons Metro. One is a lovefest guest post by VA Governor Kaine extolling Ms. Peters’ virtues. The other, written by Peters herself, links to all sorts of handy information, including FTA’s official statements on the issue, as well as FTA’s letter to Kaine and a matrix outlining what’s changed about the project since January.

All this begs the question: Is Mary Peters a villain or a hero? We know she’s an ideological Bush appointee and Highway Administration alum who comes from Phoenix, the most suburban and auto-oriented major city in America. We know she thinks the Federal government should hand over infrastructure-building to private firms, and we suspect her earlier opposition to the Silver line was part of a scheme to turn the project over to private investors… But Kaine can’t stop praising her, and according to the first Post article we posted this morning, “Officials with knowledge of the federal decision said Peters was behind the reversal despite objections from the FTA staff.” In other words, Peters saved the Silver line from the FTA.

What gives? We know the world isn’t supposed to be black and white, but there’s got to be more to this story. Why did the villain turn hero?

The American Public Transportation Association is a neat resource. Their statistics page is one of the best single clearinghouses for transit ridership data in North America. They also have a handy illustration of why transportation is so important to environmentalism. Being a transit advocacy agency, APTA focuses on carbon emissions reductions that can be had by commuting via transit in place of driving, but it doesn’t take much mental extrapolation to imagine what additional gains could be had by living in a walkable neighborhood.

A couple of their graphics:

Thanks to CommuterPageBlog for the heads up.

Within the last week Metrorail has recorded its third and fourth highest ridership days in the history of the system. Although it was sporting events, cherry blossoms and the Pope’s visit that tipped things over the edge, the real story is simply that more people than ever are using transit for their day to day needs. Go Metro!

A shoulder bus lane in Minneapolis

Now this is the kind of Bus Rapid Transit system we can wholeheartedly support.

WMATA chairman Chris Zimmerman’s proposal to allow buses to use roadway shoulders as exclusive lanes during periods of heavy traffic is absolutely inspired. It could markedly improve bus service on 100 miles of our region’s largest roads, it costs virtually nothing since it uses infrastructure already in place, and it’s not being billed as anything it can’t be (like the equivalent of rail). It is, in short, an easy thing we can do to make sure buses don’t have to sit with cars in traffic jams.

Ron Kirby, director of transportation at MWCOG (and a guy with whom BeyondDC usually agrees), doesn’t think the idea is worthwhile because the benefits would be relatively modest. He says not all shoulders are wide or strong enough, and even those that are would generally only be safe for marginally higher speeds than clogged traffic.

But see, the fact that this is a marginal benefit is kind of the point. Zimmerman isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s just trying to do what he can to make what we’ve got better, for virtually no cost. This is one of a multitude of little things that we can do to make transit service just a little bit better. And why shouldn’t we? A slight benefit is better than no benefit, and if you manage to string together a bunch of slight benefits, pretty soon you’re making a major difference. This sort of thinking is exactly the reason WMATA brought CEO John Catoe to Washington from Los Angeles. Under his stewardship LA made a lot of improvements like this to its bus system, and they increased efficiency by a pretty whopping 25%.

BeyondDC has long maintained that BRT can be a valuable way to “do buses right”, as long as it’s not used as an excuse to stop building rail. This proposal gets it exactly right.

In his book The High Cost of Free Parking author Donald Shoup persuasively argues that no parking is really free, that the hidden costs of “free” parking outweigh the benefits, and that our cities would be better off if the enormous veiled subsidies propping up ostensibly free parking were eliminated, or funneled towards more productive goals. The DC Council must be familiar with the work, or at least the concept, because they are considering a $25 / month tax on every free commuter parking space in the city. Parking at residences, transit stations and shops would be unaffected, as would for-pay parking, but any employer currently subsidizing its employees’ driving habits with a free space would face new charges. Even if the initiative fails to discourage many drivers, at least someone other than taxpayers will be footing part of the bill for “free” parking.

Councilmen Jim Graham and Phil Mendelson, co-sponsors of the bill, should be commended for showing the sort of progressive leadership our cities need if they are to climb out of the automobile-induced funk in which they’ve been stuck for 50 years, and which has resulted in our country being at the mercy of foreign oil exporters. Graham and Mendelson’s prudence is particularly glaring when compared to the populist pandering of presidential hopeful John McCain, whose plan to suspend the federal gas tax would have the primary effect of encouraging consumption. The feels-good-but-ultimately-counterproductive plan would make all our oil and transportation problems worse. It would be a step backward at exactly the time we should be sprinting forward. It’s the latest indication that McCain isn’t the logical, independent thinker he purports to be, and that no matter his foreign policy pedigree, he has little idea how to run a country.

By the way: Cutting the gas tax would take money directly out of the federal transportation budget, forcing cuts to funding for new projects. Considering McCain’s anti-rail record, it’s not hard to guess where those cuts would be made if he’s elected. Anything but a moderate when it comes to transportation, McCain considers rail “pork” and says he will not negotiate over his desire to shut down Amtrak. Transit advocates are calling him worse than Bush.

First walk-up on the left was hers

When Jane Jacobs wrote her seminal work on walkable urbanism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she lived on an upper floor of a humble walk-up in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. BeyondDC happened to be in that part of Manhattan last December, so we took the opportunity to make a quick pilgrimage. The spot is, after all, just a little bit holy.

The handful of photos we snapped are available to view.

Fight for the cause, Al.

Hey Al,

We were impressed by An Inconvenient Truth and pleased when Barack Obama said earlier this week that if elected he’d offer you a cabinet job. Truth be told, we’d probably have voted for you in February’s primary if you’d been running.

BeyondDC is your kind of people, Al. We like you. We like what you stand for.

When we heard about your latest operation, the We Can Solve It campaign, we clicked over excitedly to read the latest news and sign up to do our part. Unfortunately, when we got there our initial excitement gave way to disappointment. You spend plenty of time talking about techno wizardry and new sources of energy, but we pored over your solutions page and find nary a mention of anything about changing our gluttonous driving-based lifestyle. You have a whole section titled Cutting fuel costs on the road, but in the entire piece the message “drive less” is nowhere to be found. Tucked way down deep below whole chapters about minor subjects like light bulbs, properly inflated tires, and residential air filters, there’s a single sentence about public transportation and a passing reference to walking to work, but that’s the extent – a single sentence and a passing reference. Nowhere on the entire We Can Solve It site is there any mention about living in a walkable, urban community. Nothing about the damage caused by sprawl. Searches on your site for “transit“, “walkable“, “downtown” and “suburban” come up completely blank.

Look, we get that you’re a politician trying to muster people behind a new idea, and we get that BeyondDC’s particular pet issue isn’t the sole solution to this country’s environmental woes, but for goodness sake it’s certainly a major part of the equation. Our auto-oriented lifestyles are the primary reason Americans pollute so much more than our first world cousins in Europe, so a shift to urban living is probably the single best thing anyone can do for the environment.

We’re not asking you to redesign your whole campaign, just to add a paragraph here and there addressing the tough-but-important issues of sprawl and urbanism. All that stuff you say about light bulbs and air filters is well and good, and the stuff you say about wind power is great, but please Al, say this also: Moving to the city is good for the environment.

We need you on this one, Al. Don’t let us down.

Rather than joining the We campaign, BeyondDC encourages readers to send them email noting this mountain-sized hole in their agenda, and asking them to update their rhetoric.

In 2004 and 2006 BeyondDC produced photo sets of the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms. This year we figured to show off a more local setting, thus our tour/gallery of Dumbarton Oaks. The private park in Georgetown doesn’t have as many actual cherry trees as we’d hoped, but the 19th Century gardens are so stunningly gorgeous that it really doesn’t matter. If you haven’t visited, we highly suggest it.