The images below and at right are from Moskow Linn Architects’ winning entry in the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture Contest. The idea is to dispense Zipcars in a pez-like automated parking lift, thus providing a large number of share-cars at one location without using a lot of land.

As far as we know this is a concept only; Zipcar has no plans to actually build anything like it. After all, the up-front costs would no doubt be high, if not prohibitive.

On the other hand, if the city is willing to fork out $42 million to subsidize unnecessary parking at DC USA, maybe a real public good like car-sharing has a chance.

Does it make sense for the Federal Transit Administration to force the District to operate a redundant bus network on top of WMATA specifically to ferry one segregated group of bus riders to and from destinations already served by MetroBus?

Does it make sense for the FTA to write regulations for the specific purpose of hurting government transit investments and subsidizing private ones?

Does it make sense for the FTA to outlaw a practice that costs the District $5 million a year, forcing the city to accomplish the same exact objective for $20-25 million per year?

Common sense says no, it does not make sense to do those things. Yet that’s exactly what the FTA is doing.

This from the agency that’s supposed to be helping transit.

Shirlington Station when it was under construction MetroExtra, WMATA’s brand for limited routes

Washington and New York are the only two metropolitan regions in the country in which rail carries more people than buses. In New York that’s because the rail system is so extensive. In Washington it’s partly because we have a good Metro, but also partly because we’ve never given our bus system the support it needs to meet its potential. For a long time buses have been the stepchild of our regional transit network. Sure, they exist, and sure, they carry a lot of riders, but for decades they’ve been largely ignored, and bus facilities have been low quality.

In recent years regional leaders have come around to notice that we’re not using buses as efficiently as we could, and have begun making plans to do something about that. That thinking was one of the reasons WMATA picked bus expert John Catoe as agency CEO in 2007.

This week, two big bus initiatives are coming to fruition. Arlington is opening its new Shirlington station, and WMATA is launching its overhaul of the 30s bus line, the agencies busiest.

Shirlington Station, opened for business on June 25, is the first enclosed bus station in Arlington, and one of a very few in the region. Along with the Columbia Pike streetcar and the Potomac Yard Transitway the station is part of a concerted effort on Arlington’s part to bring quality transit facilities to the more urban parts of the county not served directly by Metro. A climate controlled waiting room with restrooms, a Commuter Store, and an off-street loading area is certainly a big step up from the curb.

WMATA’s 30s line runs across the length of the District on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Avenues and carries more than 20, 000 daily riders. The overhaul of the 30s line, which begins on June 29, will provide local shuttles and cross-town limiteds in addition to the trunk local route currently operating. The limited routes will only stop at a handful of locations, speeding long-distance riders across town much more quickly than the locals. The limiteds, which as WMATA buys new buses will eventually be branded as MetroExtra, are part of a program to provide more rail-like rapid bus service on major corridors. MetroExtra is already running on Georgia Avenue, and we can expect to see it on other trunk corridors in the future. The model is Metro Rapid, a highly successful program in LA that Catoe had a hand in.

Can you ID this train?

Anyone looking for photos of American rail transit should start their search at NYCsubway.org’s outstanding photo library. Their categorized-by-city collection is easy to browse and incredibly thorough.

But that’s strictly business. How about a little fun? At SkyscraperPage a Kansas City photographer has posted 64 unlabelled transit pictures. Can you identify them all? BeyondDC’s answers, a couple of which could be wrong, are available, but try it yourself before peeking.

Says Ryan Avent:

According the Washington Business Journal, the Earth Conservation Corps is suing the District and the federal government over toxic waste at Poplar Point, and lobbying to have the whole Point be a park. As far as I know, the name Earth Conservation Corps is not intended to be ironic.

You see, the development at Poplar Point will be dense and mixed-use. It will be near the center city and transit. In other words, the residents there will have small geographic and carbon footprints. And by helping to satisfy some of the demand for dense, urban living, development there will reduce some of the price pressure on households that pushes them out into the suburbs or away from Washington entirely, to places like Raleigh or Houston. And of course, the land occupied by such households in the suburbs, or in Raleigh or Houston, would be far, far larger than the land at Poplar Point.

Which isn’t to say we need to build on every green space in the District. Parks have value. But so does dense, central city housing. Environmental groups really need to recognize that.

BeyondDC ran into this problem all the time back in our Colorado days, where “density” is a dirty word among so-called environmentalists. But Ryan is spot on – opposing Smart Growth hurts the earth. “Environmentalists” that fight density are *not* doing the environment any favors. And no, “communing with nature” on a big ranchette 50 miles out isn’t friendly to the earth, either.

Click to enlarge

In 2005, to much press, WMATA began wrapping Metro railcars in advertisements. The program seems to have lasted about a year, after which time the wrapped cars disappeared with little notice. BeyondDC, at least, hadn’t seen one in a long time.

Until today. During our commute to work this morning we were greeted by the railcar in the picture at right.

We’re big fans of the wrapped cars. They add color and variety to a Metro system that for everyday users can seem dull and repetitive. We hope the wraps are here to stay this time, and we hope more advertisers take advantage.

Bonus: Melissa Esposito of CommuterPageBlog sends us this photo of her morning commute’s Metro car, featuring grey rubber floors rather than carpet.

Greyhound’s NoMa terminal

DDOT is planning to force all intercity buses that currently load on city streets, including the Chinatown buses and BoltBus, to abandon their current stops and instead use a single “bus zone” in Southwest, near L’Enfant Metro.

We’ll add our voice to the chorus emerging online decrying this as a truly awful idea.

The idea of a single terminal for intercity buses isn’t so bad, it’s the specific location of this proposal that’s the problem. Intercity transportation terminals belong in the most central and active part of the city because such terminals both feed off of and add to the vitality of that part of the city. Banishing them to forever empty L’Enfant Plaza hurts everyone. If there were a plan to use buses to generate vitality in L’Enfant we might get behind that, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.

The worst part about this proposal is that we should know better. The city can’t wait to get Greyhound out of its terminal in NoMa and into Union Station because everybody knows the back side of NoMa isn’t a central or lively enough place for a major intercity transportation depot. Why duplicate a situation we already know is undesirable?

Are we using these efficiently?

At CommuterPageBlog there is a post titled The Last Mile in which an Arlington resident who lives a little over one mile from East Falls Church Metro discusses transit’s inability to get him all the way home, and how that is a major detriment to his use of transit. The author, Steve Offutt, suggests PRT as a solution to the “last mile” problem, claiming that while PRT can’t replace transit’s “line hauls”, it could supplement transit on a more local scale.

BeyondDC isn’t optimistic about the practicality of PRT, but the question of the last mile did get us thinking. Is there a way to use existing infrastructure to accomplish Offutt’s goal? Cyclists will tell you they have the solution, and cycling should absolutely be made easier, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Of course there are buses, but low density neighborhoods can’t support enough of them to justify convenient headways. Taking a taxi every day is expensive, and only worth the time if you can hail one directly rather than call and wait.

But what if taxis worked a little differently? What if there was a fleet of taxicabs outside each Metro station that provided government-subsidized $1 rides anywhere within a strictly defined service area, perhaps a mile and a half in radius? Since such cabs would only be permitted to operate inside the service area they’d be making only short trips and so would circulate in and out of availability very quickly. Calling one for dispatch would be practical since the dispatched cab could arrive almost instantly. Since the service would be government operated, drivers could be paid a guaranteed salary rather than work off fares, which would eliminate the temptation to give preference to passengers looking for a high-paying long-distance trip. Such a system might also be useful to urbanites running errands to the grocery store, for example.

What sort of investment would this take from the local government? How many riders might such a system carry? Could this reduce car ownership in low-density neighborhoods as effectively as car-sharing does in high-density places? We don’t know any of those answers. This could be an awful idea. But a wiki search tells us that “share taxis” are common around the world, and that “dollar vans” operate in New York, so there’s some precedent for similar systems.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Has it been studied? Should it be? What do folks think?

Each year the Transportation Planning Board adopts a Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) that outlines programmed transportation spending in the Washington region for the subsequent six year period. If you want to know what money is currently allocated (or at least officially programmed) for what projects, the TIP is the place to look.

In January the Board approved the 2008-2013 TIP, and last week released for public comment the first draft of the 2009-2014 TIP.

The document is cumbersome and the list of projects long. Most of it is taken up by the fairly mundane – $20 million for a new lane here and $15 million for a collector road there. Mundane, but expensive. That stuff adds up fast. Anyway, below are some of the not-mundane highlights, broken down by locality.

District of Columbia:

• $718 million to reconfigure South Capitol Street and replace the Frederick Douglass Bridge
• $136 million for “Great Streets” programs around the city, including $52 million to reconfigure and install streetcar tracks on H Street
• $91 million for the Union Station Intermodal Transporation Center
• $59 million for “Anacostia Riverwalk” trails
• $55 million for streetcars, including extensions across the Anacostia River
• $51 million for the K Street Transitway
• $6.5 million to finish the Metropolitan Branch trail
• $6 million for water taxis on the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers

Maryland:

• $2.17 billion for the Intercounty Connector
• $74 million for the Purple Line
• $57 million for the Silver Spring Transit Center
• $55 million to build the Montrose Parkway
• $50 million for the Corridor Cities Transitway
• $18 million to improve MARC tracks
• $2 million to study extending the Green Line north to BWI Airport

Virginia:

• $4.5 billion for the Silver Line (both phases)
• $690 million to widen the Beltway and install HOT lanes
• $372 million to convert I-395 HOV lanes to HOT lanes, and to improve bus service in the corridor
• $130 million to widen Routes 1, 29 and 50
• $61 million to widen I-66 in Arlington
• $40 million to build/widen Prince William Parkway
• $17 million for the Columbia Pike streetcar
• $1.5 million for the Potomac Yard busway

We’ve been reading Grand Avenues, a biography of the city planner who designed Washington, DC, Pierre L’Enfant. Naturally the book spends a lot of time discussing said planning, including the interesting tidbit that the founding fathers very nearly named our city Washingtonopolis instead of plain old Washington.

A bit of a mouthful, no doubt, but somehow a little more alluring. There’s something enchanting about Washingtonopolis that isn’t present in Washington. Something a little bit more glamorous. Dare we say it, a touch sexy.

BeyondDC likes. Too bad.