Click to enlarge

The image at right is a proposed tower that would occupy a chunk of the underused plaza above the Bethesda Metro station. At BeyondDC we’re not generally big fans of glass curtain wall architecture (not enough pedestrian-scaled details), but this case may be an exception. This part of downtown Bethesda is dominated by relatively heavy-looking buildings with boxy character and concrete facades, so a taller but lighter-looking landmark that gets noticeably narrower at the top could be striking. In any case, the architectural variety will be welcome. One can’t always trust renderings, but this one looks pretty darn nice.

On the subject of greater Bethesda, DCmud reports that the first building in North Bethesda Center (aka the TOD at White Flint station) is complete and will open on Sunday.

With improvements in downtowns Bethesda, Rockville, and Gaithersburg, new TODs at North Bethesda Center, Twinbook Station, and Watkins Mill Town Center, and the ongoing Rockville Pike Master Plan, the MD 355 corridor in Montgomery County is looking quite impressive indeed.

Update: (June 13) Montgomery County turned down the Bethesda tower, bowing to complaints from adjacent property owners who said it would block the views from their penthouse offices. The county did, however, leave open the possibility that another design could be approved.

Last week BeyondDC wrote about the fabulous Amtrak bill currently before Congress. The bill won’t just fund Amtrak for several more years, it will have specific effects on transportation in the Washington/Baltimore region.

President Bush is threatening to veto it, and wants to end Amtrak subsidy altogether.

In this era of high gas prices, national dependence on foreign oil, and record-breaking rail ridership, it’s embarrassing that the President is so out of touch.

Update: (June 11, morning) s GGW notes, the House passed the bill 227-187, which is a solid majority but is well short of the 290 votes needed to be veto-proof.

Update: (June 11, afternoon) The aforementioned vote was in regards to rules regulating the House’s vote on the bill, not the bill itself. Voting for the bill itself should happen some time today.

Update: (June 12) The House passed the bill by a vote of 311 for versus 104 against, enough to override a veto should the President make good on his threat. There were several amendments to the bill, including one authorizing $1.5 billion for WMATA maintenance. For more details on that amendment and on the $60 million allocated for a new tunnel in Baltimore, see § 104 and 106. Yet to be seen is how the WMATA amendment will affect Senator Coburn’s roadblock.

The good: DDOT is studying installation of exclusive transit lanes in Georgetown. Short of spending untold billions on a new subway or ruining Georgetown’s character with an el, the only way to provide decent transit service to M and Wisconsin will be to dedicate part of the surface streets. For years naysayers have insisted that M Street isn’t wide enough to accommodate transit, and that all six lanes of it (including parking) have to be given over to cars at all times, lest the world end. Good on DDOT for considering that maybe 17% (one sixth) of a street isn’t too much to ask in exchange for serving by transit one of the city’s most walkable neighborhoods.

The bad: Virginia’s Supreme Court on Friday struck a blow to the Tysons Metro project, reviving a lawsuit filed by transit opponents that had been struck down by a lower court. At issue is whether it was constitutional for Governor Kaine to transfer the Dulles Toll Road to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority without General Assembly Action. A Circuit Court originally ruled that the state was protected from the lawsuit by sovereign immunity, but the Supreme Court disagreed and on Friday ordered the Circuit Court to take up the case again and decide it on its own merit. The Airports Authority plans to raise fares on the toll road in order to provide construction funds for the Silver Line, so a negative ruling by the Circuit Court could hurt or delay Virginia’s ability to pay its share of construction costs.

The ugly: Homeowners in a Bethesda neighborhood are upset that Montgomery County wants to locate a group home for people with disabilities on a piece of land the locals had hoped would be used to expand an existing park. The fact that for years residents in the Hillmead neighborhood opposed the previous landowner’s plan to build four houses on the property suggests these folks suffer from a sense of misplaced entitlement. They think they deserve a bigger luxury more than other people deserve a basic human need. Shameful enough when targeting the sort of upper middle class family likely to buy one of the originally proposed houses, but when targeting the disabled? Disgraceful.

A facepalm moment if ever there was one

ghetto (noun)
any segregated mode of living or working that results from bias or stereotyping; “the relative security of the gay ghetto”; “no escape from the ghetto of the typing pool”
– Princeton University WordNet dictionary.

Cordoning off dangerous neighborhoods is how you create ghettos. Basic human nature dictates that most people subconsciously imitate those around them to avoid social conflict. Put a person in a mixed neighborhood where crime isn’t tolerated, and that person will more often than not lead a straight life. But put them in a place where crime is a way of life, and that same person learns that crime is the natural way of things, and goes bad. Of course there’s more to it and it’s not true for everyone, but nonetheless there is a clear and unmistakable pattern. This is why most affordable housing programs now focus on spreading low income housing around town rather than focusing all of it into a handful of gigantic housing projects.

Every city planner in the country, and most people with common sense, know that as a rule, ghettos are bad for the city. Especially ghettos of crime. Nobody in their right mind would try and create one.

It boggles the mind, then, that Mayor Fenty and Police Chief Lanier want to do exactly that, and create a ghetto in the heart of Washington.

Never mind that closing off entire sections of the city to people that don’t live there is blatantly unconstitutional, it’s a stupid, stupid idea. Even if it’s just for ten days, you’re sending a message that legitimate citizens, business and money have no place in that part of the city.

Don’t be surprised if legitimate citizens, business and money heed the message.

“We taught our kids how to ride their bikes on the trail… If they swerved into a train …”

“The students said their track team, and other athletic teams throughout Bethesda and Chevy Chase, use the trail for practice runs – and for walking to school. “We’ll probably have to drive to school” if light rail is built, said [one student]”

Purple line opponents staged a march last weekend along a portion of the rail right-of-way. As the quotes above illustrate, the propaganda brigade was in full force, and in particularly misleading form.

Responding, in reverse order:

• With light rail, the trail will still exist and will still be perfectly usable for track team practice. Building transit does not mean the trail will go away. They will be adjacent to each other.
• Yes, transit options that preserve the trail do exist, but the Jones Bridge Road alignment isn’t one of them, and opponents are even less interested in seeing those options built than the trail alignment.
• Cross sections show that on the master plan alignment there will be fences between trains and trail to stop anyone on a bike from swerving into a train. The cross sections also show that there will be no such fences on the Jones Bridge Road alignment.

With every event staged, Purple line opponents expose themselves more and more as mere NIMBYs. How much longer are we supposed to take them seriously?

Construction in Crystal City. Click to enlarge.

Transit types around the region have long lusted after a more substantial regional rail network. Why can’t MARC and VRE run trains 7 days a week and at all hours of the day, rather than just at rush hour? Why can’t they be more like New York’s LIRR or Chicago’s Metra, for example?

Actually there are a bunch of reasons why that’ll be hard, but none are bigger than the simple fact that we don’t have enough track capacity to run both freight trains and more passenger trains. MARC and VRE run almost exclusively on track owned by the freight companies, which have their own problems. The only exception is MARC’s Penn Line, which runs on track owned by Amtrak and doesn’t have to compete with freight. It’s no coincidence then that MARC’s Penn Line is by far the most substantial regional line in the region.

So if trains are going to be added, if VRE is to extend to Richmond and if MARC is going to cross the river to Crystal City, we need more track capacity. We particularly need more capacity between Alexandria and L’Enfant, where all rail coming or going through DC is funneled onto a single double track segment, owned by CSX Railroad.

There’s good news.

A couple of weeks ago BeyondDC attended the Virginia Transit Association’s annual conference, held in Crystal City. Richard Layman of Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space was there too and wrote about the conference extensively (see posts on May 20 and 21). In between sessions BeyondDC bummed around Crystal City, taking photos for our transit library. We wandered up to the VRE station and found, much to our surprise, construction!

We went back to the conference and asked around a bit, then did some digging online, and it turns out CSX is building a third track along that very segment between Alexandria and L’Enfant. The third track will be used exclusively by freight, but its presence means the original two tracks can be used more by passenger rail. The only remaining two-track portion will be the bridge over the Potomac. Capacity is going to go up by 50% on the single most serious bottleneck in Washington’s entire rail network.

Naturally there’s more to be done before VRE can run like the Penn Line or extend to Richmond, but nonetheless this is a major step forward.

One of the Arlington Two

Zoning came about in the early 20th Century with a fairly limited objective – to reign in the industrial nuisances that were making life in cities of the day unbearable. It all started in 1916 when New York began regulating the shape of skyscrapers, and things really took off ten years later when the US Supreme Court upheld Euclid, Ohio’s use-segregating code. Once the precedent was set, zoning began to get a whole lot more restrictive. Over the ensuing decades as suburban life took hold, alternatives were gradually zoned out of American cities. Read the zoning code from any random town and odds are there are large swaths of that town where the Beaver Cleaver lifestyle is literally the only one permitted by law.

Sometime in the 1980s a backlash against such exclusionary zoning began, and under the names New Urbanism and Smart Growth that backlash has been gaining strength ever since. Progressive localities around the country have been re-writing rules left and right in an attempt to level a playing field that for years was more like a cliff face than a slope.

For the most part that battle has been fought to make urban legal again in a suburban world. Little thought or effort have gone into the question of where rural belongs in the equation, except to the extent that, y’know, rural areas shouldn’t be encroached upon by sprawl.

Suddenly though, Arlington, one of America’s most progressive rule re-writing places, is being faced with a decidedly rural problem. In April a homeowner in a suburban neighborhood near Ballston bought a couple of goats. Yeah, goats. The idea was the goats would keep the grass trim, provide fertilizer, and would be friendly family pets. Problem is, zoning in their neighborhood doesn’t allow “livestock” within 100 feet of the street, and goats count as livestock. The county says the goats have to go.

The homeowners are appealing, but they’re just one case. Similar restrictions are in most zoning ordinances, and have been for a long time. For several decades it’s simply been an assumption that farm animals don’t belong in quiet suburban subdivisions.

But if that’s the case, maybe it’s time to question such assumptions. What’s so bad about livestock? Just what exactly are we trying to accomplish by making ownership of such animals illegal? What makes a fenced-in goat more insufferable than a barking dog? If goats are quieter and less smelly than a gas mower, why is the former banned and the latter allowed? Horses are less noxious than motorcycles, and chickens less troublesome than an early rising neighbor with a woodworking hobby and a power saw. If noise and smell are the issues, why the loopholes for dogs, gas mowers and motorcycles? If noise and smell aren’t at issue, what is?

The answer is identity. Animals aren’t permitted even though loud, smelly motors are in many places around the country because at some point in their history a lot of places around the country decided they wanted an exclusive suburban character, and some things don’t fit that character no matter how inoffensive they are on their own terms.

But as the price of gas makes our suburban habit more and more difficult to sustain, alternatives are going to pop up with increasing regularity. Some of them will be technically illegal within the framework of our existing suburban laws, but does that mean they should be dismissed, or should the laws be changed? As time goes by jurisdictions around the country are going to be faced with the difficult question of just what character their communities should take, and we as a society are going to have to make tough decisions about just which values are really non-negotiable.

BeyondDC doesn’t necessarily have the answer. We wouldn’t mind if a neighbor owned a few goats, but then the prospect of living in a detached house neighborhood doesn’t appeal to us in the first place, so we’re not worried about protecting that lifestyle. What do readers think?