Jim Graham, in a picture from his website.

In 2002 DDOT went through a transit development study that resulted in the decision to build a streetcar in Anacostia. They anticipated opening for revenue service in late 2006.

In April of 2008, after a longer-than-expected planning process, DDOT solicited a construction bid for the project and began to get ready to finally put tracks in the ground.

In July of 2008, DC Councilman Jim Graham took an interest in the streetcar program and stalled progress to ask DDOT some legitimate but six-years-past-due questions about why the Anacostia corridor was selected, and if a better alignment were possible.

About a week ago, DDOT announced it would shift the alignment of the Anacostia line to more directly serve the walkable, densely populated neighborhood core. To do so DDOT shifted a pot of money from its capital construction budget to pay for the longer, more complicated new streetcar alignment.

Now, as GGW reports, late-to-the-party Graham and Council Chairman Vincent Gray have filed a resolution to disapprove the transfer of funds, pending another informational meeting with DDOT that is scheduled for November 7.

Graham says he is in favor of the streetcar and just wants a little oversight, but this is the second time he’s obstructed DDOT with questions DDOT thought were answered years ago. At this point we think it’s fair to ask Graham just what he’s doing, and demand that he allow the streetcar project move forward.

Lots of interesting stuff in the Gazette this week:

• Watkins Mill Town Center waiting for infrastructure. The new urbanist neighborhood in Gaithersburg that will one day be as large as Reston Town Center is chugging along despite the credit crisis, but needs the state of Maryland to finish a long-planned new interchange providing access to I-270, as well as the Corridor Cities Transitway, which will make Watkins Mill a bona fide TOD.

Proposed building elevations at Watkins Mill Town Center
• MD has the right to build the Purple Line through Columbia Country Club. The state of Maryland already owns the swath of land through which the Purple Line will theoretically run, so the state can build whatever it wants on that land. There is a possibility that the state and country club will negotiate a minor land swap to adjust the boundaries of the trail/rail right-of-way, but that remains to be seen.
• Second entrance planned at Medical Center Metro. Thanks to BRAC, thousands of federal workers will soon move from the Walter Reed medical campus in DC to the Naval Hospital campus in Bethesda. WMATA says there will be so many new Metro riders getting off at Medical Center station that a second entrance will be necessary. Nobody has money to build anything yet, but WMATA is going ahead with planning.
• Soccer stadium will be expanded. The SoccerPlex stadium in Germantown will be expanded from its current capacity of 3, 200 to 6, 600 as part of a deal to become the home field of Washington Freedom, a women’s professional soccer team. The stadium is already home to the minor league men’s team Real Maryland, and occasionally plays home to DC United.
• 13 story tower approved in Silver Spring. Downtown Silver Spring will soon be graced by a new office tower. The plans call for murals along the building wall to provide additional visual interest for pedestrians. DCmud has more.

Up until a couple of months ago, when it broke down, BeyondDC operated a no-nonsense development/planning news headline feed. You may be able to see what’s left of it at the top-left of the home page (“DC launched bikesharing”, “Downtown Gaithersburg project”, etc). It looks like the old feed is gone for good, but we could always start up a new one. Do folks care enough for us to go to the trouble?

These ARE allowed on Metro, along with lighters, toothpaste and drink bottles.

Dear Metro,

We’ve read a bit about your new bag search policy, and we’d like to ask how you think it will make us safer. The way we understand it, searches will be random, and anyone can refuse a search at the cost of being denied entry to the system. Given that anyone who is denied entry will be able to simply travel to a different station entrance and try again (hoping not to be randomly selected for a search), we don’t see how this plan will keep dangerous elements off the system. Anyone smart enough to build a bomb will be smart enough to get around this security check.

But whatever. Clearly a fully effective safety deterrent isn’t the point of this policy. We’ll accept it without too much of a fuss if you make up the inconvenience to us in other ways. Nobody minds a 30 second delay if we’re going to be waiting 5 minutes for a train anyway, but there will inevitably come times when your bag search causes riders to miss trains. That’s going to really steam a lot of people, especially at off-peak hours when trains aren’t very frequent. If Metro is going to be instituting a policy that causes riders to miss trains, which this policy will, then we riders demand additional amenities that will make train scheduling easier. Outdoor PIDs at all stations is the absolute least you can do. On top of that, shorter off-peak headways would go a long way towards assuaging unnecessary rider inconvenience. Nobody minds missing a train at rush hour when there’s another just a few seconds behind, but we do mind when the next train is 15 minutes away. Frankly, no one should ever have to wait 15 minutes for a train in a system the size of ours anyway, so you really owe us this one regardless.

So to sum up:

1. Bag searches will not be effective at stopping crime or terrorism.
2. Bag searches will cause riders to miss trains.
3. If you want us to accept this unnecessary inconvenience, make it up to us with outdoor PIDs and shorter off-peak headways.

VDOT is slashing its budget left and right. Its money problems are so severe that not only are capital projects bleeding money, personnel is in big trouble – 2, 000 staff reductions were announced just recently.

Amidst such a severe budgetary crunch, one would think VDOT would triage projects to parse out the luxuries and build the important. BeyondDC wonders then why the Commonwealth insists on moving forward with the I-66 spot improvements project, considering the locality through which the project runs – Arlington – is steadfastly against it.

If we don’t have the money for all the projects we really want, why are we spending so much on one we don’t?

If readers want an answer to that question, or have other questions, attend tonight’s VDOT public hearing on I-66. The meeting is at 7:00 p.m. at Washington-Lee High School, in Ballston.

Say no to parking lots downtown.

We hate to duplicate points already made at other local urbanist blogs, but look: it is simply not acceptable for one of downtown’s prime corners to be occupied by a parking lot.

At the corner of K Street and Connecticut Avenue a developer tore down a perfectly good (if old) office building and planned to construct a new, more luxurious one. Unfortunately, the company to which they planned to lease most of the office space says they can’t move in until 2013, so the developer wants to use the land for parking during the interim years.

The corner of K and CT is one of downtown’s busiest pedestrian corners, and is right next to two of Metro’s busiest stations. If Washington’s expansive downtown has a single center, this corner lays as strong a claim as any other. Facing Farragut Square and with the visual vista towards Dupont Circle, it’s also one of downtown’s most beautiful spots. It is not the place for a use that gives over land to cars, kills sidewalk vitality, and flat out uglies up the city.

There should be no surface parking lots anywhere in the central city, but proposing one at a corner like K and CT is an affront to good urbanism. We’re sorry, but the answer has to be no. As Ryan Avent says, “you break it, you buy it”. The developer should go ahead and build the office building now, charging a reduced rent to whoever they can find to fill the space. If that’s impractical, they should throw up some temporary retail storefronts and keep the sidewalk alive. Or an outdoor market, or an art display, or something.

The only thing as bad as a parking lot would be a grassy lawn. We don’t need another lawn right across the street from Farragut Square, and we certainly don’t need the inevitable public relations headache when time would come to tear the grass out. Bottom line: To function correctly, cities need stuff. There should be stuff at the city’s main corner.

As if public transit doesn’t have enough money problems in this country, the ongoing national economic crisis is adding a new twist: Thanks to federal rule changes, financial deals that WMATA and several other transit agencies are a part of have become invalidated, and the banks involved are demanding immediate payments of millions of dollars, hurting transit service. WaPo breaks it down in this article. The most interesting part, besides Metro’s CFO calling out the banks in question for taking “their greed out unnecessarily on public transit”, is that apparently this all began because the FTA encouraged transit agencies to help banks find questionable tax shelters.

It doesn’t take an economist to know that this stinks, on multiple levels.

A DC streetcar, running in the Czech Republic.

GGW is reporting that Jim Graham’s three-month-old questions about the Anacostia streetcar alignment have finally been answered, and that as a result DDOT is extending the planned route into the densely populated core of Anacostia, via MLK Avenue.

The extension is absolutely right from a planning perspective, so that’s good news. The bad news is that nobody (at least nobody among the public) knows whether this will mean yet another delay. DC’s first streetcar was originally supposed to begin operating in 2006, and here we are two years later, still in the planning stages. Also, as BeyondDC noted back in July, we still don’t understand why it took so long for Graham et al to give the streetcar project oversight in the first place. The old route was bad, but the time to argue over it was really long past when Graham finally stepped up to make his objections.

Anyway, we have a better alignment now; hopefully we’ll have some tracks relatively soon. In the mean time, our already built-and-paid-for streetcars will continue to run the streets of Ostrava, Czech Republic.

Hot.

BONUS: Unrelated to streetcars, but in other transit news, the first set of WMATA’s fancy new buses will begin operating on the U8 line this Monday.

Maryland transit project development chief Michael D. Madden says all the proposed Purple Line options, including the most expensive light rail one, meet federal cost effectiveness guidelines.

This means that the Purple Line probably won’t face the same level of FTA scrutiny as Tysons Metro.