Approved in Bethesda, and not a moment too soon.

Montgomery County’s Planning Board last week approved a 500-unit 18-story apartment building in downtown Bethesda (pictured at right). They had to approve the building quickly, because the Board is legally mandated to enact this month a building moratorium in downtown Bethesda. Montgomery County, it turns out, has an adequate public facilities ordinance that halts approval of new development any time crowding is predicted in the public schools.

In other words, Montgomery County has enacted into law a regulation that requires growth to be pushed away from existing, dense, transit-accessible locations like downtown Bethesda, and towards… well… anywhere else. Nothing about a public facilities ordinance stops growth; it merely sends it further away, to somewhere less urban, less well-served by existing infrastructure, and less capable of handling development.

Isn’t that the exact opposite of Smart Growth?

If Maryland is really serious about focusing investment and growth into places like downtown Bethesda, and for goodness sake the state should be, then public facilities ordinances that result in nonsense moratoria smack in the heart of the best places for development will have to be the first thing to go.

Strike this garbage law from the books, Maryland, and do it soon.

WMATA’s NextBus system is up and running, just days after the launch of DC Circulator’s Where’s My Bus application. This brings the current list of regional bus systems with available real time arrival information to:

• WMATA MetroBus
• DC Circulator
• PG County TheBus
• Howard County Transit
• Fairfax CUE
• NIH Campus Shuttle
• Arlington ART (available at many stops, but not online)

How long until Ride-On, Connector, and the other suburban systems get on-board? For that matter, what about VRE and MARC (MARC is covered)?

Infrastructurist interviews William Lind, conservative champion of transit.

This does not have to be a partisan issue.

Recently seen on PostSecret.

Driving is not a basic right guaranteed to all. Cars are not the only legitimate form of transportation. Deaths and injuries by car are not simply the price we pay for living in contemporary civilization. It’s time to adopt Vulnerable User Regulations, and codify into law that no, drivers do not in fact own the road.

Popular or interesting twitter posts from the last week. Obviously I’m still experimenting with the format for this.

From BeyondDC: @beyonddc 68% of trips to/from metrorail are walking. #factfriday @beyonddc At TPB presentation by CSX. CSX wants to run double stack freight trains to increase capacity. Would result in more slots for MARC/VRE. @beyonddc What WMATA really needs is for transit operating to get the same level of support from feds/state as highway maintenance. @RayLaHood @beyonddc Best remaining big American train stations, IMO: 1) Union, DC 2) Grand Central, NY 3) 30th St, Philly 4) South, Boston 5) Union, Cincinnati @beyonddc shopping in hampden, hon

From Others: @jdland DDOT launches “Where’s My Bus”? for Circulators–go to http://circulator.dc.gov from phone/PDA to find next bus coming to your location. #fb @infrastructure2 AASHTO’s John Horsley says US has to raise the gas tax http://tinyurl.com/lv4m7h @Worldchanging Large Majority in U.S. Supports Regulation of CO2, Poll Shows http://tinyurl.com/lrwkcm @DC_Mud Eastern Market Re-Opens Tomorrow, Street Fest to Follow…http://tiny.cc/CD1z4 @T4America Obama: There is no longer a question about whether the jobs and industries of the 21st cent. will be centered around clean, renewable energy

Avent responds to the height/density debate. The crux of our disagreement seems to be that Avent wants to put more of the growth in downtown proper, which is the one place in our region that can’t get more dense without more height. Meanwhile, I’m happy with growth anywhere that’s urban, walkable, and well-served by transit. Avent sees downtown proper as the most urban, walkable, and transit-accessible place in the region, while I see potential for other parts of the city to become equally so if more infill took place there.

To support putting more growth downtown rather than elsewhere in the city, Avent’s main arguments are that 1) there are few opporunities near the core to transition from low or medium to high density, and places like Brookland will never be upzoned sufficiently because their existing character is not supportive of tall buildings, and 2) there’s no other place in the metro area with downtown’s transit coverage, so downtown is where we can best put transit-oriented development.

The first point is a bit odd, since he’s suggesting that “existing character” should be a factor in places like Brookland but not downtown, and also because in my original post I offered several downtown-adjacent locations that are ripe for redevelopment, have tremendous potential capacity, and aren’t full of single-family houses. While it may be true that getting political buy-in to redvelop East Potomac Park, National Airport, the Pentagon’s parking lots, and Bolling Air Force Base would be difficult, it would certainly be no more difficult (and probably less so) than getting political buy-in to raise downtown’s height limit. I will clarify that outside of downtown I wouldn’t necessary oppose taller buildings. Where raising the height limit can help to spur development in underdeveloped parts of the city, I fully support raising the height limit.

Avent’s second point, that downtown has the best transit service, is true today, but it ignores two key issues: That we have a lot of underused capacity around many outlying Metro stations that could be used more efficiently at much less cost than expanding capacity downtown, and that with existing transit capacity downtown topping out anyway we will soon be faced with the choice of where and how to expand the system. Avent didn’t dispute my contention that a grid-like transit network is better for residents who both live and work in the city than a single-hub commuter-oriented system focused on getting people in/out of one small area, so I assume there’s no disagreement there. If our downtown capacity is tight but we have excess elsewhere, and if investing in more capacity elsewhere would produce a better result than investing in more capacity downtown, why focus on downtown?

Long story short: Our city is going to change one way or another. Given the choice of how to change it, I would prefer to adopt a plan that retains downtown’s special character and brings the rest of the city up to its level, rather than a plan that would produce a really great and dense downtown, but would leave the rest of the city to a less dense, less mixed-use, less urban fate. Maybe some day we will have to raise the height limit, but given the current availability of drastically underused land near the core, availability that absolutely does exist, raising the height limit today would be a bad move.

Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent both make the excellent point that since the District is the greenest part of the metropolitan area, the greenest thing it can do is work to increase its share of metropolitan jobs and people. On that point they’re totally correct. The best way to be more green is to get more people living and working in dense, walkable, and mixed-use places. Both Yglesias and Avent get off track, however, when they go on to suggest that the best way to accomplish that goal would be to raise the District’s height limit downtown.

The issue is that “dense” and “tall” aren’t the synonyms that Yglesias and Avent think they are.

There are two big reasons why tall buildings don’t necessarily equate to dense buildings:

1. Tall buildings almost always end up wasting vast amounts of space to oversized plazas and setbacks. If one compares aerial images of say, Ballston and Dupont Circle, it is easy to see that even though Ballston is fully urban and “built out” in its center, there are massive gaps in the urban fabric as compared with Dupont. This effect doesn’t stop at plazas; taken to an unfortunately frequent extreme it often results in cities where land owners think nothing of achieving the same density by building twice as tall and leaving half their land for parking. When land isn’t at a premium, there’s no reason to conserve it.
2. Tall buildings are difficult to modify. Avent makes the excellent point that it’s counterproductive to prevent large rowhouses from being subdivided into smaller apartments because subdividing them increases the number of units and therefore increases density. He’s right, but that sort of thing is much more difficult and rare at the elevator building scale than at the rowhouse scale, which means that elevator buildings are more likely to keep their original number of units over time rather than increase them. Since large new buildings almost always have to be “luxurious” in order to justify their construction costs, they’re almost always built with a lower number of expansive interior units rather than a higher number of small units. This means that generally speaking, tall buildings have fewer units on a per-square-foot basis than short buildings.

Examples of the non-synonym-ness of dense and tall abound. Ballston versus Dupont is one, but the quintessential may be Paris and its 11th arrondissement neighborhood. The 11th is the densest neighborhood in Europe and is comparable to the densest neighborhoods in New York. The vast majority of its buildings are shorter than those in downtown Washington. Very few are as short as two or three stories, but virtually all fall squarely in the category of midrises rather than highrises. Paris as a whole, for the record, is the densest city in the world outside of Asia, and except for La Défense (which only has about 1/3 the office space of downtown Washington) is almost entirely a midrise city.

Theoretically the two big problems with tall buildings listed above might be solvable with good regulations, but why bother? When you can achieve densities of over 100, 000 people per square mile (such as those in the 11th) without buildings over 10 stories, why go to the trouble of trying to reinvent modern architecture and zoning? It’s just not necessary.

So far I’ve been talking mostly about residential density as opposed to job density. It is definitely possible to get drastically higher residential densities without increasing the height limit, but what about job density? It depends on where we’re talking. To get higher job density downtown, then yeah, we’d probably need taller buildings, but is that really what we need? “Downtown” isn’t a synonym for “central city” any more than tall is a synonym for dense. In fact, we’ve got buckets of underused land all over the central city just waiting to be redeveloped. In addition to places currently planned for office infill like RFK, Navy Yard, NoMa and Poplar Point, we’ve got the likes of that useless golf course in East Potomac Park and the acres upon acres of parking lot surrounding the Pentagon. And then there’s National Airport and Bolling Air Force Base. Ho boy! Imagine if we redeveloped those chunks of mostly empty land. They could *each* accommodate as much office space as we’ve got downtown now, just with midrises. All together, without going more than about a two mile radius from the Washington Monument or raising the height limit one inch, there is capacity to probably quadruple the amount of office space currently in the District of Columbia. If we kept the height limit downtown but raised it in Anacostia and Arlington, then that potential would increase even more.

So if it’s possible to drastically expand the density of the inner city in either way, skyscrapers downtown or filled-in gaps, which would be better for the city? While the skyscrapers downtown option would create a central office center surrounded by bedroom communities, each needing its own set of services, the fill-in-the-gaps option would create a larger number of fully mixed-use neighborhoods in which office and residential uses share services more efficiently. Both options require massive new investments in transit infrastructure, but while the skyscraper option would tend to support a single-hub commuter-oriented system, the infill option would support a more robust multiple-destination network more conducive to also serving non-commuting trips. While the skyscraper option would require massive inefficiencies in the form of tear-downs of existing downtown buildings (tearing down a 10-story building in order to build a 40-story one effectively only nets you a new 30-story building), the infill option would displace much lower-efficiency uses. While the skyscraper option would be a political nightmare unlikely to be well supported, virtually everybody wants infill at RFK (though that East Potomac Park suggestion may rile up some opposition).

Long story short: If we don’t need skyscrapers to be much more dense (we don’t) and there are good reasons to spread office growth around the central part of the region (there are), then why raise the height limit? (We shouldn’t.)

PS: For the record, I’ve got absolutely nothing against tall buildings. For five years I thoroughly enjoyed living on one of the highest floors in one of Ballston’s tallest buildings, and as the screencap of BeyondDC circa 2001 posted yesterday illustrates, this very website was originally created to track skyscraper development. I’m a fan of the skyscraper, in fact. They have definite pros and are without a doubt part of what makes an interesting, vital city. I think we should have much taller buildings in places like Silver Spring and Arlington, and fully support any proposals to make that happen. But it is simply false that tall buildings are a requirement for density, and false that the District must remove its height limit in order to accommodate growth.

BeyondDC was introduced to the internet on March 2, 2001. This is what it looked like at the time:

My eyes! The pain!

Yesterday’s Metro accident was terrible, obviously. Any time innocent people are hurt or killed it’s a tragedy. But lest this disaster be used for political gain by transit opponents, let’s take a moment to compare modes.

This incident is only the second time in Metrorail’s history that a train accident has resulted in fatalities. The other accident was in 1982. Together the two accidents combined have resulted in a total of 12 deaths, averaging out to 0.36 deaths by rail accident per year since the system opened in 1976.

According to the US Census, in 2006 alone (the latest year for which data is available) there were 36 auto traffic fatalities in the District of Columbia, 651 in Maryland, and 963 in Virginia. In 2005 DC had 48, MD had 614, and VA had 947.

What happened on the Red Line was a terrible accident, but it would be the height of intellectual dishonesty to cite it as a reason not to ride Metro. Metro is safe.

Update 6/24/09: Using slightly less simple but probably more accurate math (though still very back-of-the-napkin), BeyondDC estimates that Metrorail is approximately 34 times more safe than driving. See the comments for specifics.

Pronunciation confusion: Pronounce it with only three syllables, so orn-jing-ton rather than the orangutan-like four syllable or-anj-ing-ton.

By now most readers have probably already seen Arlington: The Rap, the hilarious spoof that lovingly pokes fun at Washington’s even-more yuppie-filled western extension. The rap isn’t really about Arlington, though; it’s about that specific portion of Arlington lying along Metro’s Orange line that over the past generation has morphed from sleepy suburb to central city destination. The rap got me thinking: That part of Arlington needs a unique name. People talk about it all the time. Why not give it a single identifier?

“Arlington”, after all, refers to the whole 26 square mile county, from Chain Bridge on the north to Four Mile Run on the south, and west almost to Leesburg Pike. “North Arlington” also won’t do, since it refers as much to the rolling suburbs north of Route 29 as it does to the Orange Line Corridor. “Orange Line Corridor” itself is too much of a mouthful, as are the other frequent substitutes, “Wilson Boulevard Corridor” and “Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor”. Even shortening to “R-B” or “R-B Corridor” leaves much to be desired.

But how about “Orangington”? It spells a little awkward, but it sounds verbally clean, fits the blankington scheme used by Washington, Arlington and Shirlington, and the connection between the neighborhoods in question and Metro’s Orange Line is so strong that it’s immediately obvious what the name refers to. Normally I’d be hesitant to try and force a contrived name on unwanting locals (Penn Quarter and NoMa, anyone?), but in this case there does seem to be a need and the name does seem to be pretty organic. Indeed, I’ve been dropping it in casual conversation lately and although I get some “I’ve never heard that” comments, everyone I’ve spoken to has understood the reference immediately. It seems a natural moniker for an area that increasingly needs one.

So how about it, folks? Orangington from now on?

Cross-posted to Greater Greater Washington.