Construction is starting! DDOT is now physically laying tracks for the Anacostia streetcar. The years of false starts and frustration are finally giving way to actual progress.

Construction of tracks on South Capitol Street and Firth Sterling Avenue is expected continue at the rate of about two weeks per block, and to last through December. After that will come construction of the second phase of track along MLK Avenue, and installation of overhead catenary wire and stations. Eventually (who knows when), the streetcar vehicles themselves will be shipped over from Europe. River East blog Barry Farm (Re)Mixed has some photos of construction.

The anticipated opening of the entire Anacostia line remains Autumn 2012, but DDOT chief Gabe Klein says the initial segment may open before then.

For those keeping score at home, it finally appears a sure thing that Anacostia will be home to the DC region’s first modern streetcar. At one time Arlington’s Columbia Pike streetcar seemed closer to reality, but its funding source disappeared in 2008, slowing things down dramatically.

One of DC’s Inekon Trio streetcars on a test run in Ostrava, Czech Republic. Picture from Foto Doprava.

This week offers two good opportunities to walk the walk, as it were:

1. On Tuesday the 22nd it is Car Free Day. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to try alternative transportation, Tuesday is the day.
2. On Wednesday the 23rd the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation will be hosting a public meeting to present alternatives under study for transit improvements to I-66 (pdf). If you think the state should focus on better transit for I-66 rather than road widenings, this is the study you’ve been waiting for.

Not that kind of tiger. Photo by Wesley Hargrave of the UK Daily Mail.

Tuesday, September 15 was the deadline for submittal of applications to the TIGER discretionary grant program, that $1.5 billion pot of stimulus money that USDOT can award to whoever they want. As GGW has covered, the Metropolitan Washington Transportation Planning Board has been putting together a regional transit application. That application was submitted on schedule and will now compete with the thousands of others sent it from around the nation.

Here (pdf) is an overview of the TPB’s application. In the end it includes requests totaling $267 million, broken down into three packages, any of which could theoretically be funded individually:

• Package 1: $204 million for bus priority or BRT improvements to 16 corridors, most notably the K Street and Crystal City / Potomac Yards Transitways.
• Package 2: $13 million for a regional bike-sharing network with a total of 3, 250 bikes (including approximately 1, 000 being procured using other funding sources). The regional network would cover DC, Arlington, Alexandria, the City of Fairfax, and parts of Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties.
• Package 3: $47 million for improvements to three major transit stations, Rosslyn, Medical Center, and Takoma-Langley.

Nobody knows how USDOT will distribute money. Will they go for a small number of big splashy grants, or will they distribute money more evenly across the country with a large number of small grants? By submitting one application that can be split into smaller packages, TPB is giving USDOT the flexibility to consider its application in either event. And while all these projects are important, getting any of them funded would be a major unexpected win for the region.

Personally, I think the bike-sharing package will be particularly competitive. Although the smallest package, it hits the innovative/sexy criteria that many believe USDOT is looking for.

The deadline for USDOT to announce TIGER grant awards is February 17, 2010. They hope to announce sooner than that, but the large number of responses may hold them up until the deadline. Hold your breath, starting… now.

Dear Congressman Brady (R-TX),

Thank you for your recognition that Metro (it’s not an acronym, there’s no need to capitalize all 5 letters) does not perform as well as it could. This is due to the fact that WMATA, as well as other transit agencies around the country, is chronically under-funded.

The Washington, DC area is most pleased that despite your reputation as an opponent of government spending, you now recognize the importance of funding for transit. We look forward to your future legislative support in all funding matters concerning WMATA.

Sincerely,
BeyondDC

The Washington metropolitan urbanist community has backed your redevelopment plans for Tysons Corner as the most important priority in the region. We have spent considerable political capital helping you develop and pay for a Metro line in support of that plan, and are gearing up to give you a light rail line too.

If you back out now, we’ll never believe a word of good rhetoric from you again; we’ll know you don’t mean it. If you back out now, we want our time and money back.

I happened to be in Silver Spring over the weekend, where I saw a bunch of these:

Image courtesy The Schumin Web.

Apparently Ride-On’s old liveries covered the space on the side usually reserved for ads with the Ride-On logo, so Montgomery County used a new paint scheme for its latest order (a batch of low-floor Gilligs).

Besides not being able to accommodate ads, Ride-On’s old scheme was pretty good. It was definitely ahead of its time in the not-just-a-horizontal-stripe-on-white-background department. And although I’m generally a fan of any bus livery that does away with white, I can’t say I like this new one very much. The colors and new stylized “R” logo seem straight out of the 1980s. A darker blue would have helped a lot.

Hooray for new buses, in any event.

They get better as you go down.

Greater Greater Washington’s “Lost Washington” entry from last week features a post about the Art Deco Capital Garage, following which there is a brief discussion about the ornamentation of parking garages.

This topic seems to come up from time to time, so I want to take the opportunity to centralize a few thoughts and photos regarding the evolution of parking garage design over the last generation or so.

For decades bare concrete was the standard template; garages like this uglied up most American cities. Eventually someone got the idea that a garage need not look so bad, and designers started landscaping garages like they landscape highway medians. Garages like this one in California were the result, but they were just the beginning.

With the rediscovery that pedestrian-scale details on buildings make the pedestrian experience better (who’d have thunk), designers realized that garages could have architectural ornament, and need not present the sidewalk with an empty front. Garages like this in Gaithersburg began to appear, with more ornate facades and ground floor retail.

Those Gaithersburg-style garages were still unmistakably garages, though. They were better, but they still couldn’t match a normal building for pedestrian-friendliness. Naturally then, designers next toyed with the idea of making the garage look like a normal building. This one in Denver, CO does a pretty good job of looking like an office block, and this one in Staunton was built to resemble a train station. You have to look pretty closely to see that their “windows” hide parked cars rather than people, but you can still tell. You still feel the lack of eyes on the street that a real building would provide.

So the ultimate (up to now, at least) solution is to do away with trying to pretty up an inherently ugly duckling in the first place, and rather than mimic real buildings, to hide garages behind them. This garage in Boulder, CO neatly illustrates how a narrow “wrap” of commercial or residential space can make even a massive public garage seem like a normal part of the cityscape. This was supposed to be the idea for the garages immediately north of the Nationals stadium, but it didn’t work out.

Although every square foot of buildable area given over to parking is a square foot that goes unused for other more productive activities, the evolved, improved design of parking garages can go a long way towards improving the scars autos have wrought on our cities. This may be of limited appeal in downtown Washington, where there are virtually no above ground parking garages thanks to the height limit (I can think of two), but with the exception of New York, other American cities aren’t so lucky and need the help.

I’m back from Montreal and will post about the trip as soon as possible, with photos to follow once I’ve had a chance to organize and cull the thousand or so that I took. Since I’m swamped getting back in to the normal grind today, take a look at this hauntingly beautiful image – the first ever taken of a human being. The photo is a Daguerreotype of Paris’ Boulevard du Temple, taken in 1838. It actually shows what would have been a busy street packed with traffic, but the 10 minute-long exposure didn’t capture anything that moved. The person (in the lower left) getting his shoes shined stood still long enough to be imaged.

Click the image for a high-res version.