Ever wonder what’s inside a Metro sign pole? Now’s your chance to find out. For some reason, the black covering that’s normally around the sign for the south entrance to Dupont Circle station has been removed, leaving this:

All this, for $3.6 billion LESS than the suburban Silver line Metro extension. DDOT’s model streetcar vehicle, on display at the Columbia Heights meeting.

Despite feeling a little under the weather, I attended Monday night’s streetcar meeting in Columbia Heights. Here’s the skinny:

What we already know:

• DDOT is planning 37 miles of service, in 8 lines.
• 7-10 years to construct the system.
• Three phases of planning/construction.
• Estimated cost: $1.5 billion (compared to $5.1 billion for the Silver line).
• They’re looking at something like the hybrid solution for the wire issue.

New info:

• I asked for a clarification about what that 7-10 year timeline really means. I had assumed it meant 7-10 years of construction after planning is finished and funding is in hand. That was an incorrect assumption. DDOT says the 7-10 year number includes planning, and starts today. When they say they want to have the full system in place in 7-10 years, they mean by 2016-2019. That’s an incredible commitment, and would be an amazing achievement if they can do it.
• So far the Anacostia and H Street lines have been paid for using DDOT money. To build such a large system in such a short timeframe, the city will likely have to consider additional funding mechanisms. They are considering several possibilities, from tax-increment financing to parking fees to a Federal New Starts application.
• In order to open the door to Federal funding, DDOT is going to conduct a NEPA review. Unfortunately the existing K Street review (which is being fast-tracked to increase its likelihood of receiving a TIGER grant) doesn’t cover streetcars.
• DDOT intends to plan and build the three phases as “projects”, rather than each corridor individually. This means that they’ll do a NEPA review and award a construction contract for each phase as a whole, rather than line-by-line.
• When it comes time to award contracts, the city intends to award a single contract to design, build, operate and maintain each phase. This allows for more rapid planning/construction. I neglected to ask about bidding or potential contract awardees, but presumably WMATA would be a prime candidate.
• They plan to have streetcar stops every 4-5 blocks, rather than every 2 blocks. This means that operationally the streetcars will be like an express bus rather than a local bus.
• Streetcar stops themselves will be raised slightly to make ingress/egress easier, but won’t have full length platforms. They may or may not have platform strips.
• The LRVs themselves can be coupled into trains, but DDOT doesn’t plan on doing so very often, and isn’t designing stations with multi-car trains in mind.
• Potential coordination issues with Arlington over the Columbia Pike and Crystal City streetcars, and with Maryland over the Purple Line, have not yet been seriously considered, but will be so in an upcoming WMATA interoperability study.
• For the most part DDOT is planning to operate streetcars in mixed traffic with automobiles. However they are considering potential dedicated running ways on Rhode Island Avenue and M Street, SE, in addition to the K Street transitway. These issues will be worked out in the NEPA phase.
• Despite some problems with traffic signal priority on the existing Georgia Avenue bus pilot project, DDOT says they are working the kinks out and expect that signal priority will play a significant role in many of these lines. That would be great.

Overall the meeting was very informative, and very optimistic. I really hope DDOT can meet its objectives here.

There are still six meetings remaining, so there are plenty of opportunities to attend and comment.

All BeyondDC photos (even the really old ones from the original City Profiles) are now available via flickr. They’re organized into the 6 categories on the left-side menu.

The Transit Library, a mode-by-mode collection of transportation images, is of particular interest. I haven’t listed it as one of the Galleries in the past, but it’s always been there. Hopefully it’s a good resource.

DDOT held the first of several public meetings about streetcars last night. GGW has a good write-up, but if you’re interested in attending a meeting in person here’s the schedule, and here’s a map of meeting locations.

I’m planning to attend the Columbia Heights meeting on Monday evening.

Downtown Houston at the height of urban renewal. No way to build a city.

Parking lots are the scourge of cities. They eat up valuable land that could be used for activity-generating purposes, and they spread development out so that walkable and transit-supportive densities aren’t possible. There are precious few things you can do to kill quality urbanism faster than introducing a bunch of parking lots.

Today, therefore, BeyondDC presents the top ten most offensive parking lots in the DC region. These are the lots that do the most damage to their environment. Each link leads to an aerial image of the lot in question.

Number 10: GWU Garage
DC’s height limit has long been a subject of much debate, but one of its indisputably positive effects has been that land downtown is at too much of a premium to waste on parking lots. As far as I’m aware, this is the only free-standing above ground parking garage downtown. At least the one above Union Station is an air-rights development.

Number 9: RFK Stadium
The only reason the acres and acres of asphalt at RFK aren’t higher on the list is that they’re basically out of the way. If they chopped up a neighborhood, they’d be worse.

Number 8: Pennsylvania Avenue at the Capitol
What a depressing end to what was supposed to be America’s finest street. How is it exactly that what should be one of the city’s prime corners is actually such a wasteland?

Number 7: Courthouse Plaza
One block from Court House Metro and smack in the middle of everything, this lot is a huge psychological barrier between the commercial and residential sections of Arlington’s Courthouse neighborhood.

Number 6: Nationals Stadium
Remember how Nationals Stadium was supposed to have awesome views of the Capitol dome? Remember how it was supposed to feel fully integrated with the surrounding city? Oops.

Number 5: Downtown Rockville
Like Courthouse but worse, because it’s *between* Metro and the most active part of downtown. Repeated attempts to redevelop this killer have fallen through.

Number 4: Capitol South
A full-block parking lot directly above a core Metro station, in one of the most historic and beautiful neighborhoods in the city? Really?

Number 3: Howard University
Usually where a major university fronts onto a major commercial street the result is a high-quality mixed-use neighborhood downtown. By any reasonable account, Georgia Avenue in front of Howard University should look like U Street. Instead, it’s an ocean of surface parking lots.

Number 2: Old Convention Center
The only reason this giant multiple-square-block scar on the urban fabric doesn’t top the list is that it’s been due to be redeveloped since day one.

Number 1: Union Station South
Who thought it was a good idea to put four square blocks of surface parking adjacent to one of America’s biggest transit centers, smack between that center and most of the activity it serves? Oh right, the Federal government. Congresspeople need their parking, after all. Thanks a lot, guys. :Facepalm:

Take a look at how many of the top 10 are the result of institutional decisions rather than free market ones. Without pulling a cadastral map and actually looking at ownership, I’d venture to guess that of these 10, only Courthouse and Rockville are the result of the market. All the others, every single one of these lots within the District of Columbia, is likely the result of governmental or quasi-governmental misuse. The market almost certainly would have seen all these properties developed productively years ago.

(Dis)Honorable Mention: Union Station north garage, King Street Metro, the Pentagon, the Natural History Museum.

This is the front of a bus on the 16th Street line headed northbound to Silver Spring. 10 points to the first person who correctly identifies what’s wrong.

I’ve been seeing this for months, by the way. It’s no one-time mistake.

In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t really matter. WMATA has bigger fish to fry. It’s just a little funny, though.

… For breaking your one-day ridership record.

In related news, VRE will likely dump Amtrak as its operator and instead use a money-saving French company.

Soon to grace K Street.

You know that big empty lot at the corner of K Street and Connecticut Avenue, where a developer tore down a perfectly good office building in order to build a newer office building? You remember how about this time last year the developer said they couldn’t possibly begin construction of their new building anytime soon and had to turn the land into a parking lot?

The office building is now under construction.

Arlington’s second mixed-use church breaks ground this weekend.

After five years clearing legal and financial hurdles, the “Views at Clarendon” apartment building will break ground this weekend, as DCmud reports. The building will be constructed on top of the First Baptist Church of Clarendon, in what is surely one of the nation’s most intriguing and progressive cases of Smart Growth. 70 of the building’s 116 apartments will be below-market affordable, and it is expected to attain a LEED silver rating.

Arlington’s other mixed-use church, for the record, is above a gas station in Rosslyn.