Today’s Express cover

DDOT has determined that the 15th Street cycle track was a success, and is therefore planning to install several additional cycle tracks, including one on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol.

It isn’t often in our city of international politics and intrigue that bicycle planning makes the front page, so let’s save this one. At right is the cover of today’s Post Express.

Below is a map of the proposed cycle track network, from the Post.

New York’s Times Square is the tourist heart of that city. It is filled with bright lights, chain restaurants, and professional entertainment that draws visitors from all over the world.

230 miles south of Times Square is Gallery Place, which since the MCI Center opened in 1997 has been (after the National Mall) the tourist heart of Washington, DC. It is filled with bright lights, chain restaurants, and professional entertainment.

It may be true that Gallery Place / Chinatown is smaller and quieter than Times Square (DC is a smaller city), and that the entertainment is of the sports variety rather than the theater sort, but on the whole the two districts are of a kind. They are both the heart of commercialized tourism in their respective cities. They are where suburbanites go to experience life “downtown”. And if it’s true that the hyper-commercialization of such districts can be garish, it’s also true that such garishness is unique, interesting and something that a lot of people simply like. It’s not just that places like Times Square and Gallery Place are busy with excitement and color because people flock to them, it’s also that people flock to these places because they are busy with excitement and color, and not very many places are like that.

So when I hear there is a proposal to add even more video billboards to Gallery Place, I think that’s awesome. The more the merrier. The main reason I ever go to Chinatown in the first place is that it isn’t Georgetown or Capitol Hill. I want Chinatown to be as colorful and bright and fun as possible.

Naturally, someone disagrees. The launch of StopTheBillboard.org has been widely reported this week in the blogosphere. The first paragraph of their home page reads:

“Giant color video signs are not what anyone has in mind when they think of Washington, D.C. But unless we stop them, these huge, moving-picture billboards will make cherished parts of our beautiful city look more like Times Square… If we allow these signs to be installed permanently at the corner of 7th and G Street NW, not only would an important downtown neighborhood become blighted, but it would be just a matter of time before video billboards would pop up all over the capital.”

I appreciate the desire for quiet in one’s home neighborhood, but what planet is the author of that paragraph from? Actually, giant color video signs are exactly what I have in mind when I think of Chinatown, which is a cherished and important downtown neighborhood in our beautiful city precisely because of the unique role it fills as a place for brightness, color, and electronic 21st Century fun.

No, I don’t want the entire city to look like Times Square, but I don’t want the entire city to look like the street from Leave it to Beaver either. I want to live in a city that has stately, beautifully dignified places like Dupont Circle and 16th Street, and places like Times Square. When I think of Washington, DC, I don’t think it should be a city with any one character imposed throughout.

The bright lights part of Chinatown is a mere three blocks long. That’s three blocks in our entire gargantuan metropolitan area where we’ve collectively decided to have some fun with colorful nightlife. As much as I love marble and granite (and I do), I think it is entirely justified to take three tiny little blocks in one corner of the city and give those blocks a neon character.

On the other hand, just as I don’t think it’s reasonable to move next to an airport and then complain about noise from airplanes, I don’t think it’s reasonable to move to Chinatown and complain about bright lights. If we don’t put them in Chinatown, where they are completely appropriate given the existing context, where do we put them? Nowhere? How is that the less draconian option?

What do you think?

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.

According to the latest Silver Line construction newsletter we are now a full year into construction of the Silver Line, and going strong. Preliminary work is more or less complete, so the approximately 1, 100 workers are now focusing on the real guts and bones of the project: tunnels, els, and stations. This photo shows the outbound tunnel that passes under International Drive.

Photo by Rich Silva, Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project.

America’s oldest post-war light rail system.

Lots of pictures lately. I’ve been organizing my folder. These are from San Diego, which I visited shortly after Christmas.

View all 150 pictures via four sets in Flickr…

• Downtown
• Balboa Park
• Escondido (a suburb)
• Transportation

… Or see the highlights in narrated threads at the SkyscraperPage message board:

• The City
• Transportation

The US Census webpage is a treasure trove of interesting information about cities. Want to know where the most dense neighborhoods are, or what percentage of residents of an area are immigrants? It’s all there. One of the most fascinating pages lists the 100 largest cities in the country at the time of each decennial census, starting in 1790.

It turns out several cities in the region that we think of as relatively small or unimportant places in 2010 have illustrious histories and were in their heyday places of national importance.

The table below lists each city in the District, Maryland, or Virginia that appears on the top 100 list at any point prior to 1950 (about the time metro areas supplanted cities as the most telling measure of urban population), along with its peak rank and the equivalently-ranked metro area as of 2008.

Of course the country is a lot bigger today than it was in the middle of the 19th Century, so perhaps it’s not exactly accurate to say that in 1820 Frederick, MD held as strong a place in the national consciousness as Salt Lake City does today. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to consider how these things change over time. Who knew that Baltimore once might have challenged New York as America’s dominant economic center, or that Boston wasn’t always the only “big city” in Massachusetts?

There may not be much practical application for this, except as a reminder that all things change, but at the very least it’s a fun set of facts for anyone interested in cities.

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.

In Federal news, Senator Jim Bunning finally relented on his one-man filibuster to put USDOT out of business. While the prospect of yet another extension of the existing transportation authorization (now we’re talking about a freaking year?) is bad news, not having an authorization at all would be much worse.

In local news, WMATA is apparently ready to hire Richard Sarles as interim general manager. For the past three years Sarles has been head of New Jersey Transit, and he spent the 20 years before that at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Without knowing much else about him, the prospect of a manager with experience in a larger, older transit system seems like a good thing. New York and New Jersey have been through the aging infrastructure problem before, so hopefully Sarles will bring some meaningful guidance on that front.

Cell phone picture of a DC snowpile, taken 3 or 4 days after snowpocalypse.

Would you take a bite out of the snow pile pictured at right?

Of course you wouldn’t; that’s disgusting. Seriously, gross. You’ve done it, though. You do it all the time.

The pollution that makes snow so ugly after a few days on the street doesn’t magically appear whenever it snows. It’s always there, produced by our litany of motorized vehicles. It floats around the air we breathe for a while before settling on the ground, or in the water. Every time you walk behind a truck or big SUV and get a whiff of exhaust, you’re essentially taking a big bite out of a delicious soot-flavored snowcone.

But that’s just the cost of doing business in a modern civilization… right?