My friend and colleague Ron Kirby was shot and killed yesterday.

If you’ve worked in transportation planning in the DC area, you’ve met Ron. As Director of the TPB, he was smart as a whip and always enthusiastic. I’ll miss him terribly.

One company is taking the term “land yacht” to new more literal heights (or would it be lows?). For $3 million dollars to buy, and probably about the same in annual gas bills, you can own this: The Marchi Mobile eleMMent Palazzo Land Yacht.

Image from Marchi Mobile.

DC’s newly repaved 15th Street cycletrack sports a new feature: green-painted checkerboard patterns where alley entrances cross the bike lanes.

Green paint is an increasingly common way for cities to make car drivers more aware of bike lanes, so drivers know to watch for cyclists. Alley entrances are a natural application.

15th Street cycletrack at the alley between O Street and Rhode Island Avenue, NW.

The repaving project is thanks in no small part of ANC Commissioner and sometimes GGW contributor Kishan Putta, who campaigned promising to push repaving.

After slow progress, the project is nearly complete. The repaving portion is done, with the new paint and replacement bollards going in now.

No word on whether DDOT will take my 2011 suggestion to add green paint at street crossings.

Unofficial photoshop mockup of green stripes at the intersection of the cycletrack and P Street.

This map shows every Amtrak, commuter rail, metro, light rail, and tourist rail line from Maine to North Carolina, to scale.

It comes from NortheastRailMap.com, and you can even download it in a fully-editable Adobe Illustrator format.

Image from NortheastRailMap.com.

Update: The map’s author has requested that you “like” their page on Facebook. Please help them out and do that!

 Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.
 
 
 

When the sun rose over DC’s east horizon on Sunday morning, it was in the midst of a partial solar eclipse. The moon was passing directly between Earth and the sun, obscuring the sun as seen from Earth.

To see the event, I woke up early and set up my camera at the best easterly-facing view I could think of – the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria. Here’s what I saw:

Eclipse over Alexandria. Full set of 25 pictures is on flickr.