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By now readers have probably alreadyheard that DC regional urbanism was recently honored by the American Planning Association with four Great Place Awards, for Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, DC’s Union Station, Annapolis’ Main Street and Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood.
What you might not have heard is just how good a showing that is. 31 30 awards were announced, so one city snagging four represents 13% of the total. Comparatively, the Washington-Baltimore region accounts for about 2.6% of the national population. No other region in the country did as well, and only the Boston-Providence region (recipient of three awards) came close.
Gainesville, where PWC planners propose a town center.
Prince William County, one of the DC region’s biggest poster children for sprawl, is beginning to see the light. Planners there working on the County’s Comprehensive Plan are proposing that future growth in Prince William be focused in a series of walkable town centers. So far plans are extremely preliminary, but the concept should be fleshed out over the coming months and years.
From a regional Smart Growth perspective adding growth to Prince William County doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but assuming there will be continued growth there regardless, it’s better if that growth takes on relatively urban forms. If genuine urbanism follows rather than lip service urbanism, and if adequate transit connections come with town center construction, Prince William could theoretically become a viable clump of satellite cities, which really aren’t so bad.
BeyondDC is skeptical that Prince William County has the political will to actually go through with a great-sounding plan. Even if it does have the will, retrofitting the likes of Dale City isn’t exactly going to be easy. But considering that we’re talking about the third most populous jurisdiction in Virginia, we’ll sure be watching as the plan develops.
According to The Overhead Wire, in defending his vote against the recent Metro funding bill, Senator McCain said “With the serious financial situation facing our nation, this commitment of taxpayers’ dollars can [be] dedicated to addressing far more important national priorities.” So just to be clear, supporting transit, which leads to healthier cities (the engine of the American economy) and reduces America’s dependence on foreign oil, is not an important priority of John McCain.
Conversely, in last night’s debate Barack Obama said energy independence would be the highest priority of his campaign.
Not to be outdone by DC or Arlington, Montgomery County Councilwoman Valerie Ervin proposes that the Maryland jurisdiction become the region’s third to adopt a bike-sharing system. Ervin proposes MoCo install bike stations at all the county’s high-density downtown areas, such as Silver Spring, Wheaton and Bethesda at the least, and possibly downtown Rockville, Takoma Park, and the new urbanist communities in Gaithersburg, among others.
So far the MoCo idea is just that, an idea. There’s no word whether Montgomery might adopt a DC-style SmartBike system or Arlington-style Call-A-Bike technology. Either way, if bike-sharing goes forward in Maryland (and it should) there will be some bumps along the road. More bike-sharing is always a good thing since it makes car-free living easier, but with nodes of urbanism spread several miles apart from each other, bike-sharing in Montgomery County is necessarily going to be a different animal than bike-sharing in Arlington or DC, where walkable neighborhoods are generally adjacent to other walkable neighborhoods.
It seems likely that shared-bikes in Montgomery County are more likely to be used for last mile trips than for shuttling around for errands, and for relatively long cross-county trips between the two spokes of the Red line. That means users are likely to need bikes for longer periods of time in MoCo than DC or Arlington.
Not that that’s any reason to oppose the concept, just that for it to work Montgomery County planners will have to recognize and accommodate differences in travel patterns between the jurisdictions.
BTW, bike-sharing seems like a fabulous idea for a redeveloped Tysons Corner, where that last mile is going to be an issue. Ready to step up, Fairfax County?
No blog updates for the next week or so, while we’re abroad sans internet. There will be intermittent twitter tweets though, so stay tuned on that front.
In the mean time, feel free to use the comment space under this post to talk about, well, whatever you want. Suggestions for future BeyondDC topics, criticism, praise, current events… whatev.
In 2006 the gross domestic product for the Washington, DC region (the sum value of all goods and services produced regionally that year) was $367 billion. That includes the suburbs, but not Baltimore nor its suburbs. Assuming 2006 was a fairly typical year:
Metro’s request for $11 billion in maintenance money over the next 10 years equates to about three-tenths of one percent of the regional economy.
The approximately 190 miles of streetcar lines BeyondDC proposes in our Transit Vision, costing a very very back-of-the-napkin $6 billion, equate to less than two-tenths of one percent of the regional economy over 10 years, or about 1.6% of one-year’s economy.
The Washington region alone could pay off the entire federal economic bailout in about two years.
Each of the 5.3-some million people in the region produce, on average, about $70,000 per year in economic activity.
Of course, these aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons. We physically can’t spend all our collective economic energy in one place (gotta eat, after all). The amount of money available to the government to spend discretionarily is much, much smaller than the overall total gross economy. But still, interesting stuff.
“U.S. Congress ordered the dissolution of the DC streetcar system in the early 1950s, after choosing to not renew the franchise, ostensibly in response to a worker strike. (The system was replaced with buses completely in 1962.) This means to my way of thinking that the Federal Government has a special responsibility for rebuilding transit in the region, because the Federal Government has responsibility for the wrecking of fixed rail transit in the region.”
Part of the Transit Vision as seen in Google Earth
When we released the BeyondDC Transit Vision we included two maps showing our proposed transit system, an abstracted diagram and a true geographic map. Since then we’ve heard some readers have had trouble understanding where some of our proposed routes go, and that the geographic map is too hard to read at the scale provided and without labels.
In response, we’ve prepared a downloadable .kmz map. Download the file, open it in Google Earth, and then navigate in and out to your heart’s content.
A couple of notes:
We put this together pretty quickly, based more or less on eyeballing routes. It’s not as exact as the original geographic map, which we made in GIS. The point here is just to show folks where lines go.
Red is Metrorail, dark blue is streetcar, teal is light rail, green is BRT, and purple is regional rail
Refinement is never ending. For this version of the map we’ve added one line not shown on any others - a spur of the H streetcar route (call it H3) cutting down New Hampshire Avenue from U Street to Foggy Bottom.
Lynchburg: Where dedicated local NoVa transportation money will be spent on education. Wait, what?
When the Virginia Supreme Court nullified the NVTA’s ability to collect taxes earlier this year, it struck a major blow to Northern Virginia’s hopes for new infrastructure.
That was a few months ago. Since then construction projects have been put on hold and hundreds of millions of dollars have been returned to Virginia taxpayers. However, BeyondDC has it on good authority that:
1) While most of NVTA’s money was automatically refunded, certain pots of it have to be specifically claimed by individual taxpayers. Funds totaling several million dollars have not yet and are unlikely to be claimed, leaving NVTA with some fairly sizable amount of money leftover.
2) Thanks to an article in Virginia’s state constitution, all leftover money of that sort must be given over to an education fund that mostly benefits rural communities in southwest Virginia. So after the refund process is over, NVTA can’t even spend what money it has left, and must instead send it down to Richmond.
So, just so we’re clear, millions of dollars raised in Northern Virginia by Northern Virginians specifically for the purpose of locally funding transportation projects in Northern Virginia, is now being taken by Richmond for dispersal in southwest Virginia.
BeyondDC is all for education programs that benefit rural communities, but for goodness sake, this money was raised locally specifically because Richmond doesn’t pay Northern Virginia its fair share of state-wide revenue. Northern Virginia ponied up to create a dedicated local funding stream to pay for what should be state responsibilities, and what happened? The state swooped in, literally stole the cash, and left Northern Virginia to its wounds (and precious few new transportation facilities).
Welcome to the Commonwealth; the ridiculous, irresponsible, intellectually bankrupt, downright broken Commonwealth.
