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.

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 BeyondDC.

On I and L, the lanes will run on the left side of the one-way streets, opposite the buses. There are some places where pedestrians get a leading interval; in those places, signs will direct cyclists to cross with the pedestrians to take advantage of that.

As WashCycle reported, some have been asking why use I street instead of M; lanes on M could extend farther to the planned lanes on 9th Street and on-street bike lanes on 5th rather than ending at New York Avenue between 10th and 11th.

If DDOT sticks with I, they should also factor in buses into the analysis. H and I Streets have some of the heaviest bus traffic in the city, and also some of the greatest delays. They should have a dedicated bus lane during peak periods and parking off-peak.

Such lanes could save the District government significant amounts in WMATA contributions by reducing bus delays and the consequent labor expenses as well as rider frustration. If DDOT is already studying the streets, they should identify the best way to do that as well as install a cycle track.

After the fire, St. Thomas's attendance declined by half. But the remaining members kept the congregation alive, and especially with their openness to gays and lesbians, grew substantially in the 1990s. In 2005, the growing congregation began exploring the possibility of rebuilding the church.

In 2008, they selected parishioner and Swiss-educated architect Matthew Jarvis. Jarvis studied under Swiss architect Peter Zumthor before moving here and working for David Jameson Architects, where he worked on many glassy and rectangular buildings.

Jarvis cites the Dutch Glaspaleis as inspiration for this project, which he says "has long outlived its then young author, 36-year old Architect Frits Peutz.

Tonight, St. Thomas will present a design for a new church to the community at the Dupont Circle ANC meeting.

Jarvis says,

The design of the building embddies the vision of St. Thomas over many decades. It is a jewel box, in the sense that it is a place to keep things safe. We will express this idea in its truest sense: by a wall that wraps around you; by a strong roof that covers you; by a large glass window that, like a tent opening, says, "this is shelter." It is a place to come in out of the rain.

I live very near this place, and therefore I'm going to withhold any aesthetic opinions until I hear from you. While the park is a nice amenity, it's not public property. The congregation once had a church on this site, and they should be able to have one again. What about the design? What do you think?

After you answer the poll, share in the comments what in particular you like/dislike about the design. I'll pass the feedback on to the architect at the ANC meeting tonight.

The current M Street is a six-lane roadway that serves about 10,000 cars per day on the east side of South Capitol and 20,000 on the west side. According to DDOT, it only takes two lanes to carry 10,000, and four lanes to carry 25,000, so the road is overbuilt. An overbuilt road invites speeding. In addition, a road that wide is harder to safely cross. Instead of being a highway, M street should be a neighborhood street.

Wells suggested taking the extra capacity and converting it into something more useful, and more beneficial, before the expected 25,000 new employees and 10,000 new residents move into the area over the next several years.If things don't change, they'll expect parking and traffic lanes instead of high-quality transit, sidewalks, bike lanes and negotiable street crossings.

Wells calls Near SE/SW the most multi-modal neighborhood in America. Within blocks you can find Metro, Metrobus, Circulator, major roads, a water taxi dock, a helipad, carriage horses (stabled under the freeway), and more. What's missing is high-quality infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists.

The groundwork is already laid on the edges of Southwest. People are biking over the 14th Street and Case bridges to and from the District, and they need a way to connect to Southwest and Southeast. Down the road, the Nationals ballpark has the highest transit ridership of any baseball stadium in the country. A streetcar is coming, and adding bike lanes now will get people used to the idea of fewer lanes. Fewer lanes will make the road safer and more friendly.

Adam Goldberg of AARP said they support complete streets for an aging community because they help create livable communities. Older adults are over-represented in all road fatalities, but especially among pedestrian fatalities, where they make up 19% of pedestrian deaths. America is getting older, and older people walk more, bike more and drive less.

According to Goldberg, surveys have shown than many paratransit riders would prefer to ride fixed-route transit but find it difficult because their bus-stops, sidewalks and neighborhoods are not accessible. It costs roughly $38,000 per year to provide paratransit service to someone, but only $8,000 to fix the accessibility of a bus stop.

Supportive members of the audience referred to experiences in Europe or the success with 8th Street SE, which lost a lane but is more walkable and successful as a result without backing up traffic. One cyclist who hates riding on M Street spoke of the signed bike route that instructs cyclists to use the sidewalk, where they mix with pedestrians.

Younger people generally supported the new design. One woman said she sold her car when she moved to DC because she could. Another person talked of how South Capital separates neighborhoods and how this project could connect them.

But, as with any plan to reduce road capacity, many people, especially ANC commissioners, were concerned about traffic. "You will cause M St SW to lose all hope of moving cars for hours and hours and hours," said one attendee. Wells pointed out that when Constitution Avenue ended one-way rush hour operation traffic did not back up to Maryland as some claimed it would. If you remove lanes, Wells argued, traffic will go away as drivers find other ways to move around.

One commissioner was concerned that slowing down traffic will also slow down bus transit. "If this appears to be a conspiracy to slow down traffic, it is. Traffic is slower on Barracks Row, but it isn't gridlock", Wells said. There is rampant speeding on M Street, so the goal is not to make traffic crawl, but to go the speed limit. A safer street will serve bus riders as well. One commissioner thought that complete streets are great "in a perfect world", but what about when there are crashes or an evacuation.

Some expressed concern that there isn't enough parking in the area and this will only make it worse, even though Wells pointed out that it wouldn't remove any parking. "Why not build central parking garages?" Wells noted that there is more parking in new buildings and that even though the new Arena Stage won't add any parking, it will be sharing parking with those buildings. The area actually has more surface parking than most.

One ANC commissioner was not opposed to a complete street design on M, but only if it came after a more through traffic study of the area.

Then there were the people who just don't like cyclists. One particularly angry woman asked "Who are these bike lanes for? Who uses a bike to drop off their kids at school? Who brings home groceries for a family of four on a bicycle?" But after each question several hands went up from people who did those very things. To that, she responded sarcastically each time, "Congratulations, you must be real proud of yourself." After the school question, she added, "You're an irresponsible parent."

She continued, "Older people don't even bike. This is elitist. These bike lanes are elitist and they only serve a few people. They don't service the whole community." She failed to note that in a city where less than half of all people drive, much of the roadway doesn't serve the whole community either.

Another woman complained that cyclists don't follow the law, and asked how to protect pedestrians from cyclists. Wells avoid the question a bit, but noted that "we have sidewalks for pedestrians and roads designed for cars and we want to make space for bikes. But it isn't just about bikes."

Though the street is overbuilt and Tommy Wells and other residents clearly want to repurpose the unused capacity, this project is unlikely to move forward without support from the ANC. Consequently, it might be a long time before we really see bike lanes on M Street SE/SW.

JDLand has another summary of the meeting and a copy of Wells' slides. Crossposted at TheWashCycle.

Sources consulted:
"Dedication Of N.Y. Ave. Church Tonight." The Washington Post, December 20, 1951, B2.

Goode, James M. "New York Avenue Presbyterian Church." In Capital Losses, 238. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003.

Hall, Martha J. "Final Service Today Ends Era At Presbyterian Church Here." The Washington Post, January 29 1950, M16.

All options maintain the existing treebox areas, then place protected bike lanes inside the current curbs, but elevated to sidewalk level. Additional pedestrian and/or planted spaces (in red on the diagrams) then protect the lanes from traffic and parking.

North Carolina Avenue would get an eastbound cycle track and retain its westbound bike lane, while the westbound cycle track would continue on the one-way portion of C Street west of 16th Street and transition to a standard bike lane as the road narrows past 15th.

The largest difference between options is in the numbers of vehicular lanes. All reduce the eastbound lanes to one, as there is little eastbound traffic. Instead, drivers generally use Independence Avenue. For westbound cars, option A preserves the current three lanes and parking. B would preserve the three lanes in the peak but use the space for off-peak parking only, and C reduces the travel lanes to two with full-time parking.

In the center, a planted median would separate the two directions of traffic and provide left turn pockets. Each alternative includes a chicane, gently curving the road back and forth, either at a gentle 3000-foot radius or a narrower and more traffic-slowing 600-foot radius. The medians also prevent cars from crossing over C on smaller cross streets such as 17th Place, 18th Street, and 20th Street.

Raised crosswalks would slow traffic on cross streets to assist pedestrians. To the west, there is an option to reconfigure the intersection of Constitution and North Carolina to create one large island instead of several small ones.

Finally, the proposals contain significant "green streets" elements. The cycle tracks and new pedestrian paces in red would use permeable paving to minimize stormwater runoff. In addition, where there are large bulb-outs (also in red), Toole proposes bioretention areas, planted areas that are left more wild than manicured and can hold water like miniature wetlands during and after storms, letting it slowly drain into the ground rather than overloading storm sewers.

This project could create DC's first real "green street" and show how good design can do so much more with public spaces. I'm just disappointed we aren't getting the same for projects like 17th Street, NW, now under construction. Fortunately, the new DDOT is using Toole for several other ongoing projects, boding well for more designs like this to come.

They want to renovate the plaza at the corner of Colesville Road and Fenton Street, the mall's most visible entrance but perhaps also its most foreboding. Signs for anchor stores Marshalls and Burlington Coat Factory are plastered several stories up, making them hard to see for people on foot or driving past. A large sculptural fountain, lined with spiky strips to discourage loitering, blocks the door.

The developer's proposal would take out the fountain and repave the entire plaza, making it easier for people to circulate and open up sight lines. This will hopefully discourage loitering and make the space feel safer. A tree that interferes with wheelchair ramps at the crosswalk for Colesville Road will be removed.

And a new metal screen, similar to the ones placed along Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street in 2005, will wrap around the corner. It'll display large tenant signs, a new sign for the mall itself, and a video screen "that will televise events, ads and information as an aesthetic response to this admittedly commercial enterprise," according to a report filed by Planning staff. The screen will be required to display public information and event calendars every five minutes.

The proposal doesn't address any changes to the restaurants flanking the entrance, Taste of Morocco and a shuttered Ruby Tuesday that was vandalized in the fall of 2008. Both eateries' street-facing windows are either covered up or tinted, and their patio seating - a great way to activate the plaza - is largely unused. Hopefully, renovating the plaza will encourage at least Taste of Morocco to open up to the outside.

A new plaza is only the beginning of ambitious changes planned by Petrie Ross. Parts of City Place's upper two floors, occupied by a ten-screen movie theatre that closed in 2004, could be converted to offices. Signs around the mall already advertise the yet-unbuilt space for rent, and a flyer from the leasing agency shows how the building would be retrofitted - both inside, where the theatre would be gutted, and outside, where new windows would be added to the upper stories - to accomodate the renovations.

The office addition, both within the existing mall and in a nine-story office building on top that was first approved twenty years ago, brings a customer base that could draw new, higher-end retailers to City Place. As recently as last summer, the developers had unsuccessfully courted Park and Planning to occupy the 300,000-square foot tower. But without office tenants willing to take a chance on the mall's potential turnaround, it's likely that nothing could happen at all.

In the meantime, there's a possibility that City Place Mall could get a new name. All of the renderings above show new signage at the corner of Colesville and Fenton reading "The Galleria at Silver Spring." As Silver Spring, Singular first suggested in 2006, the name City Place carries with it some serious baggage and could use a new moniker to get disenchanted shoppers interested again.