Posts from March 2010

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The charge would be enough to encourage some motorists to carpool, some to take transit or commuter buses, some to telework, some to shift to other times, and some to not make the trip unless it was necessary. With fewer automobile trips into downtown DC, traffic would lighten and the remaining drivers could get to their offices or other destinations more quickly.

This worked well in London, which implemented a congestion charge in 2003. London charges $12 (£8) for drivers to enter central London on weekdays between 7 am and 6:30 pm. They have until 10 pm of the day they crossed the boundary to pay the fee, or else it increases with time.

The charge has been successful. 21% fewer automobiles enter central London (70,000 fewer each day). Bus ridership increased 6%, and the system raised $206,000,000 (£137,000,000) in fiscal year 2008 for transportation improvements.

In the past, the District had proposed that the money collected from this charge would go towards improving DC's streets and transit. However, we are a region of 5 million people, and need to function more like one in solving our transportation woes. Just like with the natural environment where everything in the ecosystem is connected and works together, the same is true with transportation. Jurisdictions throughout the Washington metropolitan area are connected in a transportation ecosystem.

Rather than having DC keep all of the revenues generated by such a plan, the revenues should be shared regionally and be required to fund weekday downtown-bound commuter transit services, services which provide alternatives for the very commuters who would otherwise pay the charge.

The revenue could pay for dedicated bus lanes, to provide guaranteed funding for our world-class Metro service, or improve transportation demand management and telework options. And perhaps the potential for funds benefiting their constituents could make this concept palatable to regional state and federal elected officials who would have to support such a plan.

If regional Congressional and state representatives supported the idea, it could conceivably still happen despite obstructionism in Richmond: Congress lets DC impose charges within its own borders, and DC agrees to dedicate the funding to a regional authority that includes representation from Virginia and Maryland. Could it really work?

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The 1888 model is based off of Sanborn fire insurance maps. By this point, the blocks are just being fully built out. Many residential row houses have been completed on the outside, including the Victorian home on M Street where Blanche K. Bruce, the first African American senator, lived. 9th street was emerging as the commercial corridor, but N street had a bakery and other shops. Many of the small tenant homes were already completed on the alleys, especially in the southern block around Blagden Alley. Stables were spaced throughout, with the major livery housed on Naylor alley.

This is a closer look at the shape of the alleys themselves (north is now up). Blagden Alley was formed in an H shape with a central vertical axis, a design that was latter maligned as a "blind alley" for its tendency to attract crime. The Naylor Court block is formed completely differently with a strong east-west axis. At this point each of the alleys in this block had different names, but all of the others have since been dropped.

Much has changed by 1928. The first five or six story apartment buildings have been constructed, particularly the Atlantic and Henrietta apartments on N Street. The effects of the transition to automobiles is obvious. A large number of the residential units on the alleys now serve as garages for the homes fronting the outside streets, with a 21 car parking garage and gas station located just off of 9th street. There is some industry, mostly auto body shops, in the interior of the blocks. The first floor of the old livery is used by DC street cleaning, but the second floor still functions as a stable. North Presbyterian Church had been replaced by Salem Baptist Church in 1925.

Today the blocks look much the same, with the exception of a number of gaps in the urban fabric. These lots are either currently vacant or serve as parking lots. Some buildings on the internal alleys have been re-purposed for commercial or office use, something that was not common in the earlier days. The old livery became the host of the DC city archives in 1988, but the buildings labeled industrial are actually still vacant as far as I can tell. All of the brick alleys retain their original shape.

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The cylinders do more than any other element to make the memorial visually striking from a distance, and so are indispensable to the design, but at 80 feet tall and lacking any details whatsoever they will be too bare up close. Like the lackluster inner plaza, the cylinders are a missed opportunity for sculpture. If I were the designer I might go classical, but Gehry could propose something like bareiss columns and that would be just as good.

I also have mixed feelings about the other major element of the memorial, the metal tapestries. I appreciate and agree with the desire to cover up the Education Department building, but to do so with oversized picture panels is a touch contrived, a little too easy. It's like we've taken the tarps that are supposed to hide the parking garages at Nationals Ballpark and turned them into a monument. It's a difficult problem, but is that *really* the best we can do?

Gehry deserves credit for restraining himself from retreading his own familiar shtick. Another mass of crumbled titanium would have been inappropriate; it would be memorial to Gehry himself more so than Eisenhower. But at the same time I have to say I'm disappointed that there's nothing daring in this proposal. Such rare opportunities for artful civic sculpture shouldn't be ignored. This memorial could be worse, but it could also be a lot better.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

"We want it to look inviting to a mother pushing a stroller," said staff member Ching-Fang Chen. "That way, the neighborhood will be more open to it."

But skaters worried it could be disruptive or even dangerous for those using the space. Keir Johnson, a skater who grew up in Silver Spring, explained the "flow" of skate parks: users will start at one end and build up speed to do a trick on the other before turning around and doing it again. The tree would block flow or potentially be a hazard if kids can't slow down before running into it. "It feels cramped," said Johnson.

"It looks like it was designed for prettiness," said Downtown resident Maryam Balbed, who began skating with her kids a year and a half ago and goes by the nickname Sk8ter Mom. "We have to design it for children's health and safety."

Aaron Spohn of Industry, California-based Spohn Ranch, the company contracted to build the modular pieces, agreed to take out the tree from their final design. Spohn shared catalogs of Spohn Ranch skate parks across the United States, including one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for sailors stationed at the naval base there and their families.

Skaters suggested other things that they'd like to see in the design. One was a combination ramp and stairs designed to look and feel like one you might see outside an office building, which could appeal to street skaters who now get chased off real-life versions of it across Downtown Silver Spring.

Johnson rattled off a list of things that local skaters like to use: ledges; a flat bar, a long, thin metal rod for grinding on; steps; a pyramid; a quarter-pipe, and a bank. "I think if we want to make the best use of the money and the space, we want things we're gonna use," he says. "If it has those five things in it, people will be psyched."

As a high school student in the 1990's, he managed East of Maui, a skate park on Ellsworth Drive that closed to make way for the Downtown redevelopment, where he and his friends ran camps and arranged skate demos. "I loved that place," says Johnson, who currently works as a field producer for reality TV shows. "It was a huge thing. It made Silver Spring very prominent."

Given the size and significance of East of Maui, it's unlikely that the Woodside skate spot could meet the need of Silver Spring skaters. Last fall, JUTP crunched a formula from Skaters for Public Skateparks that determines how large a skatepark needs to be based on an area's population. We estimated that approximiately 900 people in Silver Spring would use one on a regular basis, requiring a park nearly three acres in size.

Citing those figures, Sk8ter Mom worried that the Woodside skate spot could be overwhelmed. "This is like throwing a sandwich into a hungry crowd," she says. "All the little kids who don't go downtown, their parents are gonna bring them here."

The skate spot will cost approximately $69,000 to fabricate and install the modular pieces, according to project manager Ellen Masciocchi, in addition to the cost of laying the concrete slab, which is currently unknown. By comparison, planned parks in College Park and Clinton could cost $250,000 and $300,000, respectively, while a temporary skate spot built by police officers in Germantown cost only $1,000.

If all goes well, construction could start on the skate spot this spring and it could open in time for Go Skateboarding Day on June 21. One year after the skate spot opens, the Parks Department will conduct a review, seeing how well it's used, how expensive it is to maintain, and how many complaints it has generated.

After that, they'll decide whether to keep the temporary park or start planning for a permanent one. Even then, a permanent skate spot won't be built until Woodside Park is scheduled for renovations, likely within the next seven to eight years.

Sk8ter Mom questioned how much sway the park's neighbors will have. While most in the adjacent Woodside Civic Association support the project, a handful of neighbors managed to stall the project last fall, while plans several years ago to build a larger skatepark on Fenton Street were scuttled by neighbors there. "How much power do we give the residents?" she asked. "They own their homes, but they don't own the park. Do they get to dictate this project?"

This is the second meeting that the Department of Parks has held with skaters about the project, and despite the lingering concerns, local skater and Blake High School student Christian was happy about getting results. "We got rid of the tree," he says. "We got a lot covered."

Fellow skater and high school student Alex felt similarly. "At least we got to put a say into what we want in it," he says.

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