Breakfast links: Honk if you have a vote in Congress

by David Alpert • September 14, 2011 8:20 am

Photo by KCIvey on Flickr.

Take action (if you can): Live in Virginia? Ask your reps to save Amtrak service. ... Live anywhere outside DC? Ask your Senators to preserve bike/ped funding. ... Live in DC? You're screwed, but if you know anyone in Illinois or Louisiana, ask them to contact their reps to oppose riders on DC's budget.

Who's popular in Virginia: 61% of Virginians approve of Governor McDonnell. 64% approve of Senator Mark Warner, 47% of Ken Cuccinelli, 55% of strict regulations on abortion clinics. (Post)

Kwame Brown now for ethics: Kwame Brown is planning to introduce ethics legislation, but residents will have to look closely to figure out if it's serious or just a smokescreen to distract from his many problems. (DCist)

Should Council be full-time or part?: Some think DC Councilmembers should not be allowed outside employment, because of conflicts of interest. Meanwhile, Los Angeles has full-time members and some think they should be part-time. (DeBonis)

ACT: Build Bethesda entrance faster: The Action Committee for Transit is raising alarms over a plan to rehab Bethesda elevators one year before Montgomery County adds a new entrance to the station. They want the new entrance's timeline moved up. (TBD)

No more taking off shoes for kids: The ridiculous sight of parents taking off their toddlers' shoes at airport security checkpoints will finally end, as TSA rolls out new screening procedures for kids under 12. Removing shoes generally will be phased out, but not until there are new scanners even though no other country requires it. (Post)

Suddenly it's historic?: Walmart opponents have now turned to historic preservation to try to stop the store, filing an application to landmark the old Curtis Chevrolet, though the DC Preservation League is okay with the new building. (City Paper)

And...: Arlington wants stores to keep doors closed (literally, not metaphorically). (ARLnow) ... Exxon asked for a $5.2 billion highway so it could move its headquarters; Texas eagerly complied. (Streetsblog) ... Any Montgomery County curfew won't come until November, if at all; councilmembers remain divided. (Examiner)

Have a tip for the links? Submit it here.

17 comments

Tags: abortion, air travel, Arlington, Bethesda, Bob McDonnell, Brightwood, California, Congress, curfew, DC, DC Council, escalators, ethics, historic preservation, Ken Cuccinelli, Kwame Brown, links, Los Angeles, Mark Warner, Maryland, Metro, Montgomery, retail, roads, security, sustainability, Texas, transportation reauthorization, TSA, Virginia, voting rights, Walmart, WMATA, youth

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington. He has had a lifelong interest in great cities and great communities. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.

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I'm no fan of Wal*Mart as a company, but this latest effort to block them confirms my long held belief that we should rename most historical societies to Hysterical Societies.

by Dave J on Sep 14, 2011 8:51 am

Live in DC? You're screwed

A bit. But you're still free to contact any representative you please. Will they listen to you? Not really, but then again, do you really think they listen to their own constituents? Only the ones that agree with their donors.

55% of strict regulations on abortion clinics.

Read: 55% of Virginians don't think they'll need an abortion soon. Not a surprising statistic.

by Jasper on Sep 14, 2011 9:22 am

Keep doors closed thing is interested, but I do remember walking down the street with all the furriers in NYC (56th? 58th?) on broiling days. They had the doors wide open with arctic blast air rolling out on the sidewalks. Environmentally friendly? No. But damn it felt good.

by beatbox on Sep 14, 2011 9:34 am

Wow, that Exxon story is infuriating.

by jag on Sep 14, 2011 10:04 am

@Jag Wow, that Exxon story is infuriating.

Why? Would it be better that Exxon not say anything ... and just pack up and leave instead? I'm sure the work Exxon brings to Texas is worth far in excess of the cost of the road. And the hard reality is that without the proper infrastructure in place in Texas, Exxon would have no choice but to move to a place with an infrastructure that could support the thousands of workers it employs and everything else.

This points out the giant hole in how smartgrowth is being interpreted by too many people. If you're going to have population growth, you need transportation growth too. And as the most efficient and least costly form of transportation, it only makes sense that most of that transportation expansion is going to have to be in the way of roads. Yeah, you can also include some rail and bikepaths in that expansion, but dollar for dollar, the impact in accomodating the growth won't be as cost effective.

by Lance on Sep 14, 2011 10:33 am

@Lance

Roads are the most efficient and least costly form of transportation? Surely, you are making this up.

by Ray on Sep 14, 2011 10:42 am

Houston and Dallas are poster children for how continuously building highways isn't a transportation policy and doesn't cut down on congestion. Despite having twice as many road miles as Chicago, both cities still rank in multiple studies as having among the worst road congestion and longest commutes in the nation. It's so bad that they've even had to implement (gasp!) HOV lanes. Surely that is an affront to all decent residents of the Lone Star state who believe that there is a God-given right to operate your own personal automobile on your own personal highway, subsidized by the public. I think it's outlined somewhere in Leviticus.

by Adam L on Sep 14, 2011 10:54 am

@Lance -- The Exxon story is infruriating because it highlights the classic prisoners dilema that has become jobs policy. Individual states and individual localities shouldn't be essentially trying to buy jobs. Net social welfare would be greater if no one did this.

by Kate W on Sep 14, 2011 11:20 am

@Ray, 'Roads are the most efficient and least costly form of transportation? Surely, you are making this up.

No, not at all. We had this discussion on here last year. For certain specific and isolated circumstances (e.g., bringing all the federal workers every workday into Washington), rail and mass transit can be cheaper and more efficient. But in the vast majority of instances, they are far costlier. Imagine the cost of a train going from say Metro Center to Forest Glen at midnight with 15 passengers. The cost and waste is far far higher than they'd each driven themselves. Ditto for where most of the growth in this country has been for the last 60 or 70 years ... the suburbs.

Don't let the low cost of mass transit fool you. It's only low because it is highly subsidized by taxes. Someone on here last year calculated that it is subsidized to the extent of something like 87% ... while cars are subsidized to the tune of less than 5% (a gap that only developed in last 10 years and could be easily closed if there was the political will to either raise the gas tax, or divert LESS funding from road projects to the usually not-cost-effective mass transit projects.)

by Lance on Sep 14, 2011 11:53 am

Arlington's "Retail Doors Campaign" -- the county's latest foray into green self-parody.

by Paul on Sep 14, 2011 12:12 pm

Imagine the cost of a train going from say Metro Center to Forest Glen at midnight with 15 passengers.

Please stop using the sweeper trains as an example of why mass transportation is inefficient.

If you run a rail transit system that does not operate 24/7, there are necessarily going to be at least two trains at the very beginning and end of each day that are very sparsely used.

Yes, those sweeper trains are inefficient, but also a necessary evil. Unless you're closing the system early enough as to inconvenience a large number of riders, the last train of the night will almost always be the least patronized one, simply because people know that catching the last train of the night is a risky strategy, and avoid doing it wherever possible. If we added a train at 1AM, I'd bet that the midnight trains would have more people on them, and that the 1AM trains would now have 15 riders each.

by andrew on Sep 14, 2011 12:20 pm

Imagine the cost of a train going from say Metro Center to Forest Glen at midnight with 15 passengers.

Imagine the cost of the last parking space at the top of a shopping mall garage. It costs $30,000 to build and is occupied for 10 hours a year. If the carrying cost of the garage is 12%, the parking costs $300 per hour.

by Ben Ross on Sep 14, 2011 12:44 pm

In terms of the retail door campaign, it does sound a bit like parody.

But there is no question that retail establishments waste a lot of electricity in cooling. What's the best way to solve that?

Name and Shame (publish lists of electricity use) might have some slight effect. Encouraging shade is always good in the summer. Encourage more efficient cooling systems in shared establishments?

I realize it's wasteful, but on hot days, walking by the retail stores in Georgetown gives you a nice breeze. I'll miss it when it is gone. And the European solution -- more tightly buttoned up storefronts -- may not be as friends as an open door.

by charlie on Sep 14, 2011 12:45 pm

Before it was Custis Chevrolet, it was a streetcar barn. I'm not saying it's worth saving, but it is somewhat historic. I think if they were clever they could integrate the building into their new Walmart, but I'm not an architect. Still, I hate to see it go.

by David C on Sep 14, 2011 2:24 pm

@ Lance:The cost and waste is far far higher than they'd each driven themselves.

Cuz that road grew there without any cost, right? And those cars grew for free as well, right? And that gas just jumped all the way from deep down in the earth in those gas tanks, right?

by Jasper on Sep 14, 2011 2:30 pm

If you want to act against the House Appropriations' subcommittee's disastrous bill, which would effectively end all Amtrak service, you can also do so via the National Association of Railroad Passengers: http://act.narprail.org/.

by Malcolm K. on Sep 14, 2011 3:07 pm

Dave J - Your comment that most historical societies should be renamed hysterical societies is unfounded. The write-up clearly states that these are WalMart opponents - not preservationists who filed the landmark nomination on the building.

by Rebecca on Sep 19, 2011 10:40 am