I had a neighbor once who would drive a couple of hundred feet from her townhouse to the mailbox to pick up her mail.

by kenf on Dec 5, 2008 8:51 am • link • report

That 'why I hate' blog is the most obnoxious thing ever. Why live here if you don't like it, and furthermore, why rain on everyone else's parade? There's a reason people move here and are willing to pay top dollar for a place, and it ain't just about the jobs. There are plenty of jobs in Houston and Atlanta, too. (having said that, if I lived in SW, I probably wouldn't have a great impression either- but that just makes the author of the blog a moron for choosing to live there over the other world-class neighborhoods)

by SG on Dec 5, 2008 10:14 am • link • report

Or a moron for not bothering to hop on the Metro and see what lies north of the Mall.

by Cavan on Dec 5, 2008 10:45 am • link • report

Keep in mind traffic around the southwest edge of capitol hill. There are places where it's easier to drive a short distance because it's hard get through the intersections without a ton and a half of steel around you.

by Steve on Dec 5, 2008 10:49 am • link • report

I find it thoroughly unironic that the skybridges went away. Often the most controvesial aspect of a plan is the least important. That was definitely the case here. I also find it unironic that the use configuration chosen for the library was not the one that the focus group picked.

I did not think that the county would pick option 1a. I thought they would go with the option the focus groups chose, just without the expensive and redundant underground parking. Now that they are working with option 1a, I predict that if they get an exception for the new library with regards to the ban on pedestrian bridges over Wayne, it will be eliminated anyway due to its unnecessary cost.

by Cavan on Dec 5, 2008 11:01 am • link • report

I used to live in a garden apartment complex near the Glenmont Metro, and some people who lived at the corner of the complex that was farther from the Metro would drive to the corner that was closest to the Metro, park, and then walk across the street to the Metro. Some people are just lazy. However, David, this also proves your point: they would park on the complex grounds, where it was "free" (at least for residents.) If parking at the Metro were free, surely these lazy bums would have driven all the way across the street instead.

@SG: "why live here if you don't like it": read the post; he explains that he likes his job, so he stays here.

by Omari on Dec 5, 2008 11:42 am • link • report

So how were the streetcars that used to exist in DC powered?

by Mike on Dec 5, 2008 11:49 am • link • report

Underground power within the L'Enfant city and then when they reached "boundary avenue" they stopped and switched to overhead power.

by Steve on Dec 5, 2008 12:12 pm • link • report

Mike, the streetcars that used to be in DC were powered by in-ground conduit in the L'Enfant city, then (at least some, if not all) switched to the more reliable overhead catenary outside it.

by Adam on Dec 5, 2008 12:13 pm • link • report

'Boundary St' is now Florida Av for much of its length.

by Adam on Dec 5, 2008 12:14 pm • link • report

My understanding is that this system never worked well, was expensive, and broke down frequently. Also, nobody makes those anymore except the Alstom system in Bordeaux, which has had a lot of problems, is expensive, and Alstom requires the city to buy every component from them.

But this is really the sort of debate driving Streetcars4DC's questions: DDOT should say whether they're impractical or not, and why, and then we can move forward.

by David Alpert on Dec 5, 2008 12:29 pm • link • report

David,

DC's old conduit system and Alstom's in-ground power supply for Bordeaux are not the same thing.

DC's old system was a continuous vault under the street, sort of like a cable car. Except that there wasn't a cable down there for the cars to grip onto, there was a third rail, like a regular subway. The problem was that these things had to be continuous in order to ensure the streetcars always had power. That meant digging a big trench in between the tracks and providing for continuous gaps in the streets. This makes switches and intersections very complicated, requires a ton of utility relocation (more than just the tracks) and was still unreliable. You not only needed to put in the tracks, but a continuous tunnel about 2 feet down to power the things. That creates all sorts of drainage issues as well.

Alstom's new in-ground power supply has no vault at all. The third rail is embedded into the actual street surface and divided into sections. Each section is smaller than the train itself, and only that section that is under the train has power, thus it is safe to walk across. However, this is very expensive and has reliability issues as well.

by Alex B. on Dec 5, 2008 1:02 pm • link • report

Isn't there some technology that would allow the streetcars to charge a battery on the overhead wire part of their run and use the battery power for the L'Enfant City part? Like automobile plug-in technology?

by Bianchi on Dec 5, 2008 1:30 pm • link • report

Streetcars use a lot of juice. I'm not sure the quick charging would work.

There was some documentation of the Bordeaux system and it mentioned if the track malfunctioned and didn't provide power, the tram could make it a whopping 500 feet on the batteries.

by Alex B. on Dec 5, 2008 1:46 pm • link • report

San Francisco's trolleybuses have a battery so that they can be rerouted away from power lines when necessary. However, they don't run as fast on battery power, and I'm not sure what their range is.

by Mike on Dec 5, 2008 3:22 pm • link • report

See http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post.cgi?id=1347 for a discussion of battery technologies that could possibly eliminate overhead wires. See http://chuckdcoleman.blogspot.com/2008/12/gyroscope-lrt-power-storage.html for a discussion of flywheel power storage and some implementations in England.

DDOT really proved my point that they didn't think about the overhead wire ban. As engineers, they're supposed to take constraints like this into account during planning.

@ Alex B.

DC's old conduit technology used 4 rails. Two rails underground of opposite polarity supplied the power

by Chuck Coleman on Dec 5, 2008 7:23 pm • link • report