Greatest Greatest Hits: Your favorite posts of 2012

Greater Greater Washington published 824 posts and 285 breakfast (or other) links so far in 2012. What were your favorites? Here are the ones that racked up the most pageviews, comments, tweets and likes:

Most commented: After a man riding a bike hit and killed an elderly woman walking on the Four Mile Run Trail, we discussed what we could do to make trails safer, including how cyclists should properly warn pedestrians they are passing. You responded with 390 comments.

Rob Pitingolo’s musings about fringe suburbs in decline generated 236 comments. When Herb Caudill refuted arguments that District policy is “anti-car” you had 211 things to say, and there were 208 comments on Dan Reed’s discussion of millennials’ housing needs and a reader’s report that WMATA didn’t take her seriously after a bus driver hit her while she was cycling.

Most read: David Daddio analyzed how people use Capital Bikeshare, and since April, this one post racked up over 51,800 views to the post page itself (not counting people who read it on the home page and RSS feeds). It got attention on Planetizen, Reddit, Next American City (now Next City) and more.

Runners-up for highest-traffic posts include Dan Reed’s millennial post which also scored #4 on most-commented, an analysis and map of dying malls by Dan Malouff, Bradley Heard’s summary of the Cafritz project in Riverdale Park and how it fits into Prince George’s TOD strategy (or lack thereof), and historic names for DC neighborhoods, such as “Pipetown” and “Bloody Hill,” by Kimberly Bender.

Most tweeted: Over 204 people retweeted Herb Caudill’s amazing essay on so-called “anti-car” policies, including folks from all around the country, since his points are just as salient in almost every other city as they are here. It’s worth a read at any time.

The Twitterati also clearly are very into open data. They got very excited about the real-time arrival screens Eric Fidler put together on a fellowship for Arlington County Commuter Services and Capital Bikeshare agreeing to release data in an anonymized form that enabled all kinds of people to put together great visualizations; these clocked in at #2 and #3 on total tweets.

Rounding out the top most-tweeted articles are ones by Christine Green on how planners are advancing public health and a very short post on a clearly hot-button issue, the fact that DC now has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, but 3 fewer votes in Congress than each state.

Most liked: Some different subjects interest people on Facebook than on Twitter, while others interest them all. The top “liked” post was the one on DC being bigger than Vermont, and it was also the 5th most tweeted.

However, 673 people liked Dan Reed’s post on the National Labor College going on the market, while only 5 people tweeted it. (Maybe that’s because the original title, which Facebook shows, is “College for Sale” (intriguing!) while the tweet was “National Labor College move presents development opportunity for Hillandale” (eh!))

You also really liked the historic neighborhood names like Pipetown (by Kimberly Bender), the recent revelation of Montgomery County school officials freaking out over a 5th grader riding Ride-On to school, and, once again, Herb Caudill on car-dependence.

Many thanks go out to all of these contributors and the many, many more who submitted posts that might not have made the top 5 in one of these categories, but which still informed, entertained, engaged, or energized readers about one of many important topics.