Reflecting on Greater Washington’s changes over 10 years

As advocates, we spend a lot of time on Greater Greater Washington discussing visions and practical plans to make Greater Washington Greater. While we have lots of room to become Greater, I think it’s important to celebrate things that are currently Great but weren’t always.

Two Wednesdays ago, I attended DC United’s friendly game against A.C. Milan. To the surprise of many in attendance, United won the game 3-2. Because of the friendly nature of the game, the atmosphere was very celebratory and festive.

After the game, I got on a packed Blue Line train at nearby Stadium-Armory to transfer at Metro Center to Red. Two older tourist couples got on at Smithsonian. I could tell they were tired and suggested to another couple of soccer fans about my age that they offer their seats. After the tourists sat down, I explained to them that they’re on a train filled with soccer fans coming from a professional game.

I was very pleasantly surprised when our guests started explaining how much they love visiting Washington. They explained that they’re from Los Angeles and that they “couldn’t believe how full the trains were this late at night!” It was 10:30pm.

It has now been almost 10 years since our Metro system was completed. We have experienced almost 10 years of dramatic revitalization of our urban places both in the District and in the inner suburbs. As a region, we now expect safe, vibrant urban neighborhoods as the norm along with a busy Metro that accommodates play in addition to work. The fact that we expect these things when as recently as 10 years ago, they were largely pipe dreams says a lot about how much our region has changed.

The conversation also drove the point home that the dramatic increase in the vitality of our urban places was not an automatic thing. Much of the urban vitality we now take for granted is completely alien to large swaths of the rest of the United States. The progress in our region was due to a combination of political will for good planning, dramatic infrastructure investment, and being lucky enough to have good legacy street grids.

We spend a lot of energy on Grater Greater Washington debating things like sector plans, infrastructure construction, and business incentives. Because of zoning and funding mechanisms that are largely left over from the 20th century, creating and maintaining great, vibrant, desirable, sustainable, human-scale traditional walkable urban cities and towns still takes more work than creating gas-guzzling car-dependent places.

Whether we feel that way about ourselves or not, the Washington region is now an inspiration to improve the vibrance of traditional cities and towns for many visiting Americans from other regions. We should feel proud of that fact and also understand that such a position also brings the responsibility to maintain what we’ve got as well as making our region Greater.