Greater Greater Washington

Pre-snow-whatever open thread

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:04:00 EDT

I'm at the local Safeway which is reasonably adequately stocked except for produce, but the lines are 15-30 mins long for checkout. 17th Street businesses mostly did a very poor job of shoveling, along with many big residential buildings.

How are the groceries and other necessities in your neighborhoods? What about the sidewalks?

9 comments

Large buildings have no excuse for not shoveling (Dec 22, 2009)
Breakfast links and morning open thread (Sep 25, 2008)
From Social Safeway to Sidewalk Safeway (Jun 16, 2008)
What's wrong with 17th Street redux (May 21, 2008)
What's wrong with 17th Street? (Apr 10, 2008)

DC making DC USA garage free

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:38:39 EDT

Photo by zontikgames.

by David Alpert

Tipster Thomas forwarded an email the Mayor's office sent around about the snow:

DC USA parking garage will remain free for the next 48 hours: With street parking more scarce during this historic winter weather season, we will continue providing free parking in the over 2,000 space parking complex at the shopping center in Columbia Heights. The DC USA parking center is conveniently located a block from the Columbia Heights metro stop and can provide sheltered parking while ensuring that your vehicle is off of the streets so that we can quickly clear your street and return to normalcy as soon as possible.

The email also reminded residents that you have to clear your sidewalk and asks those who drive to please be careful not to park in ways that block snowplows from accessing streets.

3 comments

Free parking near the Navy Yard given away to commuters (Sep 17, 2008)
Entire level of DC USA garage has never been used (May 29, 2008)
Is the 1,000 space garage in Columbia Heights a good investment? (Feb 21, 2008)
Cleveland Park(ing) puzzles (Feb 15, 2008)
"All I want for New Year's is free parking" (Jan 4, 2008)

What's That? #12

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:12:00 EDT

by Michael Rogers

It's week #12 of What's That?

Each week I show small close-up photographs of three different well-known places in and around Washington, DC.

The first person to get all three wins recognition of his or her genius when I reveal the answers a few days later.

Post your guesses in the comments. Comments will be hidden until the winner is announced. I'll credit the first person to get each of the three individually as well as the person who first correctly guesses all three.

Update by David: I originally set up the comments incorrectly so they were showing. They're hidden now.

49 comments

What's That? #11 (Jan 31, 2010)
What's That? #10 (Jan 24, 2010)
What's That? #9 (Jan 18, 2010)
What's That? #8 (Jan 10, 2010)
What's That? #7 (Jan 3, 2010)

Can a private model build the transit we need?

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:34:35 EDT

Photo by Wm Jas.

by Steve Offutt

Many of our transit systems are bursting at the seams, yet only provide about 2% of trips nationwide. It takes decades to build new transit projects. The existing public agency model for providing public transportation services is totally inadequate to rapidly meet the challenges we face, particularly the urgent need to deal with climate change.

We need to break our reliance on individual vehicles and fossil fuels. Public transportation needs to expand rapidly to help us do that, but is not effectively designed to do so. Could the private sector, with its profit motive, provide solutions?

Currently, public transit provides only a tiny fraction of the transportation miles taken by Americans. For 2006, transit carried 52,000,000,000 miles, while passenger cars traveled about 2,650,000,000,000 miles — 50 times greater. And car passenger miles are even higher, since some of these cars had more than one occupant.

In the DC area, MWCOG's State of the Commute 2007 reported 71% of all commuting trips by SOV, with another 7% by carpool/vanpool. Given that transit trips on average tend to be shorter than car trips, the passenger miles of transit commuters is considerably under 20% of the commuting miles in total.

Commuting, though, only makes up about 25% of all trips, and transit is used for an even smaller percentage of non-commuting trips. So even in the DC area, which has significant transit infrastructure and operations, it accounts for well under 10% of all the travel — probably closer to 5%.

Even so, our Metrorail and Metrobus systems are often running at or above capacity, particularly during rush hours and for certain special events. This displaces less than 20% of commuting miles/10% of VMT. Transportation is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, and it is growing. Global climate change necessitates drastic and enormous changes in our emissions from all sources, including transportation.

That percentage needs to increase dramatically over at most a couple of decades, from less than 2% nationally to something like 20%, or 50%, or more. We can't just keep driving cars 2.6 trillion miles per year. Reducing that 2.6 trillion just a little to 2 trillion by shifting to transit would require a 12-fold increase in transit capacity. What does that mean for WMATA? Or BART? Or SEPTA? Or RTD? What would it require to make a 10- or-20-fold increase in capacity?

Transit agencies and governments work too slowly and incrementally for this kind of increase. It will take at least 16 years from the first real plans to build the Silver Line out to Dulles airport and its completion — longer, if you also count the time it was being thought about, proposed and debated. The FTA issued a decision on a short, 5-mile extension of BART in 2006 that will open 8 years later, in 2014. DART's 2030 plan includes a paltry 18 additional miles of light rail (less than 1 mile per year). And let's not even get started on the Purple Line.

How can we possibly increase the capacity of our public transport systems by an order of magnitude or more if it takes decades to complete a single project?

Lincoln said it best:

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew."

The occasion is global climate change, and we must think and act anew. Somehow we need to change the model for transportation such that the private sector benefits from providing transportation with close to zero emissions.

Private streetcar companies built thousands and thousands of miles of lines in just a couple of decades around a hundred years ago. Some streetcar barons made millions of dollars in the process, but to great public benefit as well.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I know the wrong answer is just to keep doing what we're doing now, but just a little better or a little faster or a little different. Just another billion dollars here or a dedicated funding source there. How can we best engage the private sector to invest and invent and move forward?

Some ideas, for what it's worth:

The HOT lanes in Virginia are controversial, but they are getting built quickly. The private consortium is motivated by the profit motive to get this project done as rapidly as possible. No doubt it is not perfect, but it is an example of engaging the private sector's profit motive to expedite progress. Given that the US is a big place, experimenting with different ideas in different places across the country will help us discover the ideas that work and those that don't.
One could imagine a rail system in which the operators are private entities but the infrastructure is not. This is analogous to our air transportation system: the government runs air traffic control, airports are usually quasi-government entities, and the airlines are private companies. What if the Northeast Corridor, for example, were opened up to private operators. They could buy "slots" like airlines do and provide varying levels of service at varying levels of price. There would likely be Wi-Fi on some trains by now if that were the case; even the Acela trains do not have Wi-Fi today.

The trick is to make the financial incentives align with the societal goals. If the goal is to reduce miles being driven, then private companies could be paid per mile reduced. They would then strive to find solutions. One example of this is the contract Houston has with a company called NuRide (disclosure: I used to work for NuRide). NuRide is paid by VMT reduced. They offer incentives to people to rideshare and take other modes. If they are successful, they get paid; if not, they don't. So it is in their direct financial interest to find the incentives that will get people to change their behavior.

Transit agencies, as they are currently organized, do not have to worry about not getting paid if they don't perform or, conversely, make a gazillion dollars if they over-deliver.

I don't have all the answers, but rather hope to begin a discussion about rethinking the current public agency model of transit that is incapable of delivering the massive market transformation that is required. What do you think?

21 comments

Metro needs a CEO (Feb 4, 2010)
"All you can eat" driving promotes vehicular gluttony (Feb 27, 2009)
Stimulus draft released; $30B for highways vs. $10B for transit (Jan 15, 2009)
COG climate change report briefing tomorrow (Aug 25, 2008)
Quiz answers: commuting is larger share of transit trips in big cities (May 15, 2008)

The evolution of Metrorail, 1976-2010

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:29:00 EDT

by David Alpert

During December's snowstorm, we wrote that the worst December storm since 1982 would (and did) create a Metro system with about the same number of stations as in 1982, as did this weekend's storm.

This raises the question, what exactly did the rail system look like in 1982? Or other years? To answer that, I created a little slideshow:

The Metrorail system may have been about the same size as in 1982 during the recent storms, but if Metro has to make drastic cuts to bus and rail service in July as planned, it'll indefinitely revert to a state far worse than it was in 2005. Sign CSG's petition to ask local officials to support Metro and maintain our vital service.

Notes on the maps:

Most of the data comes from the excellent nycsubway.org timeline of the Washington Metro. I tried to identify the dates of station renamings from Wikipedia's pages on individual stations and other online sources. To keep the number of maps manageable, and because many stations' exact renaming dates are not available, I grouped station renamings in with the next major service change.

We know that around 1982, Orange and Blue trains operated a strange service pattern where Orange trains ran to New Carrollton, then turned around as Blue trains to run to National Airport; Orange trains the other way went to Ballston, then turned around as Blue trains to Addison Road.

According to coneyraven, this balanced the capacity as the New Carrollton and National Airport branches had higher ridership than the Ballston and Addison Road branches, while keeping the termini the same as their ultimate configurations (i.e. to get to New Carrollton, get on an Orange train).

I don't have information on whether Metro used this pattern for the entire time between when the line to Addison Road opened on December 1, 1979 until the Yellow Line opened on April 30, 1983; the maps above assume that is the case.

The maps do not show the Green Line Commuter Shortcut, where from January 27, 1997 until the inner Green Line opened in September 17, 1999, rush hour Green Line trains on the Greenbelt segment used the switch at Fort Totten to continue to Farragut North. Metro maps from that era do not appear to show this service except in an info box.

29 comments

A new late-night map to soften the blow of Metrorail cuts (Dec 23, 2009)
A cheaper route to Metro core capacity, part 3: More complex service patterns (Jul 1, 2009)
A cheaper route to Metro core capacity? (Jun 29, 2009)
What was up with the one-way Orange-Blue? (Oct 7, 2008)
Proposed "Blue Line split": why blue? (Mar 12, 2008)

Breakfast links: White stuff

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:09:00 EDT

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

by David Alpert

It snowed: In case you didn't notice, the region got buried under two feet of snow. The Circulator is running, and all trips are free. Metro is limited to underground rail still, and just a small handful of Metrobus routes are running. There's also limited service on ART, Ride On, Fairfax Connector, and MARC, and no service on DASH or VRE. There's no information on TheBus.

DC schools were originally going to be the only ones open but changed their minds, thanks to the union? (DCist) ... Oh, and it will snow again Tuesday.

Fight for the fountain: Thousands battled it out in a huge snowball fight in Dupont Circle Saturday. M.V. Jantzen was over at the fight in Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park.

Parking makes even counselors angry: Nobody pulled a gun on the snowball fight, but a Fairfax anger management counselor did last week. He got upset at two men in an SUV who were parking (though it's unclear why from the article), and allegedly pulled a gun on the two, who turned out to be U.S. Marshals. (Post)

Bag fee refined: New regulations clarify details of the bag fee. Businesses that sell a small amount of food will still have to charge 5 cents for all bags, but bags that package most things that need bags, like newspapers or dry cleaning, are exempt. (Post)

Why four stations at Tysons?: A letter writer asks Dr. Gridlock why Tysons needs four Metro stations. The doc cites Zachary Schrag in explaining how clustered transit stops "shape communities." (Post)

Vacant or blighted?: The DC Council is still wrestling with how to adjust its "vacant" and/or "blighted" property tax rates to promote using empty properties and punish those that let properties crumble without unfairly hitting property owners hurt by a bad economy. (The Other 35 Percent)

Privatization makes street fairs costly: As with Virginia's HOT lanes, people keep discovering more hidden gotchas in Chicago's parking meter privatization deal. The latest: the city would has to pay the vendor any time they shut a street down, for construction, a street fair, and more. (CBS2 via Parking Ticket Geek, Michael P)

Tokyo molded itself well: Researchers grew some slime mold around food sources arranged like the map of Tokyo's rail stations, and discovered that eventually the mold coalesced into a network of lines resembling Tokyo's. Many articles said "maybe this means mold is better than planners," but what it really tells us is that Tokyo's designers did a good job laying out their system. (MSNBC, Steven)

Have a tip for the links? Submit it here.

26 comments

Snowpocalypse open thread (Feb 5, 2010)
Impending storm could trigger the Metro "snow map" (Dec 18, 2009)
The new Circulators and the Metro map (Mar 31, 2009)
Fairfax County proposes bus route cuts (Mar 24, 2009)
Why was Arlington so ahead of its time? (Jun 23, 2008)

Snowpocalypse open thread

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:40:00 EDT

by David Alpert

White stuff is coming down everywhere. Grocery stores were mobbed yesterday with hour-long waits at Trader Joe's. Metro will probably go to the "snow map" again. NOAA really thinks you shouldn't drive anywhere. There will be various snowball fights, hopefully with no guns.

What's on your mind?

35 comments

Thanksgiving weekend open thread (Nov 28, 2009)
Open thread (Sep 16, 2008)
Open thread (Sep 9, 2008)
Open thread (Aug 28, 2008)
Grocery stores disappearing in NYC (Feb 19, 2008)

The Transit Ombudsman: Watch the language

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:10:00 EDT

by Dennis Jaffe

A few weeks ago, The Transit Ombudsman put the spotlight on Metro's online trip planner. Readers identified many good issues and provided excellent suggestions on the trip planner and other topics. WMATA staff followed up with us promptly and is working to correct many of the issues.

The goal of the Transit Ombudsman is to identify issues that bother riders and then contact Metro to seek solutions. The focus is on issues that are good bets to produce successful results.

Suzanne Peck, WMATA's Assistant General Manager for Information Technology, contacted me to pledge the IT team's responsiveness. David and I met with Peck and her deputy, Vic Grimes. We feel that both were very responsive and we are hopeful of seeing results that will raise rider satisfaction.

Your comments generally centered around four main areas: Items that were unclear or confusing on the site, the need to make it easier to report problems, accuracy issues around the trip planner, and trouble with NextBus.

Today's column focuses on the first of those. wmata.com has many helpful tools for riders, but in some cases the names of tools or instructions aren't clear enough. Here are a few examples you identified:

Find a station: The rail map page includes a "Find a station" feature. As BryanDC wrote, it sounds like a way to find a specific station by name.

It isn't. Type in "U Street," for instance, and the tool, based on Google Maps, suggests addresses around the world starting with one in South Africa. You're supposed to type in a specific address and find the closest rail stations with their distances.

The IT team will change this to "Find station near address." Does that help?

Service nearby: On WMATA.com, the Rider Tools menu lists Service nearby.

What I hear most is people don't know what "Service nearby" is and they don't use it. If you haven't used it, is "Service nearby" clear?

As with Find a Station, you can type in a specific address or landmark. But here, the site lists both bus stops and train stations within one mile, plus the exact distances.

Have you ever used this? If you have, how useful has it been?

We asked the IT team to change "Service nearby" on the main page tools list to "Service near address." They explained there isn't enough space and that "Service nearby" is based on Google maps' "Search nearby." However, on Google maps, that feature shows up only after you've typed in a location and you see a map, making it clear what it's for.

Positive instructions: Jane suggested that the trip planner prominently tell people what to enter in addition to what not to enter. The trip planner's address boxes say, "Do not enter city, state or zip," but that doesn't say what to enter.

Farther down, on the trip planner's longer form, it says, "Note: Enter address, intersection or landmark. Do not include city, state, zip code or any commas." But this is not particularly visible, nor is it part of the shorter form on the home page.

IT staff agreed this has merit. They will give greater emphasis to the instructions for what to enter. What do you think of the wording that's already there?

Which other tools on WMATA.com do you think need to be described more clearly?

IT staff at Metro are demonstrating responsiveness to the issues readers of The Transit Ombudsman are raising. And they requested that I ask you to be as specific as possible in your comments. They're reading what you're writing.

Upcoming posts will look at your comments on reporting problems, trip planner accuracy, and NextBus.

21 comments

The Transit Ombudsman: What's bothering you? (Jan 4, 2010)
Ride-On now on Google Transit (Nov 2, 2009)
Innovation resistance at Metro, part 4: What flaws? (Oct 5, 2009)
Metro releases station-oriented bus maps (Aug 17, 2009)
Metro refuses to participate in Google Transit (Dec 13, 2008)

Government driver hits pedestrian, MPD gives victim a ticket

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:04:00 EDT

Photo by love not fear.

by David Alpert

A US Diplomatic Security Service vehicle hit Daily Caller employee Sean Medlock, the site reports, and while Medlock was in the hospital, an MPD officer showed up to give him a ticket for jaywalking.

Medlock was transported to Georgetown hospital, and while there, MPD officer John Muniz showed up and wrote Medlock a jaywalking ticket, with a dark-suited "special agent" standing behind him. Medlock denies he was jaywalking.

MPD does not typically appear in hospitals accompanied by government officials to write tickets for jaywalking, so this seems highly suspicious.

Moreover, the ticket has the wrong location, the Daily Caller says, and says Medlock was walking diagonally. Medlock, however, says that he was in the crosswalk and had the white walk signal.

The Daily Caller sent some questions to the State Department. Most got no answers, but the department did say that "At approximately 7:10 PM last night, a jogger collided with one of the U.S. Department of State, Diplomatic Security Service's official vehicles." If a driver hits a pedestrian, now we're saying the pedestrian "collided with" the vehicle?

Daily Caller and the public deserve to know what, if any, conversations transpired between the State Department and MPD. More importantly, it'd be great if this incident opens the Caller's reporters' eyes to the problems of traffic safety in general.

A government SUV hitting their writer does play squarely into the conservative view of government, and this hint of a conspiracy gives that a lot more salience, but police also blame pedestrians for many crashes not involving the government at all. That's just as wrong.

Thanks to JTS and Bossi for the tips.

30 comments

Excessive passive voice, linguistic detachment observed in Culpeper road fatality (Mar 23, 2009)
Police report for Connecticut & Nebraska crash (Feb 4, 2009)
Pedestrian hit at Comet Square; driver "cited with a violation" (Feb 4, 2009)
Bob Novak hits pedestrian, tries to commit hit-and-run (Jul 23, 2008)
Driver vs. pedestrian perspective (Jan 10, 2008)

Breakfast links: Build more in the east

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:48:00 EDT

Image from Wikimedia.

by David Alpert

Build in Capitol Heights, not Westphalia: A resident of Capitol Heights argues that Prince George's needs to focus more on developing around its Metro stations and making the roadways there more ped- and bike-friendly, instead of building megaprojects on remote farms like Westphalia. (Gazette)

Preserve UMD history and add the Purple Line: UMD administrators are still pushing to locate the Purple Line anywhere except the logical place: through the center of campus. The latest proposal would disturb a campus building which is up for historic designation; the administration sounds like it doesn't care much about the historic buildings. Students say: run the thing on Campus Drive already!

Big Chair big news: Area blogs have been talking about this for a while, but there's a new coffee shop on MLK Ave SE in historic downtown Anacostia. The coffee shop will seek to capitalize on the lunch rush hour and create a "third place" in an area with few food options. (Post, Cavan)

Those stylish reusable bags: Finally, a press article that isn't whining about the bag fee, but agrees that people really are using reusable bags: the Post's Home and Garden section has an article on the stylish reusable bags people are sporting at area grocers. (Post)

Sex parties are not "residential": When the local zoning board cracks down on a quasi-commercial use in a residential area, it usually doesn't make multiple papers, except when that violation is BDSM sex parties in Bethesda. (Examiner)

Ride On a little longer: Responding to a strong outcry from residents about proposed Ride On service cuts, Ike Leggett agreed to reduce some of the cuts and raise parking fines instead. Councilmember Roger Berliner wants to go farther and have no cuts. (Examiner)

Real-time Arlington: Arlington Transit has a mobile-friendly real-time bus tracking site up in beta, complete with links to Google, Bing, or MapQuest maps for stops. (CommuterPage.com, Rob S.)

Have a tip for the links? Submit it here.

And, of course, enjoy the snow! Did you stock up on groceries, ice melt, or other supplies to dig in for the storm?

25 comments

Reusable bag incentive begins in two days (Dec 30, 2009)
Get plastic bags out of the Anacostia (Feb 12, 2009)
Prince George�s and the Post back light rail Purple Line (Nov 17, 2008)