Posts about H Street

Photo by DDOTDC on Flickr.

Streetcar tracks can be hazardous for bicyclists because bicycle tires can slip on the rails or get stuck in them, causing riders to fall. That doesn't mean bikes and streetcars can't coexist, and many world cities have extensive bike and streetcar networks. Small design features can help cyclists better cross streetcar tracks at an angle that minimizes danger, for instance.

But especially for cyclists less experienced riding around streetcar lines, the tracks pose a hazard. M. Loren Copsey has seen many crashes as owner of The Daily Rider, a bike shop on H Street. He says that they have had "numerous customers come into the shop directly after a fall with injuries and damaged bikes."

Last week, Copsey says he "saw a cyclist in the streetcar lane get caught and thrown over the handlebars. The first thing he said was that he was glad there wasn't a vehicle behind him when he fell. Thankfully he wasn't injured."

DDOT has a two-pronged approach to keeping bicyclists safe in this corridor. One is to educate riders on the dangers streetcar tracks can pose. Warning signs could go at Capital Bikeshare stations or be painted on to the roadway itself. There are currently some text-only signs on lightposts, but some could be replaced by more graphic warnings like this one in Portland.

The other way is to offer bicyclists the choice of another nearby route. That's what Arlington County is doing along the future Columbia Pike streetcar line. They're turning two parallel streets, one on either side of Columbia Pike, into "bike boulevards," low-speed streets designed to give bicyclists an alternative to a busier street where there isn't room for bike lanes.

Today, G and I streets are about 30 feet wide and contain 2 7-foot parking lanes and one 16-foot travel lane, which is wider than a normal 9-foot travel lane. DDOT is looking at 4 ways to use that extra space for bicyclists:

Option 1 paints sharrows in the primary direction of travel, with no provision for bicyclists to travel in the opposite direction. This is only a small step above a "no build" option. Riders could need up to a 4-block detour to legally reach a destination if they don't want to ride at all on H Street.

Option 2 also paints sharrows in the primary direction and adds a contraflow bike lane on the left side of the roadway, between parked cars and the primary travel lane. Any drivers trying to park would need to cross the bike lane. However, drivers will not be backing into the lane, improving visibility. The hazard of doors opening into the bike lane would be less because they would be passenger doors, which open less often.

Drawings from DDOT.

Option 3 converts parking to be diagonal along only one side of the street, with a contraflow bike lane on the opposite side. Cars would not need to cross into this area, so bollards or a curb could protect it from the rest of traffic. This option may be the safest configuration for bicyclists, but would take away some parking spaces.

Option 4 converts both streets to 2-way traffic, with painted sharrows in each direction. In addition to allowing biking in both directions, this change could alleviate congestion in the area by reducing the number of turns and increasing the number of alternative routes to H Street. However, this option may increase the chances drivers would hit parked cars.

These options could also help residents find parking spaces. Each block has between 24 and 30 spaces today. Under options 1, 2 and 4, no on-street parking spaces would disappear, while option 3 would mean 4-6 fewer spaces on each block.

Streetcars and bikes happily coexist in cities from Philadelphia to Amsterdam, and they can in DC as well. On some future streetcar corridors, there may be room for bicyclists to get their own lanes. Meanwhile, in areas like H Street where there isn't room for bike lanes, it's good to provide an alternative route for those bicyclists who may not feel safe riding on a busy street.

The proposal would repurpose the existing Government Printing Office buildings on North Capitol Street and add a new extension to the west. The new building would be over 2 million square feet, and would cover multiple blocks from New Jersey Avenue to North Capitol.

Ideally an employer as large as the FBI should have its offices downtown, but the FBI isn't just any employer. Its building is likely to be a security fortress, which means it won't be very good for pedestrians, or have ground floor retail. H Street is an important pedestrian and retail spine. Giving up a long stretch of it to the FBI would be just as bad there as it is on E Street, where the FBI is a sidewalk dead zone.

Actually, a dead zone on H Street might be even worse. Walmart is building an urban format store directly across the street from this site. And love Walmart or hate it, it's going to be one of downtown's biggest retail draws. That means this exact block of H Street is about to become one of the busiest retail main streets in the city. It should have retail on both sides.

One advantage of this FBI proposal is that the federal government already owns the land. That does mean it's already less likely to get retail on it, but putting the FBI building on it would cement that, literally.

There are other questions. DDOT's proposed crosstown streetcar would run along H Street. The FBI has never weighed in on streetcars, but would they throw up security-related roadblocks? It's unknown.

According to Washingtonian, the FBI would close G Street entirely to traffic, as well as obliterating a block of 1st Street. That further cripples the L'Enfant grid at a time when other projects are trying to restore the grid nearby. And would the FBI forbid pedestrians and cyclists on G Street as well as motor vehicles?

Finally, the existing GPO buildings are among Washington's most prominent historic red brick buildings, and were designed by a prominent architect at the time. The FBI concept renderings show a courtyard in the middle of the GPO building, but aerials show no such courtyard currently exists. That suggests the buildings will have to be completely gutted to fit the FBI. Is that a worthy tradeoff?

Any proposal that keeps the FBI downtown merits serious consideration, but given the FBI's security requirements, and given the potential for this location to be redeveloped with something even better, it may be preferable to let the FBI go. Putting the FBI on this block might be better than having it remain a parking lot, but almost any other building would be more ideal.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

Gallaudet University, a Metro station, an elementary school, homes and businesses line the 6-lane road. It has very narrow sidewalks which don't meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, and no parked cars or street trees to serve as buffers.

This road has seen many deaths over the past few years. Most recently, 71-year-old Ruby Whitfield was killed while walking across Florida Avenue NE in a marked crosswalk. The driver, a 32-year-old Annapolis man, was reportedly drunk and speeding, and fled the scene. MPD quickly apprehended him.

While the section of Florida Avenue from 2nd Street NE to West Virginia Avenue NE is 6 lanes wide, the block where Ms. Whitfield was killed has fewer driving lanes, with relatively wider sidewalks and street trees. The driver had just crossed West Virginia Avenue into this adjacent block.

At a vigil on Florida Avenue a few days after Ms. Whitfield died, Mayor Gray committed to quickly installing a new traffic signal at the intersection with 11th Street NE, and allowing parking at all times on this block to reduce the road to one lane per direction. This might have saved Ms. Whitfield's life, and is a positive first step, but it is not nearly enough.

Photograph by John Nelson reproduced with permission.

The road is not adequate for growing pedestrian usage

Pedestrian traffic has increased significantly in this area as the NoMa area grows and new attractions such as Union Market open. Florida Avenue is also home to Two Rivers Public Charter School and Gallaudet University. The NoMa-Gallaudet Metro station, which opened in 2004 one block from Florida Avenue, has the fastest growth rate of any in the system.

The sidewalks in many areas, especially on the south side of the street, are often only 2 feet wide. Numerous obstructions such as light poles and sign posts reduce the effective width even further. The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) repainted some of the crosswalks in 2011, but this is not as helpful as creating actual ADA-compliant sidewalks with proper widths and ramps.

Photos by Yancey Burns.

For the thousands of students, staff, and visitors to Gallaudet University, the narrow sidewalks are particularly hazardous because it's not possible to communicate in sign language while walking single-file down a narrow sidewalk.

Hansel Bauman, the University's Director of Campus Planning & Design (and a resident of the Trinidad neighborhood) has led an initiative called "DeafSpace" to create architectural design guidelines that quantify ways to enhance communication and livability. It is ironic and sad that the main street to campus does not provide for the needs of their community.

The volume of cars traveling on Florida Avenue NE does not justify the current road configuration, particularly because this street is already narrower for most of its length. DDOT & the Office of Planning have written numerous studies and reports over the past few years that recommend reducing the number of travel lanes and installing wider sidewalks on Florida Avenue.

Most recently, the NoMa Neighborhood Access Study & Transportation Management Plan included this project on its "Immediate Action List" for completion within 24 months. That study was published in early 2010, and to date DDOT has not put forth any preliminary plans or come close to starting construction.

Sam Zimbabwe, DDOT Associate Director for Policy, Planning, and Sustainability, said in an email that DDOT is "starting a planning study from New York to West Virginia with the goal of improving safety and operations, and that will explore the ability to reduce the number of travel lanes."

The planning study won't wrap up until the middle of 2014. Then, if funding is available, DDOT could potentially begin design and construction. However, all of this would take several years. Ms. Whitfield's neighbors and friends, and everyone else who uses this street, should not continue to wait.

However, the first sepia-toned images to surface on Amundsen's Twitter account appear to be of a settlement in the little-understood territory called the Land of Mary, located due north of the District. Until now, all that anyone knew about the Land of Mary is that it was home to a boring and cultureless race of people who piloted large, metal vehicles in an erratic fashion, ate crab cakes, and were the ancestral home of the rich kid in somebody's freshman year dorm at Oberlin.

Initially, Amundsen expressed dismay about the territory's strange inhabitants after crossing Eastern Avenue, long considered to be the end of civilization, into a village he dubbed New Columbia.

"They seemed on the whole to me, to be a very uncool people," he wrote in a tumblr post. "They all go completely without scarves and mustaches, even the men, though I saw one guy who looked like he might be a DJ."

Amundsen's lunch.

One day after landing in New Columbia, Amundsen claimed to have seen sidewalks, buildings far taller than any that exist in the District, and a grody dive bar in a basement. Around lunchtime Saturday, he tweeted photos of an Ethiopian restaurant.

"Eating tibs & injera at hole-in-the-wall with amazing smells. Theres like 100 of them on 1 block here in #unchartedterritory," he wrote.

By Sunday, Amundsen and his crew found New Columbia's three record stores and began to wonder if the uncouth villagers could be civilized. "It appears to me that the people are ingenious ... I am of opinion that they would like the new Yeasayer album," he wrote on his Facebook page. "If it's okay with my landlord, I intend to carry home six of them to crash at my place so we can listen to it on my record player."

While the savages of New Columbia, which Amundsen dubbed "Columbians," were flattered by the invitation to listen to records on the floor of Amundsen's English basement studio, they politely declined, citing job and family commitments.

It's a federal requirement that all new rail lines go through such testing. Doing so guarantees that everything will run smoothly, and that there are no inherent safety problems with the vehicles or infrastructure.

Testing began on the Silver Line in Tysons Corner a few weeks ago, and so far there are no big problems. When WMATA's new 7000 series railcars arrive, they'll have to be tested too.

Besides testing, there are other issues that could potentially delay the streetcar. DDOT has 3 streetcars right now, but needs more to operate the route. 3 more streetcars are on order but haven't arrived yet. If the delivery date slips, so will opening day.

Also, the car barn still has to be built. DDOT might be able to run streetcars before the barn is finished, but only temporarily. If the barn becomes a sticking point and doesn't move forward, opening on time will be harder.

Still, DDOT says they're on target. Unless that changes, rumors of potential delay are just that.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

All images from DDOT.

Poles for overhead wires and streetcar signals will go up from May to August, wires August to October, and then they can bring the streetcars over and start testing them. They need to run them back and forth for a while before revenue service can begin.

Before the cars go to H Street, they will be on a commissioning track DDOT is building in Anacostia, right along the edge of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling on South Capitol Street. Streetcars will arrive there in February, if things go as planned, with testing starting in March and drivers getting trained soon after that.

As for the car barn at Spingarn, DDOT Chief Engineer Ronaldo ("Nick") Nicholson said that they are redoing the car barn design, which started out more contemporary, in a more classical way based on comments from the Historic Preservation Review Board and Historic Preservation Office.

HPRB landmarked the Spingarn site last month, and DDOT officials don't know or didn't want to say how much this will delay things, but they claimed that the H Street line could even start running before the car barn is done; DDOT will just have to maintain the cars in a more ad hoc way in the interim.

Besides the 3 streetcars DC already owns, there are 3 more coming from Oregon Iron Works, 2 due in August and the third in December.

Shell of a streetcar being built for DC in Oregon.

On the west end, you'll have to walk through the Union Station parking garage, down 3 escalators, into the Amtrak concourse, then over to the Metro to transfer to the Red Line. DDOT would like to build an elevator directly from the Metro to the garage to speed that part up a bit, and is studying that, but would have to come up with money or find federal funds to build such a thing.

Before and when the line opens, DDOT will reach out aggressively to area residents and businesses to educate people about not parking in the streetcar lane. Director Terry Bellamy said that they expect to have to tow a few cars at the start, and will work with DPW to have more tow trucks at the ready in the area, until people get used to the new setup.

For deliveries, trucks will have to park somewhere other than the tracks, or switch around delivery times. Consultant Steve Carroll, who worked on systems in Norfolk, Tampa, Tucson, and many more, said that in most cities, the businesses just rescheduled deliveries to come outside streetcar hours.

After H Street, Minnesota-Benning, Anacostia, and more

The next steps are to extend the streetcar over the Anacostia River to either Benning Road or Minnesota Avenue Metro station; DDOT is finishing up a study to decide that. They'll also build a line through Historic Anacostia, and are close to finishing a study on where to run that line. After that is another study to look at the best route to Georgetown.

These would be the first pieces in a 22-mile "priority system" DDOT has picked out from the original plan. The general idea consists of 3 lines: Benning Road to Georgetown (the "One City Line"), Anacostia to Buzzard's Point, and Buzzard's Point to Takoma.

To achieve that, DDOT is looking for a partner who can design, build, finance, operate, and maintain (DBFOM) the system. This concessionaire would handle the whole project under DDOT's management and with promised funding from DC to pay off the financing and cover operations.

They haven't decided on the exact alignments for each line; this map shows the alignments from the 2009 streetcar study. A subsequent Office of Planning study suggested some alternatives, and the two agencies will work together with others to actually study each line in detail.

Chief among the potential changes is running the Georgia Avenue line to Silver Spring, a far more obvious endpoint than Takoma as people could ride it both directions to jobs and connect to the Purple Line. Nicholson said DC officials have been talking with Maryland counterparts, and both sides are interested, but they haven't reached any firm agreements.

What about car barns? Those lines will need some number of new car barns, and DDOT plans to undertake yet another study, also with the Office of Planning, to figure that out. Car barns can be pretty small, even on the underground parking level of a mixed-use building using a streetcar elevator (or "lift"). If there could be more of them, each can be a lot smaller, or a larger area could hold a major facility that can handle more cars.

And beyond...

The rest of the 37-mile system isn't forgotten, either, and will follow the 22-mile "priority" set of lines. Nicholson said the car barn study will look at locations for all of those lines as well, not just ones for the priority lines.

Bellamy emphasized that they are going to work hard to put every car barn in Ward 5. No, he didn't say that. In fact, he reiterated that they will go all across the city.

We didn't discuss the later lines much in the meeting, but it's clear they will depend a lot on the early ones. As we've seen with other types of streets, like the recent streetscapes that add two-way traffic and bike lanes, once an agency has a bunch of engineers who are used to building one type of thing, they can just march along building it more places without a lot of trouble.

If the first few lines become a big success, DDOT will be able to expand the program and turn its by then finely-honed streetcar-planning, community-involving (hopefully), and concessionaire-driven streetcar-building machine to more corridors as long as the District is willing to make it a priority to pay for them.

You can see the complete slideshow DDOT presented at today's briefing.

Update: Here's Martin Austermuhle's report on DCist.

Maintenance facility decisions fell through at the last minute

Some have charged that the association's true goal is to stop the streetcar entirely. Unfortunately, DDOT made this snafu possible by really blowing the planning for the maintenance facility for the H Street line.

Former streetcar head Scott Kubly spent years believing that the agency could put the facility in the underpass below the Union Station tracks, but Amtrak ultimately decided to use the space for its own Union Station plan.

At that point, DDOT turned around and said they would put the facility at Spingarn, because that's the only place they could get approval quickly enough. A far better choice would be the edge of the massive parking lots at RFK stadium, but that is federal land, which DC controls but can only use for recreational purposes.

WMATA was able to build the Orange and Blue Line through the parking lots on a long ramp from underground to a bridge over the river, and one can certainly argue whether giant parking lots are really a recreational use. Still, any effort to get permission for a car barn would be complex and take a long time.

It's hard to really fault area residents who are frustrated that DDOT didn't pursue alternatives for the car barn location, then had to put it at Spingarn because it didn't have time to pursue any alternatives.

Will car barns look attractive?

The very industrial look in DDOT's early sketches also doesn't do much to assuage residents' fears. DDOT now says they will be designing a more attractive facility that fits better with Spingarn's historic architecture. They should, but can residents feel confident a better design will actually come to pass?

Sketch of possible car barn. Image from DDOT.

DDOT is finishing the line under a design-build contract, which includes the maintenance facility. In a design-build process, DDOT picks a contractor and then works with that contractor to work out design details as they go. This can significantly speed up projects, but it doesn't always allow for a lot of public participation or transparency. A lot of details of the 11th Street Bridge project remained somewhat vague until very late in the process, often far too late to change anything.

DDOT spokesperson John Lisle says that the contractor has "commenced" the design process for the facility, and that "Additional opportunities for public participation/feedback will be scheduled over the next 90-120 calendar days." We just have to hope that this process is more participatory than DDOT's last few efforts, and gives residents real choices.

If DDOT ends up only offering unattractive designs and says they are the only possibilities because of the short time frame or limited budget, it will only validate the arguments of those who seek to landmark Spingarn.

Streetcar planning has been limited or secret

The fact is that most large transportation projects involve a lot of different pieces, and an agency must either plow ahead knowing it will probably encounter some hiccups, or the project may never get done.

Still, it has been years since DDOT promised to flesh out details of the streetcar system, with almost no progress. The agency promised a plan for financing the streetcar, and also for how it will procure cars that can run without overhead wires at least in key viewsheds. Bellamy alluded to a lot of work getting done on these issues at the hearing, but has never actually shared any of that work with the public.

The Committee of 100 has been arguing for such plans. They initially wanted to halt progress on the project until DDOT finished the plans. That could have killed the streetcar, and we pushed hard at that time to let DDOT keep moving forward. As the years pass without any more details, however, I find it harder to keep justifying this approach.

Business groups have been talking about setting up a "value capture" mechanism that applies some of the real estate appreciation, which the streetcar brings, toward financing the lines. The farther DDOT goes down the path of planning new lines, the harder it will be to set something like this up. Already, as Cheh pointed out in the hearing, it may be too late to do this on H Street.

Similarly, where will future maintenance facilities go? For some other lines, the best locations might take time to secure permission and build community support. DDOT needs to start far sooner than it did with Spingarn to plan for these locations and create designs that satisfy neighbors.

Cheh also harangued DDOT for dragging its feet on a governance plan. When the council approved the streetcar plan, it required DDOT to study and report on options for what authority or board would control the streetcar system in the long term. Bellamy has come to multiple hearings promising that such a report was just around the corner, but then nothing happened.

Today, he said they had such a report, but some unnamed "stakeholders" had asked DDOT to hold off on releasing it. When Cheh threatened to withhold a key authorization, however, Bellamy promised to give her staff copies of the draft report. Why can't the public see this report?

DDOT might be doing a lot of work behind the scenes, but it's high time the conversation moved out into public view. Former director Gabe Klein was moving very rapidly on the streetcar, sometimes so much so that he smashed headlong into some obstacles, but he and Kubly also were forthright with residents about the way they were operating. They also built public support for the streetcar program by sharing details and progress regularly.

As we saw with the battles over streetcar funding and council authorization in 2010 and 2011, residents eager for this very important project will forgive a lot of mistakes as long as they know what is happening. With a more secretive approach of late, DDOT risks squandering a lot of the enthusiasm from residents outside the line's immediate area.

That would be a shame, because the streetcar is an important project to shape the future of the District. We can't build Metrorail everywhere it doesn't serve today. A streetcar can stimulate transit-oriented growth that buses simply don't, but if the line doesn't work well, the maintenance facility looks ugly, or a value capture mechanism for funding never comes together, neighborhoods outside H Street will either oppose or never get streetcars of their own.

The centerpiece is a large, glass-roofed concourse where today's mediocre boarding areas sit. New tracks would serve high(er)-speed rail and add capacity for MARC and VRE.

Where now people walking along H Street traverse a bridge with a wall (though a nicely-decorated one) on the north side and a parking garage on the south, with Akridge's project it will ultimately become a real street, with a new entrance to Union Station on one side and mixed-use buildings on the other.

Amtrak has now posted its master plan document online. It first gave an exclusive to the Washington Post, though the paper's article didn't include many details of the actual plan (and a couple of errors) and I encourage readers to look at the plan itself first.

The H Street underpass, which DDOT originally wanted to use for the streetcar station, is slated for a "market passage" in this plan, one of several new interior concourses connecting people to the trains and lined with shops.

Expect to see more details in the press tonight, following a briefing from Amtrak and Akridge this afternoon. I'm meeting with folks from Akridge tomorrow morning. What would you like to know about? What aspects of the plan, either for the station or the buildings surrounding it, should I delve into more deeply?