Posts about Near Southeast

Yards Park unnecessarily bans bicycles

Rules and regulations for the Yards Park are unequivocal. They list "bike riding," along with drug and alcohol use, smoking and "using more than one seat on a bench designed for sharing" among those activities prohibited by park guidelines.

The rules list no reason, but this most likely derives from a presumed conflict between cyclists and other users of the park, as is common on mixed-use paths. However, inside the park itself, that conflict doesn't arise.

The path through the park, including the bridges from Diamond Teague Park and the boardwalk that runs to the entrance of the Washington Navy Yard, is quite wide (upwards of 30 feet in parts) and has plenty of space for many different kinds of users to mix.

Rather than contribute to conflicts, this vast amount of space gives ample room for cyclists to pass safely while still letting people on foot casually stroll or enjoy the view. Though the path does narrow at certain points, it still remains wide enough for mixed bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

This award-winning park is quite a lovely one. It could become an activity center in the Near Southeast neighborhood, as the home of restaurants and shops that will be genuine amenities for the nearby community. Yards Park has also hosted many community events, including last year's celebration of bicycling, the Tour de Fat, hosted by New Belgium Brewery, which sought to "spread... the good word about the positive societal offerings of the bicycle." The event raised over $20,000 for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association.

Banning bicycles seems contradictory to the goal of becoming a welcoming gathering place for an increasingly multi-modal neighborhood.

Navy Yard Riverwalk unnecessarily bans bicycles

The Washington Navy Yard Riverwalk has, in the past few years, gone from completely prohibiting public access to limited public access on workdays, to expanded daytime access on weekdays, to daytime access seven days a week, to unlimited 24/7 public access, with the exception of closures for official events. Each successive increase in accessibility has been a step in the correct direction.

However, this increase is access does not extend to bicyclists. The Navy Yard Riverwalk rules prohibit bicycling, along with rollerblading and skateboarding. Child strollers and wheelchairs are still permitted. Much like the path through Yards Park, this section of the trail does not lack for space to accommodate of cyclists and pedestrians.

The Navy justifies the ban among the Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can I ride my bike or roller blade on the Riverwalk?

A: No. Bike riding, rollerblading, skateboarding, or scooter use is not permitted. The pedestrian bridge that makes up part of the Navy Yard's Riverwalk is narrow, and cannot support intermingled pedestrian and any type of vehicular traffic. Child strollers and wheelchairs are allowed.

Employees exiting through turnstiles onto the Riverwalk will not have immediate situational awareness of their surroundings, and may not see oncoming vehicular traffic in time to avoid a collision. The reverse would be true for someone who is on a bicycle, skateboard, rollerblades or scooter who would suddenly be confronted with a pedestrian that emerged from a turnstile. This is an obvious safety concern as collisions would be unavoidable.

The pedestrian bridge mentioned above is about 60 feet long and approximately 5 feet across. It seems sensible to think that this is too narrow to be effectively and safely shared by pedestrians and cyclists.

However, given that the bridge is only a very small section of the trail, it does not seem to justify banning bicycling throughout. The Navy could place a "Dismount Bikes When Pedestrians Present" sign here and permit bicycling in the other, wider sections that make up the overwhelming majority of the Navy Yard Riverwalk.

Perhaps more curious is the reference to the security-controlled turnstiles that sporadically provide access from the trail to the facilty and vice versa.

On the other side of the 3 of 4 turnstiles are parking lots. Presumably, the lack of situational awareness that accompanies the use of a turnstile proves to be no problem when heading the other direction, and while collisions with bicyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders and scooter users are unavoidable, collisions with automobiles are not.

Unless a cyclist were riding within a few feet nearest to the turnstile and fence that separate the facility from the Riverwalk (and given the width of the trail, this seems unlikely), there is no good reason to believe that a collision would obviously occur.

There are far less burdensome ways to keep pedestrians safe

In both the case of the Navy Yard and Yards Park, the outright bans are clumsy approaches to the commendable goal of pedestrian safety. As the pictures above show, both facilities have more than enough room for users on foot and on bicycles to share them effectively. Each is even vastly wider than the region's shared mixed-use paths, like the Capital Crescent Trail and the Mount Vernon Trail.

To better help different users share the trail, there could be elements as simple as signs asking pedestrians and bicyclists to be mindful or each other, or painted sharrows, pointing out the preferred path for bicyclists through the area. Efforts to keep pedestrians safe need not come at the cost of removing Yards Park and the Navy Yard Riverwalk as destinations for people arriving by bicycle.

If Yards Park and the Navy Yard Riverwalk continue to ban bicycling, the alternative options for cyclists traveling along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail from areas such as Hill East, Kingman Park, the Southwest Waterfront or East Potomac Park include crossing the Anacostia River on the 11th Street Bridge and then recrossing on the Douglass Bridge, bicycling along the 6-lane M Street SE/SW, or diverting to L Street SE, a quiet neighborhood street that is amenable to biking, but not in any way along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail.

"The rules against biking in Yards Park and on the Navy Yard Riverwalk are frustrating for a few reasons—first and foremost being that no one would naturally assume that bikes aren't allowed in these attractive, convenient, and spacious waterfront areas," writes David Garber, neighborhood commissioner in ANC 6D.

"If we are 100% about encouraging biking in DC, especially in a neighborhood often touted by District officials as being multi-modal, our rules about biking have to match our talk." Garber plans to introduce resolutions encouraging a closer look at these rules at a future ANC meeting.

The Anacostia Riverwalk Trail provides a genuine alternative to bicycling along city streets. For families, beginner cyclists and those who wish to enjoy a quiet ride in a natural environment, this link will prove vital to Washington's transportation and recreation system. However, bicycle bans jeopardize these seamless, off-street connections.

Mayor Gray, DDOT and local stakeholders must work with Yards Park and the Washington Navy Yard to balance the needs of pedestrian safety with the the need for a continuous bicycling corridor in this part of the District. People on bicycles and on foot can coexist, and our trails and public spaces must demonstrate this fact.

The "racetrack" and circle do not come from a traffic engineer's desire to speed up traffic, DDOT spokesman John Lisle noted. To the contrary, they make it more difficult to move all of the cars through the area. That's why the circles have to be so wide.

Instead, the designs come from studies 10 years ago that predated the current EIS. The Purpose and Need for the EIS, which defines the objectives of the project and guides the designers as they consider tradeoffs, says:

The Gateway Study (DDOT 2003) proposed that South Capitol Street become a gracious urban boulevard consistent with the past goals defined in the L'Enfant and Macmillan Commission plans, which would accommodate bicycles, pedestrians, and transit vehicles, as well as automobiles and commerce.

Project officials disputed my contention that the 5-year-old EIS is out of date with DC's needs. They said that, in fact, the EIS was only finally approved in March 2011, and the team has been continuing to refine the design. So criticizing the EIS as 5 years old was the wrong way to make the point; in fact, this design is arising from a 10-year-old set of decisions that put formal design at the top of the priority list.

A number of DC boulevards end in circles. Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues pass through circles as they leave the District, for instance. Creating some circles on South Capitol is indeed a more L'Enfant-esque design.

However, Westmoreland Circle and Chevy Chase Circle aren't as wide as these will be, and they don't really create usable neighborhood public spaces. Nobody uses the interiors, and they're in much more suburban neighborhoods than this. Circles like Dupont and Logan, which serve more as public space, are far smaller.

The "racetrack" looks like an ugly compromise between a motivation to create a Washingtonian boulevard look and the practical needs to move a lot of cars. L'Enfant designed circles in an era with far less traffic. This project is merging the geometric form of L'Enfant's circles with the traffic demands of today and ending up with a "camel is a horse designed by a committee" design, with some of the worst of both elements.

We end up with places that don't move cars particularly well, and a place that's not especially pleasant to walk or bike around. It would make a great spot for some memorials, though. As the terminus of a L'Enfant street, the National Capital Planning Commission is going to want to site some commemorative works there.

Maybe a really great memorial design could successfully create some kind of public space. Perhaps this is the perfect spot for the Eisenhower Memorial and its large metal tapestries. Here, you'll need to block out the surroundings, and for a President with road-building as one of his most notable achievements, being in what feels like a sort of highway median could be perfect.

These places won't feel pleasant on foot or by bike

The same applies to the I-295 interchange. The draft EIS called for a diamond, which is a far more walkable design. According to the project team,

Traffic analysis of the diamond interchange indicated queuing of traffic on the ramp from SB I-295 to SB Suitland Parkway may back up onto the mainline of I-295, creating a safety concerns. The Final EIS preferred alternative resolved this concern by addition of a loop ramp for this movement.

In addition, the original diamond had all 4 ramps meeting Suitland Parkway at nearly right-angle intersections. The new interchange has several "slip ramps" and angles more of the ramps to facilitate driving at higher speeds between Suitland and 295. That might be sensible for the traffic here, but won't make for any kind of place that feels safe to walk through.

The project team also emphasized that they're not forgetting pedestrians and bicycles:

As preliminary design has progressed, we are also making sure that there are continuous connections for bicycle and pedestrian travel. The new Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge will have shared use paths on both sides of the bridge that connect to bicycle and pedestrian facilities on either side of the Anacostia. We have also extended the joint use path on the east side of Suitland Parkway from Pomeroy Road SE to Firth Sterling Ave SE.

That's great, but it reminds me a little bit of the people who are so excited about how "diverging diamond" interchanges are safe for pedestrians, or how many Montgomery County upcounty mega-road projects include sidepaths and the DOT calls them "multimodal." It's nice to design your large-scale transportation infrastructure element to have a bike and pedestrian path, but any very large, open space with lots of 5-lane one-way segments and high-speed slip lanes is going to feel oppressive to people outside cars.

We know how to build spaces that feel comfortable outside a metal box: a grid of streets with buildings containing ground-floor detailing. In fairness, the collection of ramps on the east side of the river is not really pleasant for anyone today, and if the bridge has to move anyway, they'll have to put in some new design on the Poplar Point end, but this is feels like more of an improvement from the aerial view than on the ground.

There are circles circles or half-circles on both ends of the (Lincoln) Arlington Memorial Bridge as well, and those are terrible places for anyone not driving. The Park Service feels it can't really do what it would take to make those circles walkable and bikeable, such as adding traffic signals for people to cross, because of the high priority to accommodate heavy traffic.

Also, WashCycle notes that the bike path connections to the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail are pretty circuitous. Some designs from the last decade would have connected the bridge to the trail more directly.

Ultimately, this project is the end of a 10-year chain of choices. Each one had some pros and cons, and at each step officials may have been trying to best balance competing needs, but the end result is not pretty. The alternative of kicking the can down the road a while, fix up the bridge, and see how traffic patterns change with the 11th Street bridge seems more appealing.

If it's possible to reduce vehicle capacity as a counterweight to the 11th Street bridge, maybe a variant of this design could work with thinner roads along the circles, not such a huge racetrack, and a real diamond at 295. If not, we're all probably better off taking a fresh look at what to do in this area to keep moving cars but create spaces that feel more like parts of neighborhoods.

No neighborhood on either side of the Anacostia will have anywhere near the population density of Vancouver's Yaletown, whose towers exceed 30 stories tall (except in the unlikely event that a consensus builds to create La Défense on the Anacostia and allow tall towers at Poplar Point). But the Capitol Riverfront will still be a dense neighborhood by DC standards. The Navy Yard is a major employment center, and more jobs are coming to JBAB.

A lot of the riders of False Creek Ferries are tourists. We don't have one of the city's largest tourist attractions right on the river, at least not yet. Hop on-hop off tour buses do not come down to Near Southeast right now. However, Washington draws huge numbers of tourists. If we can draw tourists to the river, they could fill the ferries.

The National Capital Planning Commission often talks about where to put all of the memorials and museums that groups constantly want to build, but which can't possibly all fit on the Mall.

The Southwest Ecodistrict plan seeks to remake the L'Enfant Promenade into a pleasant place to walk with a significant museum at its end. Tour buses, like the Open Tops, do go to the end of the promenade. What if, instead of the Banneker Overlook being a dead-end excursion off the Mall, it becomes a jumping-off point to another Mall... the Water Mall?

The ferries would have to stretch a little farther than Vancouver's, but even the trip end-to-end shown here is only about 4½ route miles versus 3 for False Creek. The Park Service could place new museums and memorials in many spots in Anacostia Park and have plenty of room left over for recreation and nature.

The future Mall Circulators could have a stop at Banneker, and ultimately the streetcar could go to the Buzzard Point dock and the 11th Street Recreation Bridge, connecting directly to the ferries. The stops would be a short walk from L'Enfant Plaza, Navy Yard and Anacostia Metro stations.

Tour itineraries could suggest that families spend one day walking on the Land Mall and then one day cruising the Water Mall.

The ferries might not be able to run completely at a profit, given the lower population density along the Anacostia and the longer distance. But if the Water Mall becomes enough of a tourist attraction, who knows?

An operator stands on a platform in the center and drives the boat with a few joysticks and handles, while passengers sit around the edges. It operates a lot like a bus; in fact, the drivers even cruise past some of the docks and won't stop if nobody's waiting to get on or off.

The False Creek ferries only ply a route about 2 miles from end to end as the crow flies, or 3 route miles, zigzagging back and forth across the waterway.

Besides Granville Island and the science museum, they stop at a maritime museum, science museum, and a space museum with a planetarium and observatory. A stop in Stamps Landing takes you to a neighborhood with a lot of restaurants, and another, Yaletown, is a district with many new condo towers.

Each stop is only about 2-5 minutes apart, and costs $3.25 to $6.50 CAD depending on how far you go. The most popular route, the aquatic center to Granville Island, runs every 5 minutes from 7 am to 9 pm, or 10:30 pm in the summer. The other routes run every 15 minutes from about 9 am to 5-6 pm (depending on destination) in the winter and 7-9 pm during summer.

Best of all, the ferries actually operate completely self-sufficiently. In fact, there are 2 ferry companies that compete with one another!

Is this relevant to DC? It turns out that False Creek is about the size of the Anacostia:

While not very wide, the Anacostia is a mighty gulf separating two sides of the river. For a long time, there was little on the banks of the Anacostia, on either side. But that is changing. We already have the ballpark, and Yards Park. Buzzard Point could get a soccer stadium.

On the east, Poplar Point is slated for development, possibly including a boulevard from Anacostia Metro to the water's edge. Historic Anacostia is not far from the river. Plus, if DC builds the 11th Street Recreation Bridge, we could have a significant attraction right on the river.

A ferry bouncing back and forth across the river, with stops at all of these attractions, could bring the two sides closer together than ever before and make the water a public space. These 7 stops cover a route about 2 miles long, or about the same length as the part of the the False Creek Ferries route network east of Granville Island.

The Buzzard Point stop would be near a future soccer stadium and the Poplar Point stop at the end of a retail-lined avenue leading to Anacostia Metro. A stop at the 11th Street recreation bridge would connect directly to the streetcar and to all of the activities on the bridge, as well as being a short walk to Historic Anacostia.

A set of office buildings is going in the triangle east of the 11th Street Bridge and south of the freeway, and once the freeway segment to Barney Circle gets turned into a boulevard, there could be a pedestrian connection from the water up to Capitol Hill and Potomac Avenue Metro. Sadly, the CSX railroad bridge is too low for boats to travel under, so the ferries couldn't reach Hill East.

None of this precludes other types of ferries, like the longer-distance water taxis from places like Alexandria or Georgetown, or even farther south in Virginia, if those make sense. Those would use larger boats, running much less often.

Could this ferry system work here? I'll give my take in Part 2. Meanwhile, what do you think?

The 3 options aren't sufficient

Several people who attended last Thursday's meeting about the study came away feeling that it unnecessarily pitted transit against bicycles. The 3 alternatives look at somewhat extreme approaches, essentially bracketing the universe of genuinely practical ideas with a few options at the very edges. That's a reasonable approach, but it lacks options that help both transit and bicycle traffic at the same time.

Instead, the study seems to have assumed that no option can affect single-passenger cars that much. In making this assumption, the study creates tradeoffs for the limited space left after reserving most of it for cars. But what about greater tradeoffs between vehicular capacity and other modes?

Option 3, keeping the road with 3 car lanes in each direction, should be a non-starter. M Street doesn't need that much car capacity, and it doesn't serve the other modes well.

Option 1 looked at adding a transit lane, which could be extremely valuable, but then modeled removing the existing bike lanes on I Street entirely in order to add vehicular capacity there. If the team wants the public to think about that one extreme, we also need to understand what would happen in the alternative that adds the transit lane but then converts I Street to a full cycle track on the other hand. Or, what about putting a cycle track on M and keeping transit in shared lanes?

The area is growing rapidly, and single-passenger cars are a spatially inefficient way to move people. There's already a freeway nearby, which should be main route for cars. M and I Streets need to serve the neighborhood, and with limited road space, do so in the way that moves more people in less space. That's transit and bicycling.

Keep transit on M Street

Option 2 would provide a cycle track on M, but it would move streetcars and the Circulator off it, to parallel streets south and north. That's not a good option either. M Street will be the center of the neighborhood, and is where transfers to Metro will take place. Asking every streetcar rider who wants to shop on M Street or connect to Metro to walk a quarter mile will cut down potential ridership significantly.

DDOT concluded that in this scenario, it would need to use the Circulator south of M and the streetcar to the north. But the streetcar can do the most good on the south side. The streetcar is an economic development tool. It helps bring in development and new residents and shops where mobility and perceived mobility are some of the biggest obstacles.

The streetcar could spur sluggish growth around the ballpark and later in Buzzard Point. Along I Street there are a few parcels slated for development, but most of the road's length passes through already-built residential areas that aren't likely to change. It does make sense for the Circulator to pass by Nats Park, since many people use it to reach that destination, but way up on I Street the streetcar would be too far away to maximize its potential.

There's room for bicycles and transit

Option 1 would create a dedicated transit lane along M Street from 7th SW to the 11th Street (SE) bridge, but no cycle track. The CH2M Hill study designed this with a 67-foot cross-section. That's about the width of M Street east of South Capitol, but in Southwest the road is 80-84 feet wide.

West of South Capitol, it should be possible include a cycle track as well. One way to do that could look like this:

There would be some design challenges and tradeoffs. Should the cycle track go inside or outside the transit lanes? Putting them between the car lanes and transit lanes would require cyclists to cross over streetcar track in order to get to the sidewalk and buildings, which isn't ideal, and cyclists would feel less protected riding between lanes of cars and transit.

On the other hand, putting the cycle tracks between the transit lanes and the sidewalk would make streetcar riders walk across the cycle tracks at transit stops. That would be unusual, but not unheard of around the world. Vancouver has some bus stops like that, for example. Here, many riders would probably stand in the bike lane, at least until everyone got used to the arrangement.

East of South Capitol Street, where M Street is narrower, it is more difficult to fit in both bikes and streetcars.

One option would be to squeeze in cycle tracks by eliminating the median, narrowing the cycle tracks to half their originally-designed width, and narrowing the sidewalk to only 7.5 feet. This would be less than ideal for both pedestrians and bicyclists, but it would be a compromise that would keep everyone on M Street.

DDOT's standards for sidewalks in commercial areas are 10 feet, and bike lanes of this type at least 5 feet. That's not unprecedented in DC; Georgetown and U Street, with very high foot traffic, have had extremely narrow sidewalks for years. That creates an unpleasant pedestrian experience, however. Narrow sidewalks on M Street also might preclude having things like street trees and sidewalk cafes, which are important as well.

Another option that avoids narrowing the sidewalk would be to build the cycle tracks in SW only, and then put them on parallel strets on the SE side. From M Street, the cycle tracks could use Half Street SW to deviate one block south to N Street and Tingey Street, where they could continue past the ballpark and Yards Park to connect to the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail around the Navy Yard. When the Nats close N Street for games, they could keep it open to bicycles.

Meanwhile, DDOT could build another good bicycle facility on I Street, to the newly 2-way Virginia Avenue, atop the CSX tunnel to 11th Street and the new local bridge. I street, which isn't very high traffic, could remain as painted bike lanes, and Virginia Avenue could get 2-way cycle tracks. Riders could use either of these routes to get across the area or reach any destinations there.

DDOT and CH2M Hill will be taking feedback from the public on these 3 possibilities and creating a final report. That's not even the end of the process—they then plan to conduct an environmental review that may consider a different or larger set of options. The environmental review should indeed consider many more options than this study did, and think about more tradeoffs than just bikes versus transit.

What do you think is the best solution?

If multiple streets ran through within a block of each other, one street could have a cycle track while an adjacent street could serve the streetcar, for instance. But there are only 2 long east-west through streets here, M Street and I Street.

M connects Maine Avenue in the west to the 11th Street bridge and beyond in the east. I Street, a more residential-feeling street, runs from 7th Street SW near Maine Avenue to Virginia Avenue near 4th Street SE with only one gap, at Canal Street. A DC Department of Public Works facility in the way of I Street was recently demolished, and a coming development there will reconnect I Street. The study also recommends converting the very wide Virginia Avenue here to 2-way.

DDOT and their consultant, CH2M Hill, looked at 3 options:

1. Create a pair of dedicated transit lanes on M Street and 2 general travel lanes, but no bike lanes. Put bike lanes on alternate streets, maybe including a cycle track on I Street. Widen I Street to carry more car traffic and take away the current bike lanes.
   
2. Create a cycle track in each direction on M Street, plus 2 general travel lanes, plus a parking lane where space permits. Move the streetcar and Circulator to parallel streets. Other buses can still use the general lanes.
   
3. Keep 3 lanes of traffic all the way through. Streetcars and buses would share a lane with cars.

Each option varies a bit from place to place because the road is wider in SW than in SE:

Where would the streetcar and Circulator go in Option 2? DDOT suggests routing the streetcar from the 11th Street Bridge up to Virginia Avenue, then on I Street to 7th. The Circulator, meanwhile, would take M past the Navy Yard, then cut down to Tingey and N Streets a block south, pass the ballpark, take Canal Street into Buzzard Point, loop around down there, then come back up 4th Street to I back to 7th.

Why put the Circulator in the south and the streetcar in the north instead of vice versa? DDOT planning head Sam Zimbabwe said:

The Nationals currently close N Street during games and Potomac will cross at the oval with the [South Capitol Street] project. I think we also have some concerns about making the streetcar route too circuitous, and having 2 turns on and off M Street may not work very well. Unlike a bus, a streetcar really needs a full phase to make a turn, and also has some wide radii which sometimes can impact the right-of-way.

I think an important thing overall, which we talked about at the workshop, but probably doesn't come through in just the slides, is that the alternatives were set up somewhat to define some stark contrasts among different alternatives, and are a bit at the "extremes." The purpose of this study is not to define a single recommended alternative for premium transit (streetcar), but to define some of the planning-level scenarios and tradeoffs so that we can carry reasonable alternatives into an environmental process with some existing basic levels of analysis. Our plan is to start a NEPA process (probably an EA [Environmental Assessment]) later this fall.

What do you think is the right answer? Tomorrow, Dan Malouff and l will outline what we think.

Update: Some commenters have pointed out that instead of making I more hospitable to bicycles, Alternative 1 as presented actually makes it less hospitable by taking away the bike lanes and adding more car lanes. I have updated the post, and Dan and I will add this information to our discussion tomorrow.

Near SE planning started long before Nats

As neighborhood blog JDLand has meticulously documented, the neighborhood's transformation began in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The District cleared blighted property and the Federal government decided to make the vacant land it owned available for development. In 1996, the District demolished the Ellen Wilson housing project under a Hope VI grant.

Two years later, the last of the Capper high-rises and the old Washington Star building were both closed, and parts of Capper demolished in 2000. In that same year, Congress passed the Southeast Federal Center Public-Private Development Act of 2000, allowing the GSA to begin negotiations with private developers to develop 55 acres of the Southeast Federal Center.

Over the same time period, the national and local government were making deals. In the late '90s, the Navy awarded a contract to build five new buildings in the Navy Yard as part of the NAVSEA Headquarters Project, the Marines inked a deal to build the Marine Bachelor Enlisted Quarters on the Capper footprint, and Federal and District agencies that controlled land along the Anacostia signed an agreement to develop the ambitious Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

After a long delay, the GSA finalized deals to bring a new Department of Transportation Headquarters and the massive Yards mixed-use development to the Southeast Federal Center. Around that time, HUD awarded DC a $35 million grant to build more than 1500 new housing units at the Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg project sites, filling most of the area between M Street and the Southeast Freeway from 2nd to 7th Street.

In 2003, the District released the South Capitol Gateway and Corridor Improvement Study, which called for fundamentally redesigning South Capitol Street as a neighborhood boulevard and replacing the Douglass Bridge; and the Council approved funding for Capitol Hill Tower—a combined Courtyard by Marriott hotel and 344-unit apartment that would open in 2006. Finally, in early 2004, planning began on Canal Park.

Cranes were up when the Nats came to town

Prior to the announcement of the baseball stadium, construction was well under way. In 2002, two large office buildings on M Street opened and 4,100 NAVSEA employees started work at the Navy Yard. In 2003 the Federal Gateway building opened and the next year the Marine Barracks.

Maritime Plaza opened its two office buildings in 2001 and 2003. And developers and officials were negotiating or planning other projects, like the WASA site, Half Street, 20M, Florida Rock and Diamond Teague Park, during this time as well.

It was only after all of this had occurred, that District selected the area for the baseball stadium and even later, in a very close vote, that they financed the stadium. It would be another 14 months before the Council passed the lease agreement that would make construction of the baseball stadium possible. In fact, the vast majority of projects—by value, acre or number—in the area had their start before the stadium site was finalized.

More than just real estate deals

Political leadership played a important part in revitalization as well. The election of Anthony Williams as Mayor in 1998 ended the Barry era, and instilled confidence in the business community that investment in DC was safe. The Williams administration spearheaded the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative and worked hard to create an development-friendly environment.

The Federal Government assisted in 1997 with the DC First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit and again in 2001 when Congress dissolved the Financial Control Board. As Garance Franke-Ruta wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, "[t]he tax credit had a dramatic impact in encouraging moderate and middle-income people to put down roots in DC, especially younger, college-educated white people, and invest their sweat equity in fixing up rundown housing stock."

So strong was the change, that in 2002 the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE) named Washington, DC the top city in the US and the world for real estate investment, only a decade after being known as the "Murder Capital of the World."

Better transit brought more people, more investment

Another major catalyst was the completion of WMATA's Green Line. Until 1999, Navy Yard was the end penultimate station on a stub line that only served a handful of stations, all in central DC. That year, it was extended south of the river and into Prince George's County in 2001 making the area more easily accessible, particularly to suburban workers.

A study of neighborhoods along the Green Line from Navy Yard to Petworth showed that during the 2000s, the area added more young people, more multi-family units, and more jobs than either the Rosslyn-Balston corridor or the Northwest DC Red Line Corridor. The baseball stadium can't be viewed as the catalyst for the whole corridor, but the Metro line can be.

While development deals and transit improvements played large parts, Near Southeast also benefited from more general forces at work. As the new millennium began, Washington was experiencing a regional boom. Several areas went through a massive redevelopment from 1997-2007 including Gallery Place, Near SE, U Street, Barracks Row, Columbia Heights, and Rosslyn-Ballston. The pattern of development in those areas, over that time period, looks very similar.

At the same time, DC and its neighborhoods benefited from a general return to cities. Not only has DC's population been growing since the 2000 census, but "28 of the nation's biggest metropolitan counties grew faster from April 2010 to July 2011 than the rest of the nation as a whole."

Sites adjacent to the stadium still empty

If Councilmember Graham's assertion that "we wouldn't have all this development" were true, we'd expect to see development start closer to the stadium after it was built and radiate away from there over time. But mapping out the development, what we see is that almost every lot next to the stadium remains undeveloped.

The area east of the Metro station seems to be the core of the transformation, with later work building off of that. Only one property that abuts the stadium, the Camden South Capitol condos, has been developed in the 8 years since the stadium site was announced. You have to look across M Street to find any other post-stadium development, and those 5 properties are as linked to the pre-stadium development as they are to the stadium itself.

No stadium can be just as good

Thanks to New York's failed bid for this summer's Olympics, we also have a recent answer to the question of what happens when a stadium isn't built. The answer is development.

When New York City lost the 2012 Olympics to London, the city revamped its proposed stadium site to create Hudson Yards. This development has so much potential, the New York Times wrote "the Olympic bid's defeat may have been one of the best things to happen for the city's growth in recent memory."

There is no doubt that Nats stadium, by pumping $1 billion into the neighborhood and using eminent domain to consolidate property, may have sped up the Near Southeast revitalization. In time, it may even prove to bring additional development of the area.

But the evidence so far is that, at best, it hasn't been a drag on the process that was already in place. Near Southeast was a neighborhood on its way when the Nationals were still playing in Montreal.

Photos posted earlier show the construction in progress, 10 years later, as the freeway moved into Near Southeast.

Under the process laid out by WMATA for station name changes, the jurisdiction containing that station needs to first request a name change and identify someone willing itself be willing to pay for the cost of changing signs, pylons and more. The WMATA Board then approves or disapproves each proposal.

Various organizations including Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and nonprofits have asked DDOT for station renames. The NoMA BID wanted its name on the station in its area, for example. The National Park Service and the Trust for the National Mall requested the name change for Smithsonian.

The Golden Triangle BID also asked to add its name to one of the Farragut stations, and Capitol Riverfront wanted to be on Navy Yard, though DDOT didn't advance those requests. ANC Commissioner Kent Boese has been pushing to change Georgia Ave-Petworth to Georgia Ave-Petworth/Park View or Petworth-Park View.

Of the proposals DDOT accepted, only "Navy Yard-Ballpark" conforms to WMATA's naming policy, which calls for a maximum of 19 characters including subtitles. As Matt Johnson wrote, subtitles should not be an excuse to add more to names.

DDOT has withdrawn adding Kennedy Center to the Foggy Bottom stop since there was no organization willing to front the $100,000 or greater cost of changing a name. That must mean the Kennedy Center couldn't or didn't want to pay for the change. If that's not getting added, is it appropriate to add Arena Stage? Was it appropriate to add Strathmore, currently the only private non-educational organization on a station name?

The important principle is not to let station names become "the Yellow Pages," as one WMATA Board member put it, advertising nearby organizations and attractions. The purpose of a station is to help people find their way around the system, not to promote things to do.

But if Kennedy Center is not going on and Arena Stage might be inappropriate, is it right to add Ballpark? To me, it does seem appropriate somehow, but should we be promoting organized sports (owned by a for-profit entity that's acted fairly rapaciously toward the District) and not a nonprofit and donor-funded arts organization that's contributed a great deal to its neighborhood?

(Disclosure: I am a member of the board of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, which isn't part of a station name, and may in some ways compete with other theaters or with other entertainment such as baseball.)

Concerning the station near Gallaudet, I find it baffling that anyone wants to keep New York Avenue on the name. The station is not on New York Avenue. No entrance to the station is on New York Avenue. The platform stretches from Florida Avenue, well south of New York Avenue, to M Street NE, even farther south.

New York Avenue also runs very close to McPherson Square and Metro Center, and tourists in downtown hotels do get confused and take Metro to this station by mistake. "NoMA-Gallaudet U" would be short and appropriate.

As for Smithsonian, does anyone not know how to get to the Mall? This proposal seems unnecessary. Additionally, several stations, not just the Smithsonian stop, serve the Mall. Naming one stop ignores the usability of other nearby stations, like L'Enfant Plaza.

Already, many tourists use Smithsonian to get to Smithsonian museums when other stations would work better, such as L'Enfant for Air and Space. When major events come to the Mall, Smithsonian can face severe overcrowding, and Metro tries to encourage visitors to use other nearby stations. Adding National Mall could exacerbate these problems, leading visitors to use Smithsonian to get to rallies at the Capitol end of the Mall when they really should be getting off at Federal Center SW or Judiciary Square.

Finally, each name is something of a hodgepodge that contains 2 elements both in the primary name, or has a subtitle. I continue to believe WMATA missed a big opportunity by not moving into the subtitles all pieces of names after dashes or slashes. Why should "West Falls Church-VT/UVA" become "West Falls Church" with a subtitle, but "Brookland-CUA" not become "Brookland" with a subtitle of "CUA"?

If the new policy is to use subtitles, then all stations with multiple pieces in their names should use the subtitles for all but the first piece. In this case, Navy Yard-Ballpark could be an acceptable name, but Navy Yard with a subtitle of Ballpark is even more appropriate; if Arena Stage is indeed added to the nearby station, it should likewise be in the subtitle to avoid making the name on pylons and signs, and spoken by conductors, even longer and more confusing to riders.

If you want to convey opinions to the WMATA Board about these changes, you can email boardofdirectors@wmata.com.