Posts about South Capitol Street

In a press conference today, Mayor Gray announced plans to host an IndyCar race as soon as the project is complete. "DC is joining the ranks of other world-class cities like Toronto and Monaco in hosting a race on our city streets," the mayor said. "The same cars and drivers that race at the Indianapolis 500 will be racing here."

IndyCar officials expressed surprise that a city would build what appears to be a purpose-built racetrack. "Usually for our street races, we make do with city streets that people use every day, like in Houston or Long Beach. To have a city build an oval for us is a real treat. I mean, clearly that circle can't be great for moving pedestrians or cars, can it?" said Mark Miles, CEO of IndyCar parent company Hulman & Company.

IndyCar drivers on hand for the announcement praised the course layout. "It looks to be fast and very wide, which should make for some great racing," said driver Will Power. "It's almost perfectly built for us."

Indeed the course has a very similar shape to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, New Hampshire, which is known as a "paper clip" oval as its long straights and tight turns resemble a paper clip.

This is actually not the city's first foray into auto racing. In 2002, DC hosted an American Le Mans Series race in the parking lot of RFK Stadium. You can still make out the outline of the track today. The race only ran one year after noise complaints from neighbors. "We don't think that will be an issue here," said Gray. "People here are used to cars whizzing by."

National Park Service representatives said they should have no objection to using federal land for the racetrack, as their regulations only make it very difficult to place playgrounds, food vendors, or pleasant places to sit in federal parkland, none of which the racetrack requires.

Meanwhile, the National Capital Planning Commission chairman Bryan Preston said the race will work well with their plans to put another memorial in the circle, which will probably be unappealing for people to interact with as a city park but will be perfect for cars to drive around and around all day.

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.

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.

Eisenhower Memorial design. Image from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission.

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.

Top: Image from the 2008 EIS. Bottom: Image from the new video.

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.

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.

The centerpiece of the project is a new bridge on South Capitol Street. The old bridge either needs replacing, or DC will have to keep shoring it up every few years. The proposed new bridge would be 1 lane wider than the existing bridge.

In addition, the plans call for moving the bridge slightly to the southwest and creating a large racetrack-shaped traffic oval on the ballpark side and a circle on the Poplar Point side. Near Anacostia Metro, where South Capitol/Suitland Parkway crosses 295, they also plan to redesign the interchange to be more compact than the cloverleaf it is today.

Is this a good idea?

These plans come from an Environmental Impact Statement that DDOT did in 2008. A lot has changed in 5 years, including evolution in our understanding of what kind of transportation network we want. It's easier for DDOT to simply take the existing plan and implement it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the right plan for 2013.

Certainly, something needs to be done with the bridge. DC can also do much more to better connect the east and west sides of the river. However, leaders need to ask some tough questions about whether this is the best way to do it, because a few parts of the plan raise red flags.

Are the circle and racetrack a good idea?

That racetrack has a lot of traffic lanes—5 in many places. DC's traffic circles aren't especially comfortable to walk or bike around. The EIS says the corners will have traffic signals, like Dupont or Logan Circles, so pedestrians will be able to cross at the crosswalks, but they will still have to cross multiple wide roads to traverse the area.

The same goes for the circle east of the river. The animation shows this as a 5-lane circle, which is far larger than DC's other circles. To cross into the center, you'd have to traverse 2 crosswalks. Do we get any of the benefits, or just the drawbacks, from a circle where each side is as wide as many major boulevards?

Plus, what will go in the middle? These are not going to become any kind of neighborhood public space. Is the circle really that much better than the existing approach ramps on the southeast end that it's worth a lot of money to demolish them and move the bridge?

What happened to the 295 interchange?

Fixing the interchange with 295 could create a more walkable place, but DDOT seems to have backed off the initial designs for an urban diamond and created something that's still more focused on moving cars quickly than walkability.

Top: Image from the 2008 EIS. Bottom: Image from the new video.

Sidewalks run along off-ramps and then cross at what engineers have presumably determined is the safest place, but if there's no intersection with a light, it's not really that safe. It's the same problem we have at the Pennsylvania Avenue cloverleaf with 295.

DDOT spokesman John Lisle promised to get back to me with more information about this interchange.

Can we really not fix the bridge?

At $660 million, this is a really expensive project. It's even more expensive if DDOT has to replace the swing span, which they're asking the Coast Guard and Navy to let them leave out of the new bridge. The whole project could top $900 million if you include other plans in the EIS to change the intersection of M and South Capitol Streets.

The Gray administration says it will be cheaper in the long run to replace the bridge as opposed to fixing it. The press release also says that if they keep the old bridge, trucks might have to divert off South Capitol because of safety concerns. That last part doesn't seem like a big deal, as we just built a new 11th Street highway bridge, but we certainly don't want bridges falling down.

DDOT says it would cost $120-150 million to fix the existing bridge. That kind of figure has some appeal to many in the Council who have to make tough budget choices among many projects.

Is this really better for people east of the river?

The DDOT press release quoted Mayor Gray as saying:

By better connecting both sides of the river, the new crossing will be the single largest physical embodiment of my "One City" governing philosophy of bringing the District together across geographic, income and ethnic boundaries. This graceful new bridge will be a welcoming gateway to the center of Washington, while also serving as an anchor for the revival of the Anacostia waterfront.

It's important to ensure the South Capitol Street bridge is structurally sound. We also should improve connections across the river. But just because there's a 5-year-old plan doesn't mean we have a project worth spending hundreds of millions even beyond the cost of the bridge itself. DC leaders need to ask a lot more tough questions before rubber-stamping this plan.

Meanwhile, Catania says build it now and, in fact, this is the right place too. Of all the opinions at the hearing, Catania's is the least plausible. He was the only one to firmly defend a line to Bolling, arguing that a streetcar will generate office demand in Anacostia among defense contractors doing business at those military bases. He also wants the line to continue to National Harbor to access the jobs there. As Wells pointed out, National Harbor is not designed for transit and competes with DC for business; a line (and my transit vision map contains one), but building such a line first, with DC money, is not the right priority.

Catania is stuck in a commuter-only mindset, like the one in force when Metro was designed. Streetcars aren't a way to more quickly shuttle workers to their jobs; buses do that more cheaply over short distances. Streetcars work best to open up run-down areas to development, creating new, mixed-use, mixed-income communities, like Portland's Pearl district (or the Rosslyn-Ballston Metro in Arlington). H Street, Minnesota Avenue, or the AFRH/Hospital Center/McMillan Sand Filtration area may be such places. An access highway to a military base, far from any people, with no parcels available for development along most of the route, is not.

But the engineering is done, the cars are waiting in the Czech Republic, and the administration is ready to go. Is it best simply to get this one built and then push for the next segment? Or are we wasting our money? Whatever will create the complete planned system, or better yet the original full system, I support. The approximately $1 billion price tag may come in large part from incremental tax revenues from development it spurs. The $400 million earmarked for the 11th Street bridges looks inviting; Graham called it a "Christmas goose," suggesting the Council might find it appealing to reallocate that money to streetcars. Most likely, to kick off the investment requires federal investment from a better FTA, which we can hope to get from a President Obama.

Pictures from along the route:

	South Capitol Street, looking north toward the beginning of the streetcar line.
	Approaching the maintenance facility. 295 is on the right, Bolling on the left.
	The future maintenance facility. South Capitol is to the left.
	Looking back south from the maintenance facility toward the end of the line.
	Layers of barricades between the street and the bases.
	The CSX tracks (which the line won't use) cross South Capitol near the maintance facility.
	Looking south as the tracks cross. The maintenance facility is on the left.
	Firth Stirling, looking back toward South Capitol. 295 is crossing overhead. The space in the center is the CSX right of way.
	Firth Stirling, with Barry Farm to the right. The streetcar will replace this bus.
	Barry Farm from Firth Stirling.
	Farther north on Firth Stirling. Note the two roadways which are both Firth Stirling; the CSX tracks are in the center. The buildings on the left would be redeveloped in the Barry Farm plan.
	Another block north on Firth Stirling. At left is the cloverleaf, which could be a site for redevelopment if the intersection becomes a diamond.
	Looking toward Barry Farm from the Anacostia Metro.
	Looking northeast from the Metro. Beyond these ramps and to the right is historic Anacostia; Poplar Point is on the other side of the freeways to the left.