Posts about Events

Purple Line open houses: The Maryland MTA is holding 5 open houses to inform residents about the Purple Line, now looking a lot more likely to actually become a reality. They're tonight (Tuesday) in Silver Spring, Thursday 5/9 in Riverdale, Saturday 5/11 in Langley Park, Tuesday 5/14 in Bethesda, and Wednesday 5/15 at Woodridge Elementary School in Hyattsville. Each is 5-8 pm, except the Saturday one which is 11-2.

Bike to school: If you have children in school and don't bike to school regularly, tomorrow is a great time to try. 17 DC schools are participating, and for the dozen on those which are on Capitol Hill, families can congregate in Lincoln Park for an event featuring Ray LaHood, then form bike trains to the schools. Sandra Moscoso has more on Greater Greater Education.

Walk Route 1: CSG's next walking tour looks at Route 1 in Fairfax, the oft-forgotten highway where big box sprawl has the potential to become eco-friendly, walkable communities. Volunteers will help groups take the bus from Huntington Metro for those arriving by transit. RSVP before it's full!

Height "master plan" meetings: The National Capital Planning Commission and DC Office of Planning are working together on a study that might recommend changes to the federal height limit, or might not. Regardless, the issue is sure to be completely noncontroversial, since as we know nobody ever wants to argue about the height limit. (Kidding.) The first public involvement is next week, with a meeting Monday, May 13, 6:30-8:30 pm at the Petworth Library, and then Saturday, May 18, 10:30-12:30 at the MLK Library by Gallery Place Metro.

Learn about, push for BRT: There's a big hearing on Montgomery County's BRT plans on Thursday, May 16, 6-9 pm in Silver Spring. Can you testify? Also, Montgomery transportation planner Larry Cole will talk about BRT as well as MARC expansion at ACT's monthly meeting Tuesday, May 14, 7:30 pm in Silver Spring.

What's up with Pennsylvania and Potomac? The second public meeting on the intersection at Potomac Avenue Metro is Thursday, May 16, 6:30-8:30 pm at Payne Elementary. Have DDOT and its consultants listened made the early designs even better to walk and bike, or have they gotten worse? We'll find out!

Bike to work: Just a little over a week after Bike to School Day (but much farther down our chronological calendar) is Bike to Work Day on Friday, May 17. Pledge to ride, stop by one of the pit stops around the region, join one of the commuter convoys along popular routes, and support almost all of the event sponsors.

Talk Smart Growth with David Grosso: Ward 3 Vision, the smart growth resident group in upper Northwest DC, is having a meet and greet on Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 pm at Guapo's by the Tenleytown Metro. At-large councilmember David Grosso will be there to hear from you about your vision for a more walkable and vibrant Ward 3 and all of DC.

Roosevelt Ride: Ride around Greenbelt, the New Deal planned community, in your best New Deal-era attire, followed by a picnic. You can also get a free tour of the Greenbelt Museum, which shows how families lived in what was built as working-class housing in 1937. That's Sunday, May 26; the ride starts at 11, the picnic after, and the tours at 1.

Have an event we should consider including on the ? Send them to events@ggwash.org. Please include a URL to a webpage that has the information about your event as well, so that we can link directly to your event.

The six principles are:

Make a complete network: Bicycle lanes and paths should connect to each other and to major destinations like schools, transit stations and job centers, making them a reliable way to get around.

Be context-appropriate: A network with different kinds of bicycle facilities will best be able to fit into different neighborhoods.

Provide comfort: Bicyclists will be more likely to use the network if it provides multiple route options, is easy to navigate, and has conveniences like secure parking.

Safety: Bicyclists will feel safe on facilities that are well maintained, well-lit, and have "eyes on the street" to watch over them.

Engage the public: Making community members part of the bicycle planning process will build public support for bicycling while showing that bicyclists are valued and respected by the county.

Education: All road users, whether they are cyclists, pedestrians or drivers, should understand their rights and responsibilities and the rights and responsibilities of others.

Keeping those in mind, I designed a route that takes riders on different kinds of bicycle routes, ranging from a trail through a park to bike lanes to riding in mixed traffic.

We had a pretty diverse crowd with a wide mix of ages and skill levels, ranging from kids just out of training wheels to experienced bicyclists. Most riders came from inside-the-Beltway Silver Spring, though one person came from Takoma Park and another from Capitol Hill. The ride was pretty smooth, though there were a few spills and some emergency repairs.

Along the way, we stopped to talk about each principle, along with things the county and local municipalities are doing well, like the extensive trail network in Sligo Creek Park. While none of the neighborhood streets have bike lanes, they're slow and quiet, making them a nice alternative to busy main roads when they're not closed to through traffic. In a few places, our group had its own cheering section of neighbors.

Riders pointed out places where the bike network needs improvement. Many off-street trails are poorly maintained, leading to ruts and standing water. The Metropolitan Branch Trail abruptly stops a half-mile short of the Silver Spring Metro station, held up by historical preservationists who don't want it passing by the historic, but empty B&O rail station.

On-street riding can be equally frustrating. We used the block-long Cedar Street bike lane in Silver Spring, which was once named "America's stupidest bike lane" before being redesigned by the Montgomery County Department of Transportation. Meanwhile, streets like Maple Avenue in Takoma Park are wide enough for bike lanes but were given sharrows instead, which means bicyclists have to share the road with drivers that are encouraged to speed because the street is so wide.

Another issue was the need to educate everyone on how to share the road. On narrow Carroll Street NW in Takoma, drivers came too close to our group or sped into oncoming traffic to pass us, violating both DC's and Maryland's 3-foot passing laws. Meanwhile, on the Sligo Creek Park trail, a pair of joggers reminded us that we have to ride single-file so as not to block the whole path.

How can we improve the cycling environment? One recurring theme in our discussion was that the Department of Transportation made bike improvements based on their idea of what bicyclists want or need, like the Cedar Street bike lane, but were surprised when bicyclists actually didn't use them.

Casey Anderson, Planning Board member and Silver Spring resident, and Jack Cochrane of MoBike stressed the need to for bicyclists to let county officials know what they need. County officials need to listen to bicyclists, but they can only do so if bicyclists make themselves heard.

Overall, this was a great bike ride. I was blown away by the turnout and the enthusiasm of all our participants. It's been about 20 years since the Montgomery County Sierra Club last held a group bike ride, but this is definitely a tradition that they should resume. Ethan and I are already talking about when our bike ride will be.

Thanks to everyone who came! This wouldn't have been a success without you. And if you were unable to make it, check out this slideshow of our ride.

Thank you to DC Mayor Vincent Gray, DC Councilmembers Jack Evans, Mary Cheh, and Tommy Wells, Arlington Board member Chris Zimmerman, and everyone else who made it to the celebration!

Many contributors, commenters, and readers joined us for fun conversation, drinks, and cake, including many longtime members of our community and a number of new ones, including contributors for our new Greater Greater Education site.

Councilmember Jack Evans brought a resolution declaring March 5, 2013 "Greater Greater Washington Day."

You can see more images from last night on this Flickr set. If you were at the party, did you snap a few pictures? Please take a moment to share them in the Greater and Lesser Washington Flickr pool for everyone to enjoy!

Why Greater Greater Education?

Greater Greater Washington has focused for 5 years on what aspects of our neighborhoods and communities make them desirable places to live, and how residents want to see their communities improve. We're especially interested in walkable urban places and what makes people want to live, invest, and stay in these communities.

For a great many people, far and away the number one factor in this decision is education. If they have children, they want to live somewhere where their children can get a good education. Period.

DC, in particular, has long had a trend of young people moving to its neighborhoods but decamping for suburbs once their children get to school age. That trend is changing as more and more people want to remain in walkable urban neighborhoods, but for many residents, the question is whether the education can get good enough, soon enough for their children.

It's also important to build a city that's inclusive of all people, in all economic circumstances and stages of life. On urbanism, that means having different price points for housing, affordable transit, and thriving businesses that meet people's different needs. On education, that means also figuring out not only how we can improve education for our own kids (for those who have kids), but for all kids.

What will Greater Greater Education discuss?

While Greater Greater Washington has always been explicitly focused on the entire region, we anticipate Greater Greater Education will mainly focus on education in the District, particularly DCPS and public charter schools. However, articles about education issues in other parts of the region are also welcome.

Our aim is to step out of some of the polarizing fights that dominate news coverage. We're not especially interested in debating whether Michelle Rhee was saintly or satanic, or if charter schools are inherently good or bad. On most of the burning questions, education professionals are just scratching the surface of actually figuring out the answers through research.

We're hoping to look at real data, and real examples on the ground of what is working and what is not. We're hoping to help educate readers, and stimulate a community and lively discussions, about what is happening and what needs to happen. We hope you will learn from our contributors who have experiences to share, and we in turn can learn from all of you through discussions in the comments.

We'll be starting with a lower post volume than on Greater Greater Washington itself to begin with—about one post per day, and link roundups twice a week, ramping up as we build up a larger base of contributors.

This doesn't mean we'll entirely stop talking about education on Greater Greater Washington. Some education articles will also cross-post on both blogs, and share a comment section. But there will be many articles on Greater Greater Education alone to keep the total post volume on Greater Greater Washington from getting too high.

Can you contribute?

Speaking of contributors, we want you! If you have experiences to share with education in DC or information to share, please email us at info@ggdcedu.org with a brief introduction and a sense of what kinds of topics you might like to write about. We welcome everyone from education policy experts to regular average parents to former DCPS students and many more. As with all Greater Greater anything posts, our contributors are volunteers.

We hope you will read, comment, share, and contribute so that we can build a community of people dedicated to better education, as we have for urbanism on Greater Greater Washington. Thank you!

Live chat on building heights: The National Capital Planning Commission is also having a forum from 7-9 Tuesday on building heights, with speakers from 3 other capital cities, London, Paris, and Berlin.

Fortunately, there's another chance to engage in the conversation: I'll be moderating a live chat with some of the panelists at 12:30 Tuesday. More details will come soon. If you have questions about how other capital cities deal with building heights, post them in the comments.

Outer Beltway community meetings: Smart growth and environmental groups are holding three community meetings about VDOT's efforts to build an Outer Beltway in Virginia. The meetings are on successive Mondays: March 4 in Middleburg, March 11 in Chantilly, and March 18 in Ashburn.

ACT with Ken Ulman: This month's Action Committee for Transit meeting will feature Ken Ulman, Howard County Executive and a likely candidate for governor. He'll talk about how Route 29 fits into the future of transit in Maryland. The meeting is Tuesday, March 12, 7:30 pm at the Silver Spring Civic Center, One Veterans Place.

MoveDC workshops: As it moves into the next phase of designing a citywide transportation plan, the MoveDC project will hold 4 workshops in the evening of Wednesday, March 20 (at Minnesota Avenue), Thursday, March 21 (in Anacostia), Tuesday, March 26 (on Capitol Hill), and Thursday, March 28 (in Tenleytown).

Have an event we missed? Post it in the comments or email events@ggwash.org.

Most of the panels aren't DC-specific or focus more on national politics, but at least one looks at what's going on in our local community. "Digital District" brings together Ghosts of DC founder Tom Cochran, ANC commissioner and prolific tweeter Tiffany Bridge, Brandon Jenkins of Fundrise, Greater Greater Washington's David Alpert, and John Lisle, who recently left his post as DDOT's communication head to join DC Water. The panel is 4-6 pm on Thursday, February 20 at LivingSocial, 918 F Street, NW and will also be streamed online.

On Friday, check out "Ping My Ride: How Mobile Apps Transform Urban Living." Mark Berman of the Washington Post will moderate a panel of people from Uber, Waze, Capital Bikeshare, Parkmobile, and Parking Panda. Besides apps, the panelists will discuss open data and how sharing services are working in DC. The panel is 2-3 pm at Ogilvy, 1111 19th Street NW, or you can watch live online.

The Anacostia Watershed Society's Green Roof Networking Happy Hour is next Tuesday, February 26, 5:30-7:30 pm at Boundary Stone Public House, 116 Rhode Island Avenue NW. Environmentalists, LEED professionals, and anyone else interested can talk about sustainable development in DC.

Finally, only 2 weeks remain until the Greater Greater Wasington 5th birthday. We turned 5 on February 5, but that was the same night as the State of the District speech, so we're celebrating on our 5 year, 1 month birthday. The party is at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 641 D Street, NW from 6-10 pm on March 5. Hope you can make it!

Gray is unequivocal: More cars are not the future

Mayor Vincent Gray opened his remarks with a clear message: There might be a lot of traffic, but more cars are not the answer. Instead, the District will invest in streetcars, buses, biking, and walking.

Gray cited his sustainability plan which aims to have 75% of trips in the District happen by a mode other than driving. Cars still have a place, surely, but the District has to grow other modes more than driving.

Oh, and he promised the H Street streetcar will be rolling by the end of 2013, and taxis will have credit card readers by summer.

DDOT director Terry Bellamy, DC Councilmember and transportation chair Mary Cheh, and her colleague Tommy Wells all echoed Gray's fundamental theme of multimodalism. Bellamy pointed out that everyone walks for part of their trip, even when they drive, take Metro, or another mode. Wells emphasized equity: the District needs to help all groups of residents reach jobs safely and on time.

When is transportation not really about transportation?

A panel discussion brought together author Christopher Leinberger, Slate economics blogger Matthew Yglesias, and equitable transportation advocate Anita Hairston of PolicyLink.

The panel's title was the "future of transportation" in DC, but the panelists ended up talking quite a lot about broader urban planning issues. Perhaps this is partly because DDOT put two authors of books about buildings rather than transportation on the panel, but also because transportation is often not really about transportation.

Christopher Leinberger said, "a transportation system's goal isn't to move people. It's economic development. The means is by moving people." He argued that many departments of transportation have their mission backwards. They focus on moving vehicles and freight as much as possible. That's wrong; instead, transportation is a means to an end.

The means also directs the end. Build highways, and you fuel "drivable sub-urbanism," to use his term from The Option of Urbanism; build transit, and enable walkable urbanism. In our region and around the country, the market demand now is for more walkable urbanism.

By not having enough walkable urbanism, Yglesias added, what does exist has become very expensive. That fuels a perception that walkable urban places are just for the affluent, but that only arises because we aren't building more walkable urban places fast enough.

DC could fund this transit and associated economic development if it set up a "value capture" system, said Leinberger, to get some of the value the streetcar creates and plow it back into transportation. The right system could even make the streetcar profitable, he said. But there's no time to waste. It's like in Back to the Future, Part 2 where Biff has the sports book listing what will happen in the future. Well, we have the book now, said Leinberger, and yet we aren't preparing.

Meanwhile, he said, DC needs a comprehensive strategy for affordable housing, and lacks one today. Hairston, too, emphasized how important it is to remember equity when making these investments. What about the public health for those who live near new transportation infrastructure, or the unbanked who can't as easily take advantage of programs like Capital Bikeshare?

Hairston noted that today, it's not possible to get to 60% jobs by bus in one hour from east of the Anacostia River. She hopes the District can at least reverse that and make 6 of 10 accessible within an hour.

A public meeting was genuinely fun

I've been to a lot of boring public meetings. The moveDC Ideas Exchange might have been the most entertaining and interesting. It certainly didn't lack for manpower (and womanpower), as almost every DDOT employee was working one of many stations.

At one, people could nominate the street they think is DC's worst. Another let you place color-coded string on a map showing your commute, with the color telling whether it's by bike, bus, Metro, driving, walking, etc. There was even a photo booth.

One table let you design your ideal street cross-section, with sidewalks, medians, bike lanes, bus lanes, or whatever, then take a picture, print it, and post it on a wall. You could draw on a map of proposed CaBi stations or write parking ideas on sticky notes to go on a wall.

Greater Greater Washington contributor Veronica Davis moderated the panel and got some major praise from DDOT director Bellamy as well as plaudits on Twitter for a very interesting session.

Tough customer Alex Baca even tweeted, "I am THE BIGGEST whiner about the utility of the public-input process, but @wemovedc made today's #IdeasMoveDC a really fun time."

Of course, it might be a little easier to make a session fun when there's no proposal half the participants have shown up specifically to fight against, as in the Office of Planning's recent zoning update sessions. It's worth watching to see, first, what kind of plan DDOT devises out of all these stickies and photos and yarn, and second, if all these interactive booths give any kind of serious plan a better shot at becoming reality.

If you take Metro, be aware of track work on the Red and Orange Lines north/west of Grosvenor and Ballston and north/east of NoMA and Stadium-Armory. DDOT is also setting up more temporary bike racks to handle the extra bike parking demand. Finally, Anacostia Waterfront Initiative officials and consultant CH2M Hill have set up a 25-lane racetrack oval. No, not really that last one.

For Montgomery County residents, there are 2 great opportunities to talk about transportation's future next week (and in the same spot!) The Action Committee for Transit's monthly meeting features WMATA planning head Shyam Kannan talking about the Metro "Momentum" strategic plan. That's Tuesday, February 12, 7:30 pm at the Silver Spring Civic Center, One Veterans Place.

Wednesday, The Coalition for Smarter Growth is holding a forum on the "next generation of transit." How can the county accommodate 200,000 new residents and 100,000 jobs in the next 20 years? It will take investments in Metro, the Purple Line, and bus rapid transit.

Geoff Anderson, head of Smart Growth America, and Councilmember Roger Berliner will speak about the future of Montgomery County, and there will be presentations on transit projects in the pipeline. The forum is Wednesday, February 13, 6-8 pm at the Silver Spring Civic Center, still One Veterans Plaza. RSVP here.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Piedmont Environmental Council is holding a public meeting to talk about the McDonnell Administration's push for an Outer Beltway through Loudoun and Prince William. It's Monday, February 11, 6:30-9 pm at John Champe High School, 41535 Sacred Mountain Street, Aldie, VA.

Also, a film about plastic bags is screening Sunday in Hyattsville; John Muller is giving another tour of Frederick Douglass's Anacostia February 23; and the Anacostia Watershed Society is holding a "Green Roof Networking Happy Hour on Tuesday, February 26.

People make a city great. Downtown job centers, historic neighborhoods, and new edge cities should all be full of people, walking to do errands, sitting outside at sidewalk cafes, enjoying parks, living life, and interacting with each other. ... As the region grows, we must preserve what already works and expand what is possible, to ensure that there are enough great neighborhoods for everyone who wants to live, work, shop or play in one.

That still seems just as appropriate today as then. A lot has changed, but a lot has not.

After it launched, Greater Greater Washington gradually grew. We got links from a number of local bloggers, and some national ones, like Matt Yglesias and Atrios. The Washington Post's Marc Fisher featured us in a column about my escapade trying to get a cab to a Southwest impound lot.

Other bloggers started volunteering to post articles as well, beginning with Jaime Fearer, then Michael Perkins, and then many more. Many people helped edit, redesign the site, do links each day, and much more. A lively and intelligent community of commenters formed on the site.

We fought some big fights, like to get enough funding to stop Metro service cuts, or save streetcars. We pushed (over years) for open data at Metro. We campaigned successfully for DC's zoning update to lower parking minimums, and years later, that battle has come around to the next phase.

All of this is possible because of all of you: our readers, our commenters, our editors, and our contributors. I wish there were room to thank every person individually. Instead, here are all of the photographs on all of the author bio pages for people who are, or have been, regular contributors. This leaves out many, many people, whose photos we don't have, or who were editors behind the scenes, and everyone who's contributed by commenting or just sharing stories with their friends. Thank you, all.