Posts about Maps

In our map contest, designers tried a number of different approaches: much thinner lines like in most cities' subway maps, larger circle symbols, double symbols, or "pill"-shaped station symbols that could span more lines.

WMATA has taken a different approach with this draft. Each line got just a bit thinner, so that the station circles are slightly wider than a line instead of slightly narrower. For the 3-line segments, "whiskers" extend on either side of the station circles to tell riders that all trains stop there.

The map also abbreviates some stations which aren't abbreviated today, like "Metro Ctr" or "Capitol Hgts," and removes the cross streets.

What do you think of the proposed map?

Details emerge on Silver Line frequencies, endpoints

In addition, WMATA has released more operational details about planned Silver Line service.

As was previously reported, Silver trains will go to Largo; the original plan was to turn them at Stadium-Armory, but Metro determined that the existing pocket track is not adequate.

To use the pocket in rush service, Metro needs to be able to pull trains of up to 8 cars in pretty quickly. If the switches have a wide radius and the pocket track is long, the trains can go in at higher speeds, but the pocket has smaller switches and a short pocket, which means pulling trains in will likely slow down other trains behind.

Since the pocket is on an aerial structure, there's not room to expand it without massive expense, so Metro will send the trains to Largo (which gives Blue Line riders east of the river and in Prince George's more frequent service as well).

Silver Line trains will run every 6 minutes during peak, 12 minutes off-peak, 20 minutes after 10 pm, and 12-15 minutes weeknights. This will combine with the Orange's frequency from East Falls Church to Rosslyn and both Orange and Blue beyond that, but outside rush hours, people riding the line will likely have to do a fair amount of waiting.

Also, as we knew (but which won't please riders hurt by Rush Plus), there will be even more Rush Plus. 2 Blue Line trains per hour during the peak will become Yellow Line trains from Franconia to Greenbelt. That makes room at Rosslyn for the Silver Line.

Riders north of Mount Vernon Square on the Green Line will see more service, but Blue Line riders from southern Fairfax, Alexandria, and Arlington going to Rosslyn, Tysons, or Foggy Bottom will have to wait longer for Blue trains or ride through downtown DC.

The only solution to this problem is a new terminal or wye at Rosslyn, so that more trains can come in from the south without taking away capacity from trains from the west. WMATA has proposed this as part of its "Metro 2025" plan, but there's no funding yet for these important projects.

If you want to make your own, Michael Perkins provided a chart of the design and an explanation:

Just create a knit hat with an even stockinette block of at least 30 rows high by 25 rows wide. I knit 12 rows of k2p2 ribbing and then about 40 rows of stockinette, then decrease (k2tog) every other round in 8 parts for the top until half the stitches remain, then decrease every round until 4 stitches remain.

My hats are knit on #6 needles for the brim and #8 for the body. 88 stitches around. Yarn is Vanna's Choice Worsted Acrylic by Lion Brand Yarns.

He also has a page for the hat at Ravelry.

Homes are expensive west of Rock Creek Park; Condo sales are concentrated in the core of the city and along certain major arterial roads; and the markets for this specific type of residential real estate lagged east of the Anacostia River and along Eastern Avenue.

These maps make a statement about where mobile homeowners and investors are choosing to live and risk their money in the District, which in turn reflects the perceived existing or potential quality of life in those neighborhoods. They also provide insight into the District's housing stock.

Neighborhoods with high concentrations of apartment buildings, whether 4 units or 400 units, will not have a dominant presence on the maps. Turnover rates and neighborhood density also influence these visualizations, as do many other factors that readers will surely suggest in the comments.

Some notes about the data: The above total includes 2,286 condominiums (horizontal or vertical) and 3,086 single family homes (attached, detached, or semi-detached). Some of these may have been sold more than once in the calendar year, but because the figures only reflect the most recent sale, those cases only count once.

Cross-posted at R. U. Seriousing Me?

The Washington metropolitan area and "Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick," which the Trulia data breaks out separately, have the nation's highest ratio of women to men among the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas.

The zip code with the most male-heavy singles is Rosslyn; the most female-heavy, upper Connecticut Avenue.

Trulia economist Jed Kolko writes:

Billy Joel was right: in most metros, the neighborhood with the highest ratio of men to women is in or near downtown, as well as in recently redeveloped neighborhoods. ...

The neighborhoods with the highest ratio of women to men tend to be more residential, like San Francisco's Marina and Seattle's Queen Anne, and more upscale (and safe), like the Upper East Side and Upper Connecticut Avenue.

What do you notice in the map?

In the map, each circle represents one Amtrak station. The larger the circle, the more riders there are at that station.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

In [an Examiner article from October, entitled "Parking conflicts prompting churches to flee D.C.,"] Lincoln Congregational Temple is mentioned as one of the complaining churches. On page 39 of the 1957 survey only 25% of its congregants lived in the area and supposedly of that, most were elderly, people who should be by now at home with Jesus. With the Savior and not driving and trying to find a parking spot.

In '57 a majority of their membership [were] up in Brookland and over in Kenilworth. It is possible that the church recruited a ton of members in the Shaw area since the survey, who then moved out of the area and come back on Sundays. However, I don't think that gives anyone a moral right to a parking spot, no more than having the right to use the toilet in your first apartment years after you turned in the keys and got[] your deposit back.

Shaw is chock full of churches, and some of them have figured out how to worship without double parking and the like. Sadly it is the ones who haven't seriously looked for solutions, other than breaking the law, who seem to scream the loudest. It is embarrassing as a believer, when some church leaders try to make parking a theological issue. Parking ain't in the Bible.

The parking problem has grown especially acute recently. Residents petitioned DDOT to extend residential permit parking (RPP) to Sundays, meaning churchgoers who don't live in the area can only park for 2 hours on RPP blocks and not at all on one side of every street. That has made it impossible for church patrons to use the street parking.

I also suspect that in 1957 Shaw had fewer resident-owned cars, so there wasn't the same level of competition for curb space.

DDOT has been working with individual churches for some time to try to find extra space that can accommodate parking on Sundays, like diagonal parking or space along the medians of wide avenues. But any such parking has to be open to all, not just churchgoers (anything else would be fairly clearly unconstitutional), and just adding more free parking won't ultimately solve the problem.

Many of the churches, but not all, have nearby office buildings or public schools with unused parking capacity on Sundays. There should be a way to work out a deal where the churches can use these lots. However, that parking won't be entirely free.

As we saw with the compromise the Washington Interfaith Network worked out for Columbia Heights churches to use the DC USA garage, once free parking is clearly not an option, suddenly a compromise that involves non-free parking becomes tenable.

The neighborhood parking also isn't entirely full, now that it's so restricted. It should be possible to let some people who want to drive to Shaw park on neighborhood streets, but there isn't room for all. How can DC allocate this scarce resource? The only ways to divvy up a limited resource is lottery, queue, pricing, favoritism (choosing one preferential group), or a hodgepodge.

Right now, it's favoritism for residents, with no option for others. The most sensible approach would be to set up a parking pass that's not free, perhaps also limited in number, which people could purchase to park in Shaw on Sundays. But the assumption that parking must be free, that free parking is a God-given right, is a straitjacket that forecloses better, creative solutions.

Update: The change to the parking included restrictions to RPP holders only on one side of every street. The original article did not mention this feature of the new policy. It has been corrected.

The old maps showed a bus route that runs every 10 minutes all day in exactly the same way as one that makes 4 trips, each a half hour apart, just at rush hours. The new map makes the most important, most frequent lines thicker and more prominent. It also smooths out the paths of each route to create something that's somewhere between a completely geographic map, like the old bus map, and a diagram like the Metrorail map.

One of my main comments from the draft versions was to highlight frequent non-Metrobus lines, like the Circulator. To most riders, it doesn't matter if the bus is a Metrobus, Circulator, ART, Ride On, Fairfax Connector, etc.—only where it goes and when it'll show up.

To their credit, the map designers took this feedback to heart, and now frequent non-Metrobus routes like the Circulator get the same thick lines as primary Metrobus routes, just in a different color based on the operator (gold for Circulator, green for Ride On, etc.)

That means that, at a distance, the maps for Maryland and Virginia jurisdictions give you a pretty good sense of where the frequent buses go:

One item that we didn't get to see in the drafts is the zoomed-in insert for downtown DC. Here's what they came up with:

The downtown network is pretty complicated, so it looks like there wasn't room to give each route its own line on the map. Instead, the map groups them, which means you still have to scrutinize the lines to see which route goes where. But it does really highlight the overall grid pattern of the bus routes downtown.

On the full DC map, lines that end downtown turn into an arrow generally pointing at downtown, and you have to switch to the insert to see where they go. It's too bad they couldn't show where at least the major lines go downtown on the non-insert map, so you don't always have to switch to the insert to get a general sense of the route.

The bus maps for Virginia, Montgomery County, and Prince George's County also have little downtown inserts of their own, these showing just the buses that go downtown from that jurisdiction. It seems like a clever way to show people riding into downtown from one of these places where their buses go and where to catch them to get back home.

Perhaps, in the future, there could be a sheet of such downtown inserts for different parts of DC, like a downtown insert of buses that go to DC west of Rock Creek park, another for buses that go east of the Anacostia, ones to Northeast neighborhoods, and so on?

All of the maps also have a single overview map that shows the high-frequency buses, and Metrorail network, for the entire region:

Below that is a table of the routes in that jurisdiction and when they run. Before, if you were looking at the bus map and considering a few different routes, you'd have to find the timetables for each route online. Now, you can look them up in the table.

It might be even better if the tables could list the average headway or some other frequency information, instead of just a dot.

Overall, Metro's maps took a huge step forward. It's also important to note that just 10 years ago, Metrobus maps were not online at all. Dennis Jaffe, the first chair of the Riders' Advisory Council, spearheaded a campaign with the Sierra Club to get free maps distributed and the map posted online. Now, a decade later, we have a far better map as well.

What do you think of the new maps?

The Post's article, which talks about how home prices have risen, says:

Many of the homeowners with mortgages higher than their home's value were clustered in the eastern parts of the District and in Prince George's County.

This makes it clear that the economic recovery is not hitting all areas or all people equally. We need more jobs east of the river and in Prince George's County, especially at Metro stations, to help our economic success benefit all.

Some of the longer lines on this map are "interurbans," which were trolley vehicles that functioned more like commuter rail than central city streetcars, stopping less frequently and running on longer headways. Today we'd probably call them light rail. They're on the map because no matter their route characteristics, they were basically electric trolleys. That includes Virginia's well-known W&OD, which isn't usually called a trolley line today.

The map first appeared on wikipedia and was created by the anonymous user "SDC".

Cross-posted on BeyondDC.