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Update: DCist's Martin Austermuhle figured out the missing context. For example,

I think he's developmentally retarded, and I use 'retarded' in the French way, meaning that he's late. He's late to development meetings, that's what I'm trying to say.

Update 2: Reporter Aaron Wiener defends the context of the quotations and gives even more examples of insults from Townsend: "He also called [David Alpert] 'reptilian,' 'pedantic,' and 'childlike,' and suggested he had a 'Napoleonic complex.'"

Spirited argument is important in public policy, but it should not cross into insults. When it does, that has a chilling effect on open discourse. Fostering an inclusive conversation about the shape of our region is the purpose of this site, but discourse must be civil to be truly open. That's why our comment policy here on Greater Greater Washington prohibits invective like this. In our articles, we try hard to avoid crossing this line, and are disappointed when we or others do, intentionally or inadvertently.

The "war on cars" frame unnecessarily pits drivers against cyclists and pedestrians instead of working together for positive solutions. The City Paper article, by Aaron Wiener, does a good job of debunking that, and is worth reading for much more than the insults it quotes.

When pressed, Townsend told Wiener he wants to back away from the "war on cars."

"I regret the rhetoric sometimes," he says. "Because I think that when you use that type of language, it shuts down communication with people who disagree."

We hope Townsend, his colleagues, and their superiors also regret the things he said about David and Greater Greater Washington. We look forward to the day when AAA ceases using antagonistic language and begins working toward safety, mobility, and harmony among all road users.

In the meantime, residents do have a choice when purchasing towing, insurance, and travel discounts. Better World Club is one company that offers many of the same benefits as AAA, but without the disdain.

Instead of escalators, people used rotating spiral "spinners" to get down to the stations. But trains entering the station blew off people's hats, which made people stop riding and the system was ultimately abandoned.

UrbanTurf broke the news of Donald Trump's planned design for the Old Post Office. New Columbia Heights reported that DC USA would place a curling rink in the underutilized parking garage. (Hey, maybe not a bad idea!)

Kaid Benfield announced that sprawl will no longer happen, Southwest TLQTC posted plans to redevelop Greenleaf Gardens, a public housing complex, and Alan Suderman discovered Marion Barry is running for mayor.

Finally, DC's elections board sent out a postcard telling residents they can only vote on April 23 at One Judiciary Square, nowhere else. Oh, wait, that last one wasn't a joke; it was just a really poorly-written note that conflated early voting and regular voting and will confuse residents.

What other local and regional April Fool posts did you especially like?

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!

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.

Discussing education is always going to be a balance between the needs of individual children, and any parent understandably puts his or her own child first, and the issues facing the community as a whole. How can we make education better for the kids in good schools, bad schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools right now, and also in the long run? Are those always compatible?

Most education discussions elsewhere in the media get very heated about a few hot-button issues, like "school reform" and Michelle Rhee. The editors and contributors who work on education generally don't have an absolutist position on these topics.

Those seeking to remove poorly performing teachers have some good points, but aren't always right. Teachers' unions have some good points too, but aren't always right either. Michelle Rhee was not perfect, but wasn't the devil; she did some good and made some mistakes.

We can all agree, however, that education in DC needs to be better for kids of many different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, races and income levels, and we need to figure out how to best achieve that shared goal. I hope our discussions about education can look at issues through that broad lens and bring a thoughtful perspective that is often missing.

Our education discussions spanned many topics last year

We've talked about a number of education policy topics in 2012. I looked at whether DC schools are "good enough" for parents with a choice, the problems with the rankings and statistics we have today, whether schools can be diverse, and how to promote diversity.

Ken Archer discussed whether Ward 3 schools are getting more exclusive and if we're headed toward 2 separate and mostly segregated systems. We asked whether 100% choice should be the goal, whether charters expel too many kids, and whether to have a common lottery

Steve Glazerman argued charters should not favor neighborhood residents, while Ken felt it would create a level playing field; a panel ultimately recommended against the idea.

Ken also talked about plans for Ward 5 middle schools and the DC claims that it has "universal" pre-K are dubious; even the auditors say so.

We started out the year with conversations about education funding in the budget, from Steven Glazerman, after-hours community schools, from Celine Tobal, and the widely-criticized IFF study on school closings.

These articles were all about education in the District, where the policy issues are very different from most Washington suburbs. That doesn't mean our education conversations should only focus on DC, however, and it would be great to have more about the issues in other cities and counties in the region.

What education topics would you like to discuss?

Can you help?

If we're going to have more discussions about education, we need posts. Greater Greater Wife and I don't have kids yet. These nonexistent kids are not enrolled in any local schools. Some of you do have children, and know interesting things about what's going on in your child's and other children's schools.

Can you share some of these? You don't have to have a Ph.D. in education or be a professional education researcher, though we also would welcome hearing from those folks. When we talk about buildings or bike lanes or parks or Metro, we try to look at things from the perspective of the regular person, and mix in a little bit of context. A post does not need to be a research paper.

Our commenters know a lot, too. Often a good post just poses some interesting thoughts and then gets a topic going. It's definitely not necessary to cover all of the bases of a subject to bring it up. A good post is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

Nor does every post has to answer the broad question, "what is the most important educational policy issue"? Often very small things, at the local level, make the greatest difference. One of the best ways to talk about an issue on a blog is by example: we discuss one specific architectural decision or intersection design or local zoning fight, and through a large number of these, creates a collage that builds up to the bigger picture.

Are you trying to pick a school for your kid? Why not write about what you're learning and what factors you're weighing? Have a kid in a school with a great principal? You could interview him or her and write about what he or she does really well. Or are you sitting on a gold mine of useful statistics of some kind? Share them!

If you have access to really great information that would help advance the discussion, but can't publicly put it under your byline, we're interested in that too. However, we don't have a staff of reporters who can take a general tip or topic suggestion and do their own research for an article; that's what we need contributors to do. Most articles don't need a lot of research; you can just write about what you already know.

Can you help out? Let us know on this form. Even if you can only do a little, with a lot of people it will add up. I hope you can.

Most read: David Daddio analyzed how people use Capital Bikeshare, and since April, this one post racked up over 51,800 views to the post page itself (not counting people who read it on the home page and RSS feeds). It got attention on Planetizen, Reddit, Next American City (now Next City) and more.

Runners-up for highest-traffic posts include Dan Reed's millennial post which also scored #4 on most-commented, an analysis and map of dying malls by Dan Malouff, Bradley Heard's summary of the Cafritz project in Riverdale Park and how it fits into Prince George's TOD strategy (or lack thereof), and historic names for DC neighborhoods, such as "Pipetown" and "Bloody Hill," by Kimberly Bender.

Most tweeted: Over 204 people retweeted Herb Caudill's amazing essay on so-called "anti-car" policies, including folks from all around the country, since his points are just as salient in almost every other city as they are here. It's worth a read at any time.

The Twitterati also clearly are very into open data. They got very excited about the real-time arrival screens Eric Fidler put together on a fellowship for Arlington County Commuter Services and Capital Bikeshare agreeing to release data in an anonymized form that enabled all kinds of people to put together great visualizations; these clocked in at #2 and #3 on total tweets.

Rounding out the top most-tweeted articles are ones by Christine Green on how planners are advancing public health and a very short post on a clearly hot-button issue, the fact that DC now has more people than Vermont and Wyoming, but 3 fewer votes in Congress than each state.

Most liked: Some different subjects interest people on Facebook than on Twitter, while others interest them all. The top "liked" post was the one on DC being bigger than Vermont, and it was also the 5th most tweeted.

However, 673 people liked Dan Reed's post on the National Labor College going on the market, while only 5 people tweeted it. (Maybe that's because the original title, which Facebook shows, is "College for Sale" (intriguing!) while the tweet was "National Labor College move presents development opportunity for Hillandale" (eh!))

You also really liked the historic neighborhood names like Pipetown (by Kimberly Bender), the recent revelation of Montgomery County school officials freaking out over a 5th grader riding Ride-On to school, and, once again, Herb Caudill on car-dependence.

Many thanks go out to all of these contributors and the many, many more who submitted posts that might not have made the top 5 in one of these categories, but which still informed, entertained, engaged, or energized readers about one of many important topics.

Help me find bugs by giving it a try. A live one will appear below, in the comment area for just this post, for now. The live captcha will appear once you click into the comment form. You can also make it appear on any other post by adding /format/mapcaptcha to the end of the URL for that post.

I might try to add additional types of questions or more maps with other information about the Washington region as well; give your suggestions!

Here's how survey respondents came down on what might make them comment more:

If you don't comment a lot, would anything lead you to want to comment more?

Most of the "other" responses are people saying they wouldn't comment at all regardless, or people who said the only way to get them to comment more is to add another hour to each day, make their job less demanding, and so on. Others said they think anything they want to say has already been said by another.

At first, the survey had 2 versions of the question, one with an added option about adding threaded comments, and one without. I fixed this early on, and so we don't have good data about the threaded comment option. Even once it was gone, a few people suggested it in the Other box.

I'd been hesitant to do threading because it makes it harder to come back later and see what comments people have added, but perhaps other advantages outweigh that. One reader said, when suggesting this in the Other box, that this approach "still allows everyone to comment but readers may visually skip over tangent conversations of no interest to them."

Even without indenting, we could still make it easier to reply by having a reply button on each comment and a UI for selecting some text to reply to, which would automatically put it into the comment in italics or whatever formatting is appropriate.

I will also work on looking into better CAPTCHA solutions. Does anyone know of one? We do get a lot of spam attempts, some of which make it through the filter even with the CAPTCHAs.

Finally, many more people suggested toning the comments down as opposed to letting them be more freewheeling. We have a very strong belief in allowing comments that disagree with the ideas any post or comment presents, but also push hard to delete comments which attack others personally or take a tone which criticizes another for daring to speak up.

It's important to make the comments a space where people can toss out ideas, even ones they haven't spent years thinking about and reading or writing academic papers on; others might say they disagree, but we don't want others saying that it was inappropriate to even voice the opinion.

What parts of the comments still are problematic? One that comes to mind is the occasional tendency for some threads to veer into arguments not about the issue but about what one person previously said and what it means. A lot of these arguments turn into sniping back and forth about the meaning of some comment hours or days previous. That's really not interesting to everyone else.

One idea that came to mind is to ask commenters to avoid using the word "you" or otherwise talking directly to or about others. We wouldn't ban that entirely, since sometimes the word is very appropriate. However, I've often found that if a comment is about the issues, it's fairly easy to phrase it without using second person pronouns; instead of saying, "You wrote [x], but why do you think that, and you are wrong," one can just say, "The argument that [x] is not correct because of these reasons." On the other hand, a combative comment is very hard to phrase this way.

One possibility might be to set things up so that such second person comments can get posted, but go through moderation first. If you can write a comment without using you, your comment goes up faster.

Or, are there other elements of commenting that inhibit a more valuable conversation?

Here are some of the additional responses readers gave for the Other category:

• I don't know if restricting comments will help. It just seems that the same people always comment and continually duke it out over and over. Makes newcomers not want to comment.
  
• Threaded comments and/or the ability to mute commenters
  
• Email me when someone responds to my post; showing thumbs up or thumbs down (maybe you already do this?)
  
• Implement a ranking system (ala reddit)
  
• Comments should be on point and on topic. This blog should not turn into for example the Washington Post comments section which is half garbage and half racist comments (im not saying that this blogs comments are like that however). What I propose is that the comment policy be stricter, so while perhaps some jokes would be allowed purely sarcastic comments are not helpful. Also it would be great if the comments could bring together and form some sort of consensus, i.e. allow the users to sort of hash out possible solutions to a problem or generate new ideas which could allow the GGW community to rally behind or serve as a proposal made to eleced or governmental officials.
  
• Moderators to keep people on topic
  
• Comment likes and popularity (not quite as formal as Slashdot)
  
• Add numbers to each individual comment.
  
• If anything, i don't enjoy the bickering and straw-man arguments from a few commentors.
  
• The comments are too combative, but restricting comments shouldn't be the way to go. The same 6ish people have the same debates on all the comments. It gets old.
  
• Weed out the trolls.
  
• Consider a tiered comment system where you can directly reply to a comment and the response indents. That still allows everyone to comment but readers may visually skip over tangent conversations of no interest to them.
  
• The tone is what's wrong with the comments.
  
• I'm often reading a day or two later, no one's reading comments anymore—some way to keep the conversation "live"?
  
• Encourage people to follow the "Golden Rule" when it comes to the tone of their comments.
  
• Probably not - they are very combative but I don't think restriction is necessarily the answer.
  
• No problems, seems better than most comment systems
  
• Maybe Facebook comments?
  
• I don't really know how to stop all the anti-urbanist diatribes but they are rampant and definitely diminish my experience, as much as I hate to admit that they are winning by reducing the usability of this public forum
  allow an NYT like system where you can read the most recommended comments as well as editors picks.

The idea of having a special tab for for popular and promoted comments, which the Post, Forbes, and others also use, is an interesting one to ponder.

What do you think would make the comments more enjoyable and encourage more people to participate?