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In the TV news tradition, Tuss also interviews a few "people on the street," and does make sure to talk to people with multiple points of view. One driver thinks DC can probably figure out a better system, though he doesn't say anything inflammatory. Another says it's important to design signals to accommodate pedestrians, adding, "cities are for people, not for cars."

At the end, Tuss and his crew take a drive on Wisconsin Avenue. We can see them leaving one intersection with a green light and getting to another one. He concludes, "Clearly, from the driver's standpoint, some signals were not timed properly."

Actually, no, and this is the most dangerous part of this report because it reinforces the notion that if you hit a red light, there is something wrong with the timing.

Quite simply, lights are not going to be green for everyone all the time. Wisconsin Avenue, for instance, is a 2-way street. Any timing that gives successive green lights to people driving one direction will mean more red lights the other way.

Parts of 16th Street do have "platooning," where lights turn green in succession. This also encourages people to drive the speed limit, since if they go faster, they'll just hit red lights each time. Some people surely think 16th's lights are terrible because they keep hitting red lights. Others, driving the opposite way, have a legitimate beef that they timing makes things worse for them.

Downtown, there are many main streets intersecting at various angles in close proximity. There's no way to time all of the streets for continuous greens in every direction. Should the timing encourage people to drive north on 16th or west on streets like R and U in the evening? Both have a lot of commuters traveling in conflicting directions.

One way to combat that particular problem is to close segments of streets to car traffic. When New York closed the diagonal Broadway around Times and Herald Squares, it found that traffic flowed better because the diagonal confounded signal timings on the avenues. DC could probably help everyone better traverse a place like Dupont Circle if it reduced the number of roads coming in, but that would surely spark even more "war on cars" claims even if it actually helps cars and the people inside as well as pedestrians, cyclists, and bus riders.

There are many other reasons traffic engineers might time lights in a way that appears wrong to a driver traveling a particular direction. Contributor and engineer Andrew Bossi offered many examples, such as:

Gap Provision: Providing breaks in traffic, such as to allow nearby uncontrolled interactions to operate adequately. Without these breaks, some uncontrolled intersections may never be able to clear out, subsequently requiring some treatments such as an additional traffic signal—which would only increase motorists' delays. Breaks in traffic improve net mobility for the greatest amount of road users.

Still, many signals in DC aren't timed with a lot of forethought. DC doesn't have a state-of-the-art system to control all of the lights centrally. Many individual decisions get made based on local neighborhood pressure, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT)'s James Cheeks has told me and others. That can have its pros and cons; sometimes neighbors know well where the trouble spots are, but it also makes the overall system haphazard.

Many signal timings could be better. If DDOT changes them, however, it won't necessarily ensure that Adam Tuss always gets a green. What helps move on group of drivers could slow down another group. Also, as people say in Tuss's story, drivers aren't the only people on the roads.

In some places, DC could time signals to help buses get past a trouble spot when they cross a busy road. That might mean drivers on that main road more often get a red, but if the bus caries 20 people and 5 drivers have to wait a little longer, it's a net gain. Pedestrians need time to cross, especially wide roads like Wisconsin in places with a lot of seniors like upper Northwest.

Any fixes to signals have to take everyone's needs into account. That'll surely make someone frustrated, creating good fodder for another Adam Tuss transportation story.

New tax plan for Virginia: Governor Bob McDonnell proposes eliminating the state sales tax. He would make up the revenue by a 50% tax on hybrid or electric cars, organic produce, reusable grocery bags, and bicycle inner tube replacements. Observers now consider him a shoo-in for the 2016 GOP Presidential primary.

Congestion solved: The Texas Transportation Institute found that lost jobs from sequestration improved congestion. "Therefore, the logical policy for transportation must be further job loss," said Tim Lomax. Plus, Stockton, "foreclosure capital of the world," has the nation's lowest congestion, making it a clear model to emulate.

Where's the birth certificate?: Donald Trump is offering a reward for anyone who can prove DC Councilmember McDuffie isn't a "native Washingtonian." Stronghold resident McDuffie owns the house he was raised in and says he was born here, but no incontrovertible proof was immediately available after a 5-minute Google search.

Metro becoming more self-service: As part of its efforts to create a more "self-service" system in the Momentum plan, Metro will replaces all escalators with stairs and convert trains and buses to a Flintstone's-style power system.

Examiner will keep going: The Washington Examiner has reversed course and will continue its current publishing format. "Once we saw how upset our editorial style made David Alpert, we figured we were doing our job and had to continue," said editor Stefan Schmitt. The paper will, however, still fire Kytja Weir and Liz Essley, as both sometimes had positive things to say about transit.

Cheh apologizes: After weeks of speculation and inquiries from the local press, Mary Cheh relented and issued a letter of apology for her completely legal campaign fundraising activities. "DC residents have come to expect so much more of their elected officials," said DC voter Amy Zoneger.

The Examiner's strength was cranking out a lot of articles on many subjects. Since the start of 2012, we have included Examiner articles 284 times in Breakfast Links, second only to 531 Washington Post mentions (third is City Paper, fourth DCist). Our policy is to link to the article that has the best and/or most complete original reporting on a subject, so the high number of mentions means a lot.

Examiner doggedly pushed war on non-cars

However, on bicycling and transit, the editors repeatedly took reasonable articles, placed inflammatory headlines atop them, and splashed them on the front page.

DCist even started mocking the way the front page editors juxtaposed angry anti-city headlines on the top with large pictures that illustrated other articles below. Most recently, they matched up Pope Benedict with driving being "hell."

The Examiner delivers paper copies for free to suburban households periodically (I believe once a week), and at least the last "war on cars" front-pager, by Eric Newcomer, was on the distribution day. It's hard not to see this as propaganda designed to enrage suburbanites against the city (and maybe drive up subscription numbers).

Certainly an article whose headline proclaims "D.C. waging war against drivers" is not seriously attempting to educate anyone. Newcomer's piece wasn't quite as bad as the headline, but he did clearly set out only to identify costs to drivers, a one-sided approach. Further, someone Newcomer called about the story told me that Newcomer had approached him specifically for comments for a story on the "war on cars"; the assignment was slanted from the start.

If AAA had a point of view, you could usually count on an Examiner article which quoted AAA heavily, then maybe added a token quote or two from the police or the mayor's representatives. Alan Blinder's article today is a classic case: it leads with a dollar figure they got from AAA DC officials, then has some quotes from AAA spokesman John Townsend, followed by a couple quotes from the mayor's representatives, and then closes with AAA talking points again.

Examiner reporters almost never spoke to pedestrian or bicycle safety advocates for these stories. Every story about cameras got the frame, city officials versus drivers. The people who get killed on the roads don't exist. Unfortunately, Ashley Halsey III's articles in the Washington Post are the same way; cameras are just "lucrative" and not "life-saving."

Ledes emphasized "what you pay" over "what you get"

Moreover, Examiner articles frequently confronted any budgetary issue by leading with what it would cost taxpayers rather than the benefits. For example, a Maryland House committee yesterday approved a proposal to increase sales taxes on gas. This will have two effects: people will pay more for gas, and Maryland will get more transportation infrastructure that it needs.

This morning's article on the proposal, by Andy Brownfield, leads off with the costs and makes no mention of benefits. Yet Brownfield made the time to quote conservative opponents, a form of balance that we rarely see on AAA stenography articles.

This form of journalistic bias, which frames any government proposal in terms of harm to taxpayers much more strongly than benefits to residents, was common at the Examiner and reflected its editorial views.

I wish I could say the Washington Post's article on this subject, this time by John Wagner, was better—but it's not.

Spent $10 too much on pencils? Front page story!

The more money any organization spends, public or private, the more often some piece of that spending won't quite stand up to close scrutiny. With government, we need to have the press playing a watchdog role. The Examiner did more of this than anyone.

With the pressure to come up with stories on spending, however, this often went too far. The paper would relentlessly FOIA budget documents from everyone (except state DOTs, whose road projects they didn't look at too closely) and write a headline about almost any kind of spending.

Sometimes that spending is really inappropriate, and it's the press's duty to call attention to it. Sometimes, the numbers just sound high when you drop a dollar figure on the front page without context, but actually make sense. Or sometimes, the spending might be inappropriate, but it's really a tiny issue, and maybe the cost of adding more accounting controls is even higher.

This focus on waste also obscures another serious problem with government: not getting things done. Take Ken Archer's recent exposé about the DC Department of Employment Services and the One-Stop job centers. Their process puts up so many obstacles to getting training, such as proving residency, which are so arduous that many job seekers end up dropping out and not getting any training.

I couldn't help but wonder: if DOES fixed the process to make sure that more people got training, inevitably here and there some person might get training who isn't eligible. If the Examiner found out, even if that's a negligible number of people, it'd be front-page news about how the program is wasteful.

The biggest problems with DDOT projects is not waste, but procurement delays. It's just so hard to get anything done. We have exhaustive processes to ensure not a single dollar gets spent without review, bidding, and on and on. In practice, that means that staff spend so much time trying to move their projects through the financial process that they have too little time for actual design, community engagement, and more.

The main burden for all of these flaws should fall on editors rather than the reporters. Some reporters were better than others, but editors write the headlines and choose what to put on the front page, not the reporters. Editors assign subjects and push the reporters to write more or less on certain topics.

We can hope that the good reporters there find new jobs. In fact, they deserve to get better jobs working for editors who are actually trying to run a journalistic enterprise. I've long wished that reporters like them could work for a better paper; now, hopefully, is the chance.

Update: The original version of this article said that AAA sent the dollar figures to Alan Blinder for his story, but the story says they came from DC officials. Many articles in the preceding week did get their numbers directly from AAA, like Ashley Halsey's, and AAA has been sending around press releases with these or similar figures, but this particular story did not specifically get the numbers from AAA.

The problems of inequality and disparate economic opportunities are very real in DC, where a sizeable portion of the population—largely long-term African-American residents—do not seem to be benefitting from the city's so-called renaissance. Unemployment east of the Anacostia River remains significantly higher than in other parts of the city, and development that has transformed many areas of DC has been slow to reach its more impoverished areas.

Understanding the size and scope of this problem, inquiring why it persists and searching for meaningful solutions are worthy pursuits that all seeking to create a more livable city should support.

However, pitting jobs against programs like bike lanes is divisive, putting a bogeyman that supposedly symbolizes the city's misplaced priorities ahead of real issues. There's little evidence to support the idea that the District is pursuing initiatives such as bike lanes at the expense of jobs and social welfare programs.

Far more money goes into job programs than bike lanes

The District's FY2012 budget allocated $126 million to the Department of Employment Services (DOES). DOES' purview includes programs such as adult workforce programs, transitional employment, local job training and the controversial Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).

Many of these programs fall within the Workforce Development division, which "provides employment-related services for unemployed or underemployed persons so that they can achieve economic security." Workforce Development alone saw more than $55 million in the FY2012 budget.

Meanwhile, the District's Department of Transportation (DDOT) commands a 2012 capital budget of $128.1 million, which covers a vast array of responsibilities relating to the planning, construction and upkeep of the District's roads, bridges, trails and more. Separating out the amount spent specifically on bike-related infrastructure is practically impossible, and DDOT did not reply to an inquiry about these figures by publication time. However, some information is available.

DDOT's budget allocates $5.17 million "Mass Transit," which includes funds for programs such as bike sharing, car sharing and planning other alternative transportation options, while an additional $5 million is dedicated to planning and policy, which include pedestrian and bicycle programs and designing bicycle infrastructure.

Combined, this roughly $10.2 million, which constitutes expenses on far more than simply bike-related programs, comprises approximately 8% of DDOT's budget. (It would also represent a similar percentage of DOES' budget, and less than 1/5^th of the amount spent on Workforce Development.)

The actual construction cost for bike routes and lanes throughout the District is minuscule, according to the District's Bicycle Master Plan. This is because DDOT constructs most bike lanes or routes as part of larger streetscape and repaving projects, which minimizes bicycle-specific costs.

According to the master plan, the total cost of construction and signage of all new bike routes and lanes between 2005-2015, which encompasses well over 100 miles of routes and lanes both east and west of the Anacostia, is only $420,000.

By contrast, the District budgeted $1.57 million in 2012 alone on reduced WMATA bus fares for impoverished residents east of the Anacostia. In other words, as a portion of DC's overall $9 billion budget, costs assignable specifically to biking and bike-related infrastructure make about as much of a dent in the District's budget as the cost of refreshments served at Council meetings. (OK, perhaps that's a bit of hyperbole, but you get the idea.)

One may argue that what the District is investing into job training and placement services for its more poverty-stricken communities is insufficient, and that it needs to make a greater effort to ensure that District residents can find work at many of the businesses moving into the city.

Or, perhaps one might ask why, with hundreds of millions of dollars having gone to DOES in recent years, the unemployment rate remains so stubbornly high? (Unemployment was 26% in Ward 8 in 2011, nearly twice as high as the highest ward west of the Anacostia (Ward 5) and 13 times greater than the District's most affluent ward, Ward 3.)

But these aren't the types of questions Milloy raises. He implies that poverty and income inequality remain persistent throughout the District in part because the local government is fixated on initiatives such as bike lanes that are supposedly focused on affluent residents at the expense of jobs programs for its needier residents. "Jobs, not bike lanes," he says.

Jobs and bike lanes are not mutually exclusive

Robust and well-funded job training and placement assistance programs are not incongruous with progressive transportation options such as bike lanes, streetcars, subways and buses. In fact, one might argue, the two actually go hand in hand. As the District's roads become more choked with traffic, and as the price of gasoline and the overall cost of car ownership continue to rise, developing more cost-efficient transportation options is a tremendously sensible policy.

For example, with its annual membership fee of $75 and stations throughout the city—including more than a dozen east of the Anacostia—Capital Bikeshare is a very cost-effective method of navigating the city. It's also environmentally friendly and physically beneficial.

The growing presence of bike lanes and routes, including many miles east of the Anacostia, along with bike parking options throughout the city, make commuting to and from one's place of employment on two wheels an attractive and convenient option.

Rather than question why the city is devoting any resources to bike lane construction, a better question would be why the city's existing job training and placement programs are ineffectual. And rather than perpetuating the fallacy that the District has to choose between these two, all residents should support a city that has both smarter, sustainable transportation options and innovative and effective job training and placement options at the same time.

Newcomers are also more likely to be white than the longtime resident populace, though many of the newer black residents I've talked to have very similar visions and desires for the city and their communities as a lot of white residents.

This shift means that we have different groups of residents who have different ideas about how and whether the District should grow, or what our policies should be on transportation and economic development.

A healthy civic discourse includes debates over this. But it's not constructive when the conversation focuses on conspiracy theories about people's motivations, like the recurrent theme that a new policy is an effort to "force people out of cars." It's especially damaging when people pin this motivation on a policy that sustainable transportation advocates don't even like.

Tim Craig's Washington Post article this weekend, about parking and bike lanes, fanned these flames. The headline said new parking rules are intended to "discourage driving," and led off with a quote from Councilmember Jim Graham: "That is the sign of the future, that discourages car ownership."

It's not clear in what context Graham said this, but the article mainly talks about a program, which Graham pushed, to reserve parking on one side of every street for residents. It makes it sound like this program is part of the so-called "war on cars," and paired with Graham's quote, some bike lane discussion, and other talk about the growing numbers of residents, certainly gave the impression that this was another one of those ideas from the bike lane and coffee shop set.

It wasn't. This one side of the street thing is very simple: it's a political play. Graham's base is residents, not visitors and not employees of businesses. He saw an opportunity to give something to his voters, and he did. That would have been a far better frame for the story, especially from one of the Post's political reporters.

I didn't like this policy when it came up 2½ years ago, and you'd be hard pressed to find any kind of transit or bicycling advocate who was pushing this. It's not necessarily all bad; it basically reallocates limited street space from one group of drivers to another, and that has pros and cons.

But Craig's article certainly pressed on a nerve for the Post's suburban readers, a lot like his 2009 article that made our "10 worst mainstream articles of 2009" list. That, too, played to suburban commuters' fears of a District less deferential to their needs but in a way that likewise really misrepresented the situation; there, a Bethesda resident was complaining about getting a ticket for parking in rush hour lanes, but the people who benefit from those rush hour lanes are primarily the suburban drivers.

Gary Imhoff sees Craig's article as more proof the hipsters are trying to run everyone else out of the city. In a piece entitled "one size fits all," He wrote,

These are people who see their lifestyle, their current lifestyle, as the normal, natural way that everyone should live, and are scornful of anyone who would actually buy provisions for an entire family.

The first commenter, "DC," on the City Paper's bit about it pointed out that it's Imhoff, not any young residents, who seem to want a "one size fits all solution."

Few newer residents care how people from a different generation in a different neighborhood live. Honestly, most hardly give it a second thought. They just want to have some places to live that fit their budgets and are near jobs or transit, and want neighborhood amenities like shops, restaurants, and parks.

The only reason this would be at all threatening to anyone else is because when there weren't so many people in DC, and when a lot of people didn't walk and bicycle from place to place, drivers could have lots of spaces to park and the roads to themselves to drive more quickly.

To sum up, we have a scenario where new people are coming in, don't actually want to remove any amenities from any existing residents, but the very fact of their existence threatens some people economically. Some people respond by latching onto conspiracy theories and forming extreme groups that claim to be for freedom but actually want government rules that maintain the status quo.

Hm, this sounds eerily familiar to some patterns in our national politics over the last 4 years. A letter writer to the Current back in April even said that her dislike of the zoning update (which is actually mostly suggesting loosening some regulations) made her feel kinship with the Tea Party.

It's worth noting who, in Craig's article, most steadfastly refused to pander to any anti-bicycle, anti-transit, or anti-walking sentiment: Pedro Rebeiro, Mayor Gray's spokesperson. No matter how much tumult there's been over bike lanes, the administration has never given it credence.

Commentators would do well to listen to the mayor and stop tolerating transportation birtherism. I have absolutely no objection to everyone who uses a car today continuing to use it just as much as before. New residents are free to make their own choices as well about their transportation modes. Almost nobody wants to force anyone out of any cars.

This is about giving people more choices, strengthening the quality and availability of non-auto modes which our society neglected for many decades, and finding ways to welcome new people in our city, in a way that respects and includes existing residents of all colors and incomes, instead of trying to fight newcomers off or distract from the real issue with silly conspiracy theories.

Everyone at the meeting was white (in a relic from a more segregated bygone era, predominantly black associations are part of a separate Federation of Civic Associations), and almost all belong to the baby boom generation or older.

The discussion primarily revolved around the chronic flashpoint, parking. The Office of Planning has been encouraging developers not to build more parking than their residents need, and provisions of the zoning update reduce or eliminate many parking minimum requirements, especially around transit.

Tregoning said that when she talks to developers, she often asks them what percentage of residents in their target market own cars. She's yet to have a conversation where the developer knew the answer, but she comes armed with these statistics. She doesn't want to forbid them from building parking, but wants to help them align their project with the actual demand.

O'Connell noted that many buildings along Georgia Avenue in his neighborhood now have little or no underground parking, while earlier buildings had a lot of parking. He speculated that the older buildings built more than necessary, and developers have learned what residents want. Tregoning added that, while the data is not public, she has spoken to several developers who acknowledge that some of their past projects built parking which now goes unused.

O'Connell also wondered about the O Street Market project, which DC is supporting with over $35 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and grant funds. O'Connell said that the last economic development project of this magnitude was DC USA, which ended up with a taxpayer-funded garage which goes largely empty. Will the same happen at O?

The Rhode Island Avenue Home Depot is atop a Metro station, but has an overly car-centric design that isn't what residents wish they had at the site. Since these projects spend many years going through approvals, O'Connell said, what the city needs at the start of the process can often be very different from conditions by the time it gets built.

Audience members, however, mainly wanted planning to anticipate more car-owning households and not really expect any car-free ones. Judy Chesser of the Tenleytown Neighbors Association criticized car2go. She said that the residential permit parking (RPP) system is supposed to "protect residents," but yet car2go cars are able to park on those blocks as well as at meters.

Tregoning noted that they pay high fees for these privileges, not to mention that car2go vehicles do serve the area's residents. Some, she said, do give up cars, either going car-free entirely or reducing the number of cars they own, which makes more room for everyone else and saves money.

Tregoning emphasized the issue of choice. She asked the audience members to raise their hands if they own vinyl records, and then if they own CDs. Members of younger generations, by contrast, rarely own physical media for their music. Instead, they buy songs a la carte on iTunes or, increasingly, subscribe to services which let them listen to music on demand without actually owning the song.

Car ownership is similar, she said. Many residents do not feel the need to own a vehicle which they use only infrequently and which constantly depreciates. Instead, Zipcar, car2go, taxis and other services let them have access to cars when they need them, and they walk, bike, and take transit for many trips where possible.

While this is less common for families with small children, Tregoning pointed out that only 20% of DC households have school-age children. It's very important to serve their needs as well, but the city has a large amount of single-family housing stock, while it had far fewer apartments and condos compared to market demand. More recent development is mainly catching up to the balance we need for the future.

Facing some hostile reactions from the audience to the idea that many people would go car-free, Tregoning asked rhetorically, "do you really want me to plan for a city where 100% of people own cars?" Peter Espenschied of Cleveland Park retorted, "that would be safe."

Another questioner talked about how Georgetown residents kept a Metro station out of their neighborhood (actually, an urban legend). Tenleytown's Chesser piped up to say, "Smart move, in retrospect."

Some participants had more nuanced views. One man, who I didn't identify, preceded a serious and non-confrontational question by saying, "I generally favor higher density." Denis James of the Kalorama Citizens' Association said the group is worried that Jim Graham's move to expand visitor passes to all of Ward 1 has granted about 3,000 7,000 new parking privileges in the neighborhood, and that could bring a lot of new cars.

Most agreed that they wish the Washington Post would cover this issue more thoroughly. While Greater Greater Washington, the Washington City Paper, and others have indeed been writing about this subject, I agree that it's important enough to warrant more attention from the paper of record (as is the Montgomery County zoning rewrite also underway).

Seeing the tweets on the topic, Post reporter Mike DeBonis stopped by the meeting to say that he is working on articles about this issue. Any stories will run after the election which currently occupies all of his and others' time.

To assuage any fears that he might hate cars, bikes, feet or any other conveyance, DeBonis noted that he owns a car and an RPP sticker, bikes to work most days, took the bus that day, rode the Red Line to the meeting, and planned to walk home. Channeling Gilbert and Sullivan, he concluded, "I am the very model of a modern multimodal individual."