Posts about Windshield Perspective

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.

If you want to cross a road, you'll just cross. The cars will slow down and avoid you. You could cross blindfolded and be perfectly safe. You'll be able to cross freeways. You'll be able to walk diagonally across intersections. You'll be able to do anything you want, and the cars will be responsible for avoiding you. Your biggest danger will come from cyclists and other pedestrians, not cars.

It would be fantastic if this scenario came to pass, but is it realistic? It's certainly possible computers can get smart enough to handle it, but the sticking point here is the words "will slow down."

How much will they slow down? For how many pedestrians? Drum lives in Irvine, California, which has few pedestrians, so perhaps the cars can just avoid the occasional pedestrian. But in urban areas, there are a lot of pedestrians. If everyone crossed whenever they liked, the cars would slow down an awful lot.

In some places, cars would hardly ever get through. In almost any major city's downtown during a busy period, pedestrians are waiting in large numbers on street corners to cross. The only reason cars can get through is because signals govern pedestrian crossings. And when a light is green, often a car has to wait for a gap in the pedestrians or gently nose through to get past.

In Kevin Drum's future urban cores, constantly crossing pedestrians mean that car traffic will not flow at all except perhaps in the wee hours. Anyone who's been involved in a proposal to take away a lane of a road for bikes, or for a road diet, knows that drivers (or, in the future, car riders) will not stand for it.

Drivers are a powerful political force

Just look at, for example, the backlash against a bicycle lane on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. In a very liberal jurisdiction, a modest and overwhelmingly successful bike lane nevertheless stirred up a few wealthy and well-connected individuals, including the wife of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to create an organization and file lawsuits to block the project using any means necessary.

Tea Partiers certain that there is a vast UN conspiracy to force them to live in high rises are opposing even extremely modest state laws creating some incentives for development in dense areas. Do we really think people will let government mandate that nobody is allowed to drive a car by hand, and that pedestrians get absolute priority?

In the DC area, some bicyclists ride on MacArthur Boulevard in Potomac, a narrow and windy road in a low-density area. That's perfectly legal, but there's a constant stream of letters to local press outlets by drivers who are sure it must be illegal to bike there since it slows them down.

Forcing drivers to travel slower would be like telling seniors that we're cutting their Medicare. The political counter-pressure is intense, so much that most transportation planners always take great pains to reassure drivers of how any change won't really slow them down. Even for the pedestrian plaza in Times Square, one of the early promises from the mayor's office was that it would actually reduce car delays.

I can go on. But anyone who writes regularly about transportation has encountered the massive sense of entitlement from drivers. When I'm driving, I hate to be delayed, too, but I squelch this natural impulse because I write about the issues and have context.

It may well come to pass that driverless cars have to travel slower and pedestrians are able to act more freely. But this will create tremendous political pressure to change the social compact over roads to get traffic moving faster once again. And in this, we will see another, more intense variant of the same fight we have today.

Once, pedestrians did walk freely, and children played in the streets. As automobile use proliferated, rising deaths led to campaigns to segregate street space. Our society could have taken one of two approaches: it could have limited drivers, and added legal liability to force drivers to be more careful, or it could get people out of the street. Many places in Europe chose some elements of the former, but America decisively chose the latter: to redefine the street's role in society to move cars faster. I'm certain that in Drum's scenario, there would be intense pressure to do the same.

Who is liable?

One element determining whether driverless cars turn into the Kevin Drum reality or another one is how we treat liability. When a driverless car kills a person, whether due to a human overriding the technology or a failure in the computer system, there will be a lawsuit.

If courts hold that the manufacturer of the car is liable, this will stifle development of the cars. The technology might ultimately be perfect, but it won't be perfect from the start. Manufacturers will ask state legislatures to limit their liability. Already, a number of commentators have called for liability caps or other legal changes which shift the burden away from the manufacturer.

If the legislatures don't agree, then manufacturers will have to move very carefully until they can make the cars virtually incapable of killing anyone. That will likely hinder development in general, and make any self-driving cars travel slower than human-operated cars. Many drivers therefore will turn off computer mode a fair amount of the time, and political pressure will build to change the liability standard. This will be an early skirmish in the battle over the cars' speed.

If states do limit liability, then we'll end up with a different situation. Buyers will want driverless cars that use algorithms like the one the University of Texas team devised that let them move faster. Sometimes those cars will travel close to pedestrians or bicyclists. Most of the time they'll still avoid killing anyone, but mishaps will happen. And like in today's legal world, prosecutors, judges and juries will be very reluctant to impose heavy punishments on someone operating a car who unintentionally kills another.

Then we'll be back to a situation like the early 1900s roads. For people's own safety, officials will start imposing restrictions on pedestrians. It'll start in places like Irvine. If laws won't stop people from walking on highways or crossing diagonally, then they'll build fences, or skybridges, or both.

Today, one argument against restricting pedestrians too much is that not everyone can drive. Seniors and people with disabilities can't operate a car, and many can't afford them. When driverless cars become commonplace, there will also be cheap taxi service, and so it'll be easier just to tell people to call up a car.

Already, many suburban areas are essentially an archipelago of human-accessible islands in a sea of almost-cars-only space. Little will stand in the way of making this other space absolutely cars-only. And why not? After all, without people, cars can use fancy algorithms to interweave with each other and zoom around far faster than they could in 2012.

Driverless cars aren't bad

A number of the responses seem to be reacting to an imaginary variant of my thesis, in which I said that self-driving cars were going to be a unmitigated bad thing. There's a natural tendency to simplify all arguments into "x is great!" or "x is terrible!"

The fact is that autonomous cars are coming whether we like it or not, and like any technological advance, will bring both terrific improvements to people's lives as well as drawbacks.

Driverless cars are sure to lead to big fights. Will they shift the balance farther toward pedestrians, as Kevin Drum believes, or away? I hope the former, but the technology won't magically solve this problem. Instead, we'll have to fight it out through the democratic process, as we do most other issues affecting the public sphere.

BRT could move far more people more quickly using the existing roadway space. The simple fact is that a bus-only lane can carry far more people than a general traffic lane, as long as bus service on that lane is fairly frequent. In the built-up business and residential districts along the county's busiest bus corridors, the only way to make room for BRT is to convert existing travel lanes into bus-only lanes.

Elsewhere, BRT will stop along major 6-lane arterials, at intersections which often have multiple turn lanes. There too, it's best to put the busway on existing lanes. Widening these roadways to add new lanes could defeat the intent of the transit plan to create walkable spaces, since 10-lane suburban highways are rarely welcoming to people on foot.

Converting lanes will not be easy. Traffic planners will need to use some trial and error to find the best configuration. If there is to be any hope of meeting the ambitious schedule that BRT proponents have laid out, the county needs to start quickly.

The learning process can start now. Montgomery can benefit now by designating a few short sections of bus lane right away. Even if full BRT is not running yet, there are many existing buses, often running at high frequency. WMATA's Priority Corridor Network Plan has already identified some good locations.

The County Council recognizes this need. Last April, then-Council President Valerie Ervin and all three Transportation and Environment Committee members (Roger Berliner, Hans Riemer, and Nancy Floreen) asked for immediate action to give buses higher priority at intersections. They also requested—"separately," they emphasized—a longer-range study of passenger throughput on the roads.

Unfortunately, MCDOT, which trumpets its support for BRT sometime in the future, expressed no interest in doing anything now. In an August reply, MCDOT Director Art Holmes said that nothing could be done to speed up buses until the passenger throughput study was complete. Nine months after the County Council letter, that study still has yet to begin.

While MCDOT stonewalled, the county Planning Board began its own work on the BRT plan. Staffer Larry Cole looked at the throughput issue and found that converting a car lane to BRT adds almost as much passenger capacity as building expensive new lanes.

MCDOT planning chief Edgar Gonzalez then emailed Cole insisting that he redo the calculation with the assumption that each car carries 4 people. Cole found, of course, that roads would carry a lot more people if each car had a driver and three passengers.

Four people per private car is clearly an absurd assumption. If the county could impose an HOV-4 rule on all its highways, there would be no need for BRT nor any other road project because traffic congestion would disappear instantly.

This is not an isolated incident. Gonzalez has a long and disappointing track record on transit matters. He tried to pass off a highway interchange as a pedestrian underpass. His consultants claimed that it will take 7 years to design a new Metro entrance in Bethesda. His department asserted that adding bus lanes and bike lanes would make Rockville Pike less friendly to pedestrians than it is now.

These current and past actions from MCDOT officials make it hard to avoid the conclusion that MCDOT is interested in moving cars, not people. While DC and Arlington have taken significant steps to treat pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders more equally, MCDOT zealously hews to a cars-only mindset for its roads.

It's long past time for the department to change its approach to issues and follow the examples of sound transportation planning set by its counterparts in the District and Arlington.

I'd link to it, except the Huffington Post uses detailed analytics to determine how long to leave posts on its home page, and this one needs to roll off as quickly as possible.
Here's the link. The vast bulk is a long recitation of every car Thies has owned and the location of every places he's lived or worked. But Thies comes to the conclusion that he can't drive because of the location of his son's new school, and therefore, any public policy that's not about automobility is the "war on cars":

There are powerful, multiplying forces aligned who seek to make driving as difficult as possible. They oppose spending money to build roads and want to occupy your parking space with a bike rack.

Don't get me wrong; I love public transportation, bicycling and walking. ... A month ago my son started school across town. ... So, last week we rejoined the community of car owners.

Now we are back in the crosshairs of those who prosecute the war on automobiles. I have already heard it several times: "You don't need a car," "You could do that with a bike," and so on. ...

People are moving here and businesses are hiring. ... Not all of those employers will be walking distance from a Metro. Every new home will not be built on a block with a bus stop. People with jobs will buy cars and drive them to places to spend money. That is reality.

I love walking, bikes and riding our much-maligned Metro. I do not like sitting unnecessarily in traffic. If the war on automobiles succeeds we will all be caught in a jam and the long-term prosperity of our region will be at risk.

The problem isn't with a public policy that increases transportation options, but rather with these people who hassled Thies for driving. It's fine for Thies to drive if that's easiest for him. I drive sometimes. I have friends who drive to work.

Some of them have to be able to dart into the office late at night if there's a sudden international crisis, and I can totally understand that buses just don't run enough from their house to their office at that time of day. Or they have to stop at a daycare which is inconveniently located to transit.

I just bought some antique doorknobs for my house at The Brass Knob in Adams Morgan. They're replacing black plastic handles which I hated. Some people love the plastic, probably including the former owner that put them on. That doesn't mean that I am engaging in a war on modern fixtures, even though personally I think they're awful. I have friends with super-modern aesthetic senses, who put things in their homes I would never consider for a moment, and we can still be friends.

By the way, I drove to the Brass Knob. It's not very far, but I had to carry a heavy bag of metal objects including the mortise, to make sure I got the right size, and I was fine paying the $2.32 to park for an hour with ParkMobile. I bike a lot. I take Metro and buses. And sometimes I drive. I don't feel bad about my transportation choices, but neither do I say that a project which helps people on one mode I use sometimes is a war on another mode.

This "war" rhetoric is really tiring. It assumes that anything which helps improves non-automotive mobility hurts drivers and vice versa. That's the opposite of the truth. In DC, wherever Thies is driving from Mount Pleasant, there's never going to be a new or wider road. If he's frustrated by traffic, the best thing we can do for him is make it easier for some people, those who don't have to take a kid to a non-transit-accessible school or carry doorknobs or go stop wars from beginning late at night, not to compete with him for road space.

If anyone can feel under attack, it's cyclists. Tom Coburn is currently tying Congress in knots to try to cut any dedicated bike and pedestrian funding, which if approved would surely lead most states to zero out entirely any spending on bike lanes and sidewalks.

At a more micro level, some drivers actively assault cyclists, or talk about how much they wish they could. There's the guy on Rhode Island Avenue who deliberately knocked a cyclist over with his pickup truck, while the cyclist was riding completely legally, or the guy who deliberately struck A Girl On Her Bike not knowing she was a police officer, or the Ballston Patch writer who bragged about her cravings to smack into those pesky bikers with her car.

Most drivers aren't that guy on Rhode Island Avenue, nor the Patch writer, nor Tom Coburn. Most people driving just want to get to work or wherever they are going, just like most people biking or walking or riding the bus do. At least the people driving aren't as likely to get seriously injured if they're hit.

Maybe that's why a few of them, like Chuck Thies, can say with a straight face that they feel there's a war against them. If anything shows an insane sense of entitlement, it's his statement that some people "want to occupy your parking space with a bike rack." Why is it "your" parking space? DDOT has never forcibly installed a bike rack in the parking pad behind anyone's row house. If it's on the street, it's my parking space too.

Thies wasn't just talking about bikes; he's also talking about opposition to the Outer Beltway and most other freeways conceived in the 1950s. There are plenty of arguments against that as well, but most of all, none of it would help Thies' own personal driving concerns, which is what his whole article focuses on (after the many stories about the many cars he bought and sold, for how much and to whom).

Among everything Thies talks about, the one thing that would help him more quickly drive his son to school and then get to work is replacing a few of those parking spaces with bike racks, even if he never personally locks a bicycle to one.

Arlington has built tremendous economic success over the past 35 years around its transit system, and is recognized as a national leader in smart growth. Unfortunately, the people running Arlington Community Federal Credit Union don't seem to have gotten the message. The credit union, which serves Arlington County employees and residents, is running ads that perpetuate the anti-bus attitude:

The Arlington credit union seems to be missing the boat in more ways than one. Their two branch locations are nowhere near Metro, which seems odd considering so many Arlington employees work within blocks of the Court House Metro station. Space near Metro may be more expensive, but shouldn't Arlington's own credit union set a good example? Shouldn't it locate near its customers in the county government, which are intentionally clustered around Metro? More importantly, why would Arlington's own credit union advertise in ways that undermine Arlington's significant investments promoting alternative transportation?

This may seem like a minor issue, but eliminating anti-transit cultural stereotypes is important in the fight to change how Americans think about cities. ACFCU should rethink this misguided campaign.

The county transportation officials who designed this street to be so dangerous, the AJC reporter who pointed out she hadn't been charged, the prosecutors who overcharged the case, and the jurors who had never taken a public bus all showed no remorse for encouraging a situation where people have to break laws and put themselves in dangerous situations just to travel to work and shop.

A similar windshield perspective is on display in a recent Anne Arundel crash. A driver fatally hit Alex Canales Hernandez and, as in Nelson's case, left the scene. Also like Nelson's, it happened on a busy arterial street that's been designed for maximum vehicle speeds and not for bicycle or pedestrian safety.

Anne Arundel police spokesperson Justin Mulcahy told the Maryland Gazette, "Certain stretches of roads should really be just for vehicles." He also encouraged cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers all to pay attention and make eye contact.

Setting aside the fact that "vehicles" include bicycles, certain stretches of road are just for motor vehicles, like freeways. But those always coexist with networks of other roads that can potentially serve all modes. In most suburban areas like Cobb County, Georgia and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, designers have often made local arterial roads more freeway-like without actually providing for safe bicycle and pedestrian alternatives.

Bus stops become tiny roadside perches mere feet from speeding traffic with few or no places to cross, and people trying to get around without a car, sometimes because they can't afford one, have to take their lives into their hands and risk being blamed when anything goes wrong.

Not only do rude commenters and commentators blame these victims, but so do some police and callous spokespeople like Mulcahy or Jonathan Perok of Prince William, who blamed a pedestrian for getting killed in Dumfries who turned out to be a VDOT contractor there to install a traffic signal.

Jay Mallin made a great video in response to a similar Prince William incident that's equally relevant to Raquel Nelson's and Alex Canales Hernandez's cases. It's worth rewatching:

Wired also wrote today about a new report (PDF) framing transportation as a civil rights issue:

According to the report, the average cost of owning a car is just shy of $9,500. That may not sound like much until you realize the federal poverty level is $22,350 for a family of four. One-third of low-income African-American households do not have access to an automobile. That figure is 25 percent among low-income Latino families and 12.1 percent for whites. Racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to use public transit to get to work.

Yet the federal government allocates 80 percent of its transportation funding to highways.

"This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it," the report states. "Traditional nondiscrimination protections cannot protect people for whom opportunities are literally out of reach."

The report couldn't be more timely. Sarah Goodyear asks, could the intense media coverage of this issue mean that society is ready to start taking pedestrian rights more seriously?

For many advocates, the prohibition on nonmotorized users at Broad Branch Road was a bad indicator. Bridges are traditionally choke points where bicycle and pedestrian access is critical. Why would DDOT install a facility it considers insufficient to handle bicycles and pedestrians, and then restrict their use entirely?

Because the temporary bridge is a structure DDOT already had available, it came with some restrictions if a temporary facility were to be installed quickly. Most notably, the bridge has a single 13-foot wide lane and no sidewalks. As a result, vehicles traveling on this bidirectional roadway must alternate in order to cross the bridge. Because of these movements and the narrow bridge width, DDOT explained in press releases that it "discourages" cyclists and pedestrians from using the bridge.

The signage installed did more than discourage, however. It entirely prohibited cyclists and pedestrians. In a phone call with us, DDOT representatives explained that the sign was too restrictive and would be removed.

DDOT was under pressure to install a temporary bridge at this location. In order to do so cost-effectively, it had to use a bridge already in its possession. The agency could not responsibly encourage all cyclists and pedestrians on a substandard bridge but did not want to prohibit expert users who needed to use the facility and could do so safely. Hence, the "discourage" policy.

While this policy is not anyone's ideal, it is understandable. This policy seems to abide by the Complete Streets philosophy by allowing access but not encouraging use of a substandard temporary facility. This is only acceptable because the bridge's temporary nature, and political pressure from the adjacent council members will help ensure its final replacement by mid-September.

The Broad Branch Road bridge doesn't violate the Complete Streets policy, but is DDOT following it with its other, more permanent projects? Next, we'll take a look at street reconstruction projects, including some constructed before the policy was issued, and one identified as a "complete street" by DDOT Director Terry Bellamy in his confirmation testimony.

Many DDOT projects do take all road users into account, but not always to the extent they should. In order to be meaningful, DDOT's complete streets policy should have an impact on the agency's projects. It's not yet clear that it has.

Between 1946 and the first decade of the 21st century, the Canada Dry building was Silver Spring's gateway landmark, visible to all B&O rail and Metro riders as they entered the community.

Unfortunately, now all passengers see are parking decks and new condominiums; the Canada Dry building is no longer visible from the railroad.

Montgomery County's preservationists and planners took the least insightful and least creative path towards preserving the property. It's a pretty site (and sight), but its industrial history has been erased and replaced by a decontextualized façade that conveys little information about the building's past. As historian Duncan Hay recently wrote in the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Forum Journal, "Industry has been scrubbed clean" from the property.

By excluding railroads from impact studies, preservationists working in the regulatory world are applying a narrow reading to the laws under which they are doing the work.

Many local jurisdictions and federal agencies go so far as to specify that changes to historic buildings must not be visible from the public right-of-way. Today, this invariably means streets.

In the six years that I served on the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission, I never once heard a case that took into account views of historic properties from railroad corridors, despite the fact that Metro and MARC riders passing through Kensington, Silver Spring, Takoma Park, and Rockville would have seen the end results of HPC-regulated projects.

To ensure that the evaluation of adverse effects to historic places is truly comprehensive, historic preservation commissions and state historic preservation offices need to afford railroad the same deference as streets and highways currently have in historic preservation regulatory reviews.

And while it may be too late for buildings and historical landmarks, there will be plenty of more opportunities for preservation in the future.

The good news is that there is nothing to prevent preservationists from adding another dimension to their impact studies, except perhaps a fear of trains and a reluctance to break from the windshield survey model.

To document what train riders would see if a new building, bridge, highway or communications tower were to be built adjacent to a rail corridor, surveyors need to get out of their cars and onto the tracks.

An expanded version is cross-posted at the Historian for Hire blog.

Let me assure you that our organization is committed to using public transportation and have utilized it very successfully at past championships in other metropolitan areas such as New York and Chicago. In 2009, nearly 20,000 spectators per day took advantage of our service via the Long Island Railroad to attend the championship. Due to the proximity of the train station (less than 1 mile from the golf course) it was very easy to feature this service as a primary option.

Unfortunately, as efficient as the Metro system is in the Washington D.C. area, the nearest station to Congressional is over twenty minutes from the golf course which truly limits the ability to run a similar mass transit operation. Initially, we did not see Metro as a viable option and were not going to offer any additional service involving Metro. There was no way to tell what the usage would be and almost impossible to plan for it logistically (i.e...number and timing of buses, space requirements at the Metro station, etc…) without some sort of reservation system in place. However, we felt very strongly that we wanted to utilize the Metro system as much as possible, so we enlisted a local third party transportation company, Transportation Management Services (TMS) to provide this service very much like a sports charter for a football game.

The USGA is subsidizing the cost of this service and did so in order to make it a reasonable option for all spectators versus the cost of taking other forms of hired transportation such as taxis or limos which are often heavily utilized options by our spectators. We also compared this system to charges for regular public bus options and felt that the $8 daily charge for unlimited roundtrip use was comparable to the price of normal bus ridership.

While you are correct that the USGA is not charging for parking in our spectator lots, I think everyone is certainly aware of the expense of driving their personal automobile based on the current cost per gallon for gasoline. Therefore, we believe that the Metro option for the majority of people in the DC area will still likely be the cheapest and most efficient way to attend the championship.

Mr. Jones is right to underscore that the USGA has effectively used mass transit to get spectators to and from the US Open in the past. Unfortunately, this point makes this year's decision all the more baffling. He is quick to point out that even with an $8/person "fare" for the Metro shuttle, USGA is partially subsidizing the shuttle service.

Yet Jones fails to acknowledge directly that USGA is subsidizing the entire cost of parking and the shuttle for drivers. What's more, the shuttle trip from the Gaitherburg parking lots is more than twice the distance as the trip from Metro to the Country Club, making it a significantly more expensive service to subsidize in its entirety.

As I commented in the previous post, the USGA has clearly employed flawed logic in these decisions. They assume that relatively few people will use the Metro service, and that this fact necessitates a reservation system in order to provide no more service than is necessary. This decision, in turn, makes it not only less enticing, but also more difficult to use the Metro option, thereby making USGA's prediction of low usage a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The thinking at USGA boils down to this: The reality is that people will drive, so we have to make it as easy and as cheap as possible for them, especially because gas prices are so high. It would be nice if some people took Metro, so we'll throw them a bone. But not a free bone like we give all the poor drivers paying so much for gas.

This is an amusing justification. Essentially, he says that because gas prices are so high, parking and shuttles should be free to make it easier and cheaper for people to drive.

He also completely fails to account for the Metro fare riders have to pay to even make it to the $8 shuttle at Grosvenor. The off-peak one-way fare from Metro Center is $2.60, the regular and peak of the peak for the Thursday and Friday rounds are over $4.00.

The assertion that $8 is a reasonable charge in comparison to bus fares in the region is equally laughable. The T2 bus runs from Friendship Heights Metro to Rockville Metro, stopping at Congressional Country Club. A round-trip fare on this bus (using SmarTrip) is $3. Even if spectators are making multiple round trips, which is highly unlikely, two trips to and from the course would still be only $6.

Jones implies that they chose to make Metro a secondary option this year because the closest stations weren't as convenient to access as LIRR in Bethpage or Metra at Olympia Fields. Yet USGA chooses not to run shuttles from the closest Metro station, while offering free shuttles that go twice as far to free parking lots farther from the city center.

This is the epitome of the kind of mentality that is keeping most Americans, not just Washingtonians, from enjoying easier access to more efficient and affordable alternatives to driving. If you are planning to attend the US Open and feel that the USGA should offer you the same benefits to ride the Metro as they do to drive your car, email Reg Jones and tell him.