Metro’s signature indirect lighting scheme is getting a little brighter. Over at GGW, Matt Johnson notes upgrades to the Judiciary Sq Station mezzanine as a means of better illuminating the darker areas of one of the darker stations.
Judiciary Sq Station
I haven’t yet checked out the new mezzanine lighting in person, but Matt’s photo raises a couple of questions and concerns about Metro’s design legacy. One is a concern that Metro’s new lighting is too cold – meaning, the color temperature of the resulting environment is cold, while Metro’s original design with the concrete, brass, tile, and carpet was very warm.
Conversely, Metro’s most recent design changes seem to get colder and colder. It’s hard to judge these new lights by just a photo, but this isn’t the only case. In my post on Metro’s 7000 series designs (here and at GGW), Laurence Auerbach noted in the comments about Metro’s recent trends towards cooler lighting schemes:
I’ve ridden in the 7000 series design prototype, and it was a truly oppressive experience. A big problem is the color of the walls, partitions, and seat backs. In the old cars it is a warm beige-white that softens the fluorescent lighting. In the new cars the wall color is a cool grey-white that makes the fluorescent lighting even flatter and harsher than it normally is.
…
My favorite Metro car design is the 6000 series (the most recent), even though I prefer the original orange seat colors. The 6000 series has the best combination of efficient layout, comfortable style, quiet operation, and high quality technical/mechanical features. Metro should build on that success; it should only change the floor material to make it easier to maintain.
The change in visual experience from the original, orange color scheme is indeed striking:
The newer cars, with the white walls, are indeed much brighter. However, when compared to cars without the red carpet flooring, the color experience is much more harsh:
Wondering out loud – could Metro do hard flooring in a red-ish color that’s true to the original train design?
I’ve been meaning to say something on some more water + city issues raised by mammoth a short time ago, but I haven’t gotten around to it. Mammoth points us to another entrant in the design competition for Toronto’s Port Lands (following up on some of the discussion about McMillan Two). The project, called River+City+Life, aims to re-imagine urban wetlands rather than simply recreate a faux natural setting.
The design team faced a complex challenge: to renaturalize the mouth of the Don River while simultaneously reengineering the flood plain and creating a new thriving edge to the city’s downtown. Working at the confluence of urban core and derelict waterfront, Stoss pursued an adaptive strategy based on the primacy of the river and its dynamics. Of particular significance is the project’s explicit emphasis on building resilience, which was to be achieved by recalibrating the mouth of the river and its floodplain as a new estuary — not a restored estuary, but a landscape transformed through the creation of a new river channel and “river spits” — sculpted landforms capable of withstanding changing lake levels and seasonal flooding, while also providing new spaces for recreation and housing.
River+City+Life - Site Rendering
By proposing new, integrated ecologies for the site, organized principally by the river and its innate properties, the Stoss plan “puts the river first.” This constitutes a complete reversal of a century and a half of straightening, channelizing and deepening the river for the economic benefit of the citizens of Toronto. Centered on renewal rather than restoration, the design strategy comprises adaptation to occasional flooding, mediation between native and alien species, and a thick layering of habitats and edges, both cultural and natural, seasonal and permanent. In this way River+City+Life weaves a resilient urban tapestry of public amenity, urban edge and ecological performance, conceiving the city as a hybrid cultural–natural space and setting in motion long-term evolutionary processes in which new ecologies would be encouraged not suppressed.
River+City+Life - Hydrologic Elements
River+City+Life - Massing Study
This is the kind of potential meshing of green infrastructure, site, and urbanism we should demand from McMillan Two. Though this specific example raises some questions in my mind about public space, streetscapes, and other urban design elements – the overall approach of the city and its infrastructure as a kind of living machine is fascinating.
River+City+Life - Aerial
With this specific proposal, a few of those renderings and massing studies scare me from an urban design standpoint – with arcaded buildings suspended over streets and sidewalks – but it’s a tremendously interesting idea to play around with.
Speaking of water…
A book that I really ought to add I’ve added to the reading list is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. It’s the story of the American West and the battle for water resources.
DCist takes note of a great photo of the Mt. Vernon Square area from 1992, looking south towards the Portrait Gallery and what’s now the Verizon Center:
It’s amazing to realize how much the area has changed over the past 15-20 years. Looking back at the historical images available from Google Earth, you can piece together the evolution of the area over the years. Google Earth’s imagery isn’t universally available over time, so there are some rather big gaps between some aerial sets.
North is to the left in all the images.
1949:
Note the fine grain of the urban fabric, almost all of the buildings occupy narrow lots with zero setback from the property line – and there are virtually no vacant lots. You can see the beginnings of site clearance at the top if the image for the enormous Government Accountability Office building. That structure would be dedicated in 1951.
1988:
In 1988, things have changed a great deal. Obviously, lots of surface parking lots here. Though the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station opened in 1976 with the first operable segment of the Red line, the North-South connection along the Green-Yellow lines wasn’t yet open when this picture was taken. The Mount Vernon Sq, Shaw-Howard, and U St stations all opened in 1991, just prior to the taking of the opening photograph in this post.
1999:
In 1999, the (now) Verizon Center has been open for business for about a year and a half. Site preparation is well underway for the new convention center, but there are still some significant parcels in key downtown locations occupied with vacant lots or surface parking.
2004:
Gallery Place is taking shape, the new convention center is done, and other vacant lots fill in. Still some significant vacant lots to the North of Mass Ave.
2009:
The old convention center has been removed, just about all of the once vacant lots in old downtown (i.e. the right side of this image) are filled in, and stuff to the north of Mass Ave is beginning to see some real development. There’s a little error in image stitching between L and M streets, with the aerials to the right taking a slightly more oblique angle, showing the heights of the buildings in Old Downtown.
Watching this section of DC devolve and then redevelop shows some clear trends. The newer buildings are all much bigger than their predecessors – both in terms of heights and footprint. The fine-grained urban fabric of the 1949 image is largely gone from the downtown portions of the images, aside from a few stretches where the original facades have been retained behind newer developments or a few blocks in Chinatown, where the finer grained structures remain.
The interesting thing to note is how much of Downtown DC turned first to surface parking before redeveloping back into urban forms. This intermediate, destructive step prevents preserving that kind of fine grained urbanism. Nevertheless, the redevelopment of the area is a rousing success, showing the versatility of the traditional city grid – particularly when reinforced with urban rail transit.
Multiple sources (GGW, BDC, DCist, PoP) noted the shipping of DC’s first streetcars from the Czech Republic to DC.
A common theme amongst the streetcar commentariat – Hey! That thing looks like the Circulator!
No doubt. Obviously, this spurred JD Hammond’s post. One commenter on one of those sites (I can’t keep track) noted that the stripped down base paint job for the livery, missing the graphics and text, looks awfully similar to a Jesus fish.
Commute flows matter
Matt Johnson (at GGW and Track Twenty-Nine) has a fascinating graphic looking at Metro’s commute flows, also determing which segments of the system are the busiest during the AM rush hour.
Very interesting to look at. Well done. Also, an excellent case for more investment in the core. Discussions in GGW’s comments thread hints at the impacts of the Silver Line on current Orange Line crowds – and the inescapable conclusion is that more core capacity will be needed – sooner rather than later.
All in the game, yo.
Apropos of nothing in particular, this video of The Wire‘s 100 greatest quotes is fantastic. Those with virgin eyes/ears or those that haven’t seen all 5 seasons (there are spoilers) might not want to watch.
Lester Freamon’s last quote is the one that hits home for me when thinking about cities and the series – “all the pieces matter.”
Back in my hometown, yesterday marked the first day of revenue service for the Northstar commuter rail line between Big Lake and downtown Minneapolis. This is Minneapolis’ first heavy rail commuter line, which will look for a quick expansion to the originally planned terminus of St. Cloud, MN.
The $320 million would have been better spent on promoting transit that can be used round-the-clock by people who have a choice not to use cars — something that’s made virtually impossible by the design of Northstar’s schedule and stations. With severalother peak-period-only commuter lines under consideration, however, Metro Transit will likely spend more on projects such as this before it decides to pull back.
One note – that capital cost number also includes the money to extend the Hiawatha Light Rail line from the previous downtown terminus at the Warehouse District to the new terminus at the new Target Field. When all is said and done, that will be a great transit hub for the city, and considering that the project’s cost includes this LRT extension, the numbers look more favorable.
Service can always be increased at later dates. Given the line’s terminus at the Minnesota Twins’ new stadium, I’m sure we’ll see ballgame service in the relatively near future. Commenters also note that Minneapolis has a much stronger downtown employment core than other cities with new, struggling commuter lines.
MinnPost‘s excellent article (as per usual) from Steve Berg also notes the history of rail in the area:
“As far as I can tell, the Twin Cities probably had the largest commuter rail network in the U.S. to totally disappear,” said Aaron Isaacs, Minnesota’s foremost railroad historian. During the peak of local railroading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as many as 15 commuter lines spread outward from the two downtowns, most of them from St. Paul’s Union Depot or Minneapolis’ Great Northern and Milwaukee Road stations. By the mid 1880s, three competing railroads offered trains over three different routes every hour between the two downtowns, Isaacs said, 74 trains in all.
Commuter trains also ran on a dozen suburban routes:
• From downtown St. Paul to White Bear Lake, Lake Elmo, Stillwater, St. Paul Park, South St. Paul, Inver Grove, North St. Paul, St. Anthony Park, New Brighton, Inver Grove and Taylors Falls.
• From downtown Minneapolis to Mendota, Wayzata, Hutchinson, St. Louis Park, Hopkins, Excelsior, Edina, Savage, Lakeville and Northfield.
At one point, four companies competed for passengers between both downtowns and Lake Minnetonka. Special trains to the State Fair and Fourth of July celebrations were also offered.
By the 1890s, electrified interurban streetcars began displacing the steam-powered commuter trains. Still the trains lasted through World War I and into the late 1920s before the Great Depression spelled their demise. A few stragglers lingered into the 1940s, Isaacs said, notably the gas-electric powered Dan Patch trains between Minneapolis and Northfield and the Luce Line trains between Minneapolis, Wayzata and Hutchinson. But by 1948, commuter trains were all gone.
Welcome back to the fold, Minneapolis. With all that old right of way sitting around, there should be more commuter lines in your future.
Denver
The crown jewel of Denver’s ambitious FasTracks project will be a revitalized and repurposed Union Station.
Denver Union Station - Photo by Author
Recently, they’ve released the 60% design for the transit hub and redevelopment project. A PDF of the presentation is available here. The project will link LRT platforms and Commuter Rail platforms via a 2 block long underground tunnel that will also serve as the regional bus concourse.
General Development Plan
Transit Infrastructure
Transit Architecture
It’s a cool document, well worth a look to see what a city with a developing transit system (not just line-by-line on a piecemeal basis) is thinking of for a hub.
Ah, those nasty cruel “transportation planners”! Sorry, but the answer to “why” is not “the planners decided …” unless your main goal as a journalist is to instill feelings of ignorant helplessness in your readers. Planners and political leaders made these decisions for a reason, and that reason is the real answer to the question.
Us planners can never seem to do anything right in the minds of some, however, and Jarret put out another post talking about the nexus of planning ideals and political realities:
In the end, I completely understand the frustrations surrounding this project, and agree that it probably will not really begin to show results until it’s flows through downtown as part of the Regional Connector plan. It may be that the political pressure to put some kind of rail transit into East Los Angeles led to a project that will turn out to be premature and inadequate. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rapid transit subway extension proposed into this same area, perhaps under Chavez, in the next few decades.
Still, understanding how difficult rail transit development is in Los Angeles, I do think MTA and their partners in city and county government deserve a few days of good feeling for having gotten something done.
Nothing’s ever easy. It’s worth remembering that. The warts of the two newly opened projects show that here. Even Denver’s Union Station has had to scale things back, with FasTracks facing some financial problems and the Station’s plans scrapping underground Light Rail and Commuter Rail platforms in favor of cheaper alignments.
Following up on the current Republican assertion that what is urban cannot also be local, there’s been a lot more discussion today concerning cities and their political leanings.
The Overhead Wire asserts that building cities “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.” There’s certainly something to be said for that – as adding density is probably one of the most obvious ways to embrace the free market. Likewise is the recognition that all transportation modes are subsidized, and rail transit is the most effective means of transport in urban areas. There are plenty of things within the urban condition for conservatives to like:
Conversely, Yonah Freemark takes a look at the results from the most recent Presidential race, showing that the voting patterns for people living in more dense areas just don’t show much bi-partisanship:
The contrast is even more remarkable in the counties on the limits of typical density; those that are most urban went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama, while those that are the most rural went to Mr. McCain with a large majority.
2008 Presidential Election Results in Extreme Low and High Density Counties
Density
Total Votes
# of Counties
Obama Share
McCain Share
0-14 ppl/sq mi
2.5 million
667
38 %
60 %
10,002-57,173 ppl/sq mi
3.7 million
8
81 %
18 %
Since we’re discussing election results, I’ll use this opportunity to show off some of the cool cartograms from Mark Newman at the University of Michigan. Yonah broke down the results by county and by density. County by county results look like this:
2008 Presidential election results by county
And, when you look at the same data in a cartogram that scales county size in proportion to population, graphically displaying the density of the county:
2008 Presidential election results by county - scaled by county population
So, there’s obvious truth to Yonah’s point, as well – America’s big cities are quite blue.
The larger point, however, is that national partisan divides and cleavages don’t apply all that well to local issues. There are numerous politicians that are certainly progressive on national social and economic issues, but wouldn’t be on the forefront of progressive urban policy. Likewise, business-oriented leaders like Mike Bloomberg (regardless of his party affiliation) are certainly progressive at the local level. Guys like Bill Lind (from the video above) and the late Paul Weyrich emphasize the points.
There’s certainly a conservative niche in urban areas that could be carved out, but it’s not clear that Republicans want to do the carving. When Jim Oberstar’s draft transportation bill is labeled as an “exercise in lifestyle modification,” or that transit opponents argue that advocates want to force everyone into Soviet housing, it’s clear that they don’t care to take that step.
David Brooks gives urbanists a velvet-gloved insult:
His populism is not angry. … But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.
This rhetorical device is meant to imply, without quite saying, that “local” is the opposite of “urban”, just as “small” is the opposite of “big.”
In the grand scheme of politics, this isn’t all that surprising. It’s also frustratingly inaccurate, as any metropolitan dweller can attest – things are just as local in the big city as they are out in the wide open spaces. For all the positive words coming out of the Obama administration concerning not just cities, but metropolitan areas and their central role in our culture, our economy, and so on.
The United States has to stand or fall by being the preeminent nation of science, modernity, technology, and higher education. Some of these needful phenomena, for historical reasons, will just happen to concentrate in big cities and in secular institutions and even—yes—on the dreaded East Coast.
…
The research universities and major business enterprises that our the foundation of our way of life are, overwhelmingly, in major metropolitan areas. Not because there’s anything wrong with the people of rural Alaska, but because that’s how the world works. The idea of making dislike of metropolitan American (or perhaps all of metropolitan America except Houston) the basis of your approach to governing is pretty nuts.
Walker notes that the Republicans have nothing to gain from the cities, so why bother even trying?
But the Republicans have lost the cities. (As New York Governor George Pataki supposedly said to George Bush as they approached the crowds gathered to hear Bush speak on the site of 9/11: “See all those people? None of them voted for you!”) So they may well feel that they can use “urban” in a negative sense without much cost.
Perhaps the best way to counter this is to do so with the truth. This isn’t about urban vs. rural, it’s about (as Matt notes) metropolitan vs. rural. Metropolitan areas need to have a strong core, but don’t need to be burdened with the connotations of the word ‘urban.’ It’s also a more accurate description and approach to how our cities and regions actually operate. They’re not constrained by the artificial jurisdictional boundaries our politicians have to deal with.
Finally, I take some solace knowing that turning your back on cities and metro areas is tantamount to a political death sentence. Hitchens notes:
But the problem with populism is not just that it stirs prejudice against the “big cities” where most Americans actually live, or against the academies where many of them would like to send their children. No, the difficulty with populism is that it exploits the very “people” to whose grievances it claims to give vent.
Nate Silver also noted the demographic danger in casting off the suburbs and cities as an electoral strategy in this post-mortem of the 2008 election results:
In 1992, when Bill Clinton won his first term, 35 percent of American voters were identified as rural according to that year’s national exit polls, and 24 percent as urban. This year, however, the percentage of rural voters has dropped to 21 percent, while that of urban voters has climbed to 30. The suburbs, meanwhile, have been booming: 41 percent of America’s electorate in 1992, they represent 49 percent now (see chart).In other words, if you are going to pit big cities against small towns, it is probably a mistake to end up on the rural side of the ledger… With the votes that he banked in the cities, Obama did not really need to prevail in the suburbs. But he did anyway — as every winning presidential candidate has done since 1980 — bettering McCain by 2 points there. Indeed, among the many mistakes the McCain campaign made was targeting the rural vote rather than the suburban one, as Bush and Karl Rove did in 2000 and 2004.
Indeed. Cities and their metropolitan areas are more intertwined than ever, and politicians should denigrate them at their own peril. They are the places where the vast majority of Americans have their local connections – even the urban ones.
Wednesday of this week marked the 34th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, lost with all hands in a Lake Superior storm in 1975. The iron ore freighter has always held a special place in my thoughts (and those of many Midwesterners) due to many summers spent along the shores of the Great Lakes, in Minnesota’s Iron Range, watching the ore boats travel underneath Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge – after grabbing lunch at Grandma’s.
Watching the big boats slide out of Duluth’s harbor, bound for the industrial ports of Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, or Toledo was quite a sight. The notion that one could sink simply boggles the mind.
Adding to the legend, this regional Titanic tale, was Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad – forever immortalizing the lives of the 29th who perished.
Between summer weeks up along Minnesota’s North Shore and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as two years of living in the heart of Michigan’s industrial core, you begin to gain a great appreciation of the full industrial process. From the iron ore strip mines in northern Minnesota, the ore travels by train to the Lake Superior ports – Duluth, Superior, Two Harbors, Taconite Harbor – where it’s loaded onto ore boats, who take it through the Soo, bound for the industrial cities of the Midwest. The boats would bring the raw materials to a foundry, where the taconite would be turned to steel.
Seeing the process, even if only in bits and pieces, of raw materials harvested from the land, then turned into machinery for our use and consumption is a powerful story. So too is the decline of that process, whether through the closure of a steel mill or a taconite mine – and the costs of the process, ranging from environmental damage to the human losses of a sunken ship.
It’s interesting to contrast the different legs of the journey – from the mines and the woods to Detroit (no stranger to hard times). Gordon Lightfoot’s song specifically mentions a spiritual center of the journey from raw material to finished product – the Mariners’ Church (referred to with poetic license as the “Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral”).
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral
The church bell chimed, ’til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Mariners' Church - Wikipedia
The structure itself is nestled between signs of Detroit’s promise and decay – the historic structure now stripped of any surrounding urban fabric, sitting in the shadow of the RenCen and wrapped up by the entrance ramps to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.
I don’t really have anything in particular to say – just sharing a bit of my connection to the ship, the song, the church, the lakes, and the city – woven together by industry, transport, and culture. Having spent time on those lakes and in those cities, it’s always a fascinating story for me.
It seemed fitting to talk of a November storm as we’re stuck in our current deluge.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee.”
“Superior,” they said, “never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early.”
Matt Johnson, over at Track Twenty-Nine, noted that with MARTA’s official conversion over to a color-based naming system for their rail system, more than half of America’s rapid transit systems (including Metro) use a color-based system.
Starting in 1965, Boston started referring to lines by color. When Washington’s system opened in 1976, line colors indicated the route of trains. Cleveland renamed their lines to colors two years later, in 1978. When Los Angeles’ rail system started opening, lines were referred to by colors – the first heavy rail line opened in 1993, the same year that Chicago started calling trains Red, Orange, and so on. Baltimore renamed transit lines after colors around 2002. Finally, just last month, Atlanta added their Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue lines to America’s transit repertoire.
There are still 6 systems that don’t use colors to identify lines by names. However, four do differentiate lines using different colors on a map: BART, NYC Subway, PATH, and SEPTA. Miami and PATCO each only operate one heavy rail line, so color is not an issue.
In any transit system, the diagrammatic understanding of the system (often represented by the system map) is a vital element in the user’s understanding of where they are. Colors offer an intuitive means of understanding this – as evidenced by the numerous systems using color identifiers for their maps, even if not in their overall nomenclature systems.
There are a couple of shortcomings in using color as the main identifier of lines and services, however. One is the limited potential for expansion – Chicago has the most lines of any system using colors (8 – Red, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Green, Pink, Brown, Purple), and there aren’t a whole lot of extra options for system expansion. Silver? Gold? But would that be too similar to Yellow?
That leads to the other limitation – differentiation between the lines depends solely on color, and when those differences are not evident enough (i.e. differentiating Yellow from Gold, or for a person who is colorblind), you need some sort of alternative. Metro accomplishes this with the use of words on the trains – spelling out the color on the front LEDs, as well as the destination on the side LEDs and a two-letter color abbreviation on the PIDs.
It’s also worth noting that many airports used to have color-based naming systems, but have switched to letters and numbers for their terminals and concourses. Growing up in Minneapolis, MSP Airport used to name their concourses with colors, but switched to letters. The letter/number provides an easier identifier to the colorblind and those that are unfamiliar with English.
Eventually, converting to a system where color is a secondary identifier, especially as DC adds more lines, will be necessary. Particularly if DC adds track connections that enable more services, equating a line of track with the service that it operates on is limiting. Eventually, DC should consider changing to a naming system similar to that of Paris – where the Metro lines are all assigned numbers and colors, while the regional RER lines all have letters and colors, with numbered suffixes for branch lines in the suburbs. Jarrett Walker delves into the details of the Parisian system:
Actually, there are FOUR tiers of information here in a clever hierarchy, all designed to ensure that you don’t have to learn more information that you need to do what you’re going to do:
A Métro route number signifies a simple, frequent line that doesn’t require you to learn much more, apart from riding it in the correct direction.
An RER route letter such as Line A identifies the common RER segment across the core of Paris and invites you to use it exactly as if it were any other metro line, without caring about its branches.
Odd vs. even numbered branch numbers on the RER indicate different directions on the common segment. On Line A, for example, odd-numbered branches are all in the west, even numbered ones in the east, so as you get to know the service, the branch number tells you which way the train is going on the central segment. Even if you’re not riding onto a specific branch, this can be useful, as redundant ‘confirming’ information, to assure you that you’re riding in the correct direction. This is important as it’s very easy to lose your sense of north (if you ever had one) in the warrens of underground stations.
Finally, the individual branch numbers are needed ONLY if you’re headed for a specific suburb beyond the branch point, such as Marne-la-Vallée.
The principle is that this is a progression from simple to complex. The point of this hierarchy is not to lead customers all the way through, but exactly the opposite: to enable them to “get off,” ignore the remaining layers, as soon as they have the information they need.
Eventually, as DC aims to better integrate the commuter rail systems and further expands Metro, integrating brands and fare structures with Metro, a re-organization of the entire naming system might be in order. With Silver and Purple lines on the way, there aren’t a lot of other options left. When David at GGW looked at turning DC’s commuter rail lines into a sort of express Metro system, his naming system ran head up against the limitations (lime? teal?) of the color-based systems.
Hopefully, we’ll eventually have to deal with this issue. It’ll mean that we’ve expanded and integrated our systems beyond what we have today. More immediately, DC’s streetcar system presents some nomenclature challenges as well – and that will be a nice problem to have.
The end result, at least theoretically: fewer cars on the road, more efficient use of each automobile, and fewer parking spaces needed. It has proven a cheaper alternative to taxis and car rentals and has been quickly adopted.
The problem, of course, is that many of the people using car sharing programs once weren’t using any cars at all, meaning that the easy access to vehicle actually means an increase in overall car use. Zipcar’s campaign earlier this year to convince New York City pedestrians that they could be getting around more quickly in an automobile suggests that the service’s best market is among people who are currently walking, biking, or taking transit to get to work. Should cities be encouraging car-share programs if the end result is to convince people who don’t use automobiles today to use them in the future?
In cities where a carless lifestyle is somewhat more marginal (like Washington) the existence of a zipcar service is a huge comfort to those thinking about giving up their automobiles.
And I don’t think there is anything wrong with acknowledging the fact that for some things, the availability of an automobile is hugely advantageous. Carrying around big or bulky loads on foot is hard and unpleasant. The ability to use a car for, say, a trip to the hardware store or to the market in preparation for a big dinner party significantly increases the convenience of city life.
There’s nothing wrong with cars, per se. My personal ZipCar use in DC is quite limited for personal trips. I don’t really use it much as a replacement for walking and transit errand trips – my uses are for trips that require a car, regardless. Another case where ZipCar is quite useful has been for business trips. Previously, working in downtown DC but with frequent client meetings in non-transit accessible areas of Northern VA, ZipCar enabled me to take transit into the office, grab a car within a very short walk of the office, use the car for a meeting, and return to the office without worrying about parking.
One instance actually involved using ZipCar for a longer, overnight business trip up to suburban New York. Given the ability to pick the car up right at the office and drop it off the same, as well as the inclusion of gas, the rates for the trip were similar to renting a car from a ‘regular’ outlet.
To me, there’s no doubt that car sharing presents a net positive. I predicate that notion on the idea that car trips are not inherently bad.
Hill East, baby.
DCmud offers thoughts on living in Hill East, my ‘hood. It’s a thorough description of the area, including the neighboring retail options in Eastern Market. Unfortunately, the comments on the piece devolve into some back and forth, denigrating condo-living gentrifiers and other newcomers to the area. It’s unfortunate that residents don’t see any role for different housing options in their neighborhood, as these new options would certainly make the area stronger. It’s also not the first time these sentiments have arisen in the area.
Transit and Land Use
There have also been some good posts on the Corridor Cities Transitway – The transport politic offers an explanation of the possible alternatives, as does BeyondDC. The ‘better’ routes (at least in terms of serving potential users) are undoubtedly more snake-like, due to the locations of the various transit nodes.
Jarrett Walker notes how the land use in the area puts transit in a poor position – either option isn’t exactly how you’d like to draw it up if given a blank slate.
As a result, Maryland now has to choose between a direct yellow line that misses key destinations and a blue line that serves them but is maddeningly circuitous, especially compared to the freeway that this line would compete with.
There is no clearer example of this basic principle: Public transit’s usefulness is determined by land use planning more than by transit planning. Once you’ve arranged your major land use nodes to form a squiggle, you’ve pretty much prohibited efficient public transit.
Indeed. Once the basic patterns are put in place, there’s only so much that fixed guideway transit can do. There’s not a universal solution for simply adding rail lines to make everything better.
