Monthly Archives: October 2009

Transit Expansion

Streetcars

We’ve got more details on DC’s streetcar plans. BeyondDC has more details on the plans (at BDC/GGW), and Yonah Freemark chimes in with comments at the transport politic.

And, just for fun, this is a great reason to link to the old map of DC’s streetcar system circa 1958 (matching many of DDOT’s historical photos).

Metro Extensions

In other transit expansion news, Prince George’s County is working on re-doing their transportation plan. One of the ideas thrown out so far is an extension of the Green Line from Greenbelt through to Laurel:

The county also wants the Green Line extended from Greenbelt to Fort Meade by way of Beltsville and Laurel. The stops could include Konterra, a massive mixed-use development underway at the eastern end of the ICC.

GGW’s summary on these developments also links back to previous posts on the plan’s highway and transit components. Dave Murphy, however, takes the Green Line extension idea and improves upon it – by diverting the Metro extension away from the CSX/MARC Camden line tracks though Fort Meade (which is already a huge employment center and set to grow even more with various BRAC relocations) before terminating at Odenton – also connecting with the MARC Penn Line.

The idea of serving Fort Meade is good – it needs more transit service to meet growing demand. Likewise, the idea of connecting both MARC lines together through Fort Meade is also good. The problem, however, is that Metro isn’t the best tool to accomplish this task. It’s the most expensive mode of transit we have in this region – and should be reserved for the highest capacity, highest potential routes.

The desire to extend Metro rather than invest in other modes is understandable – everyone wants the best. However, in this case, a massive upgrade of MARC service would be more appropriate and cost-effective – expanding service days and hours, increasing frequencies, offering through-routing to Virginia, and so on. This site has the advantage of MARC lines on both sides. If service levels could be increased to match those on some of the Metro-North commuter lines (10-20 minute peak hour headways, late night service, weekend service), extending the Metro wouldn’t be needed. In the comments of the GGW article, BeyondDC provides an alternate proposal – increasing MARC service while building a cross-“town” light rail line to provide service through Fort Meade.

These kinds of ideas, whether they’re fantasy maps or some other proposal, always generate a lot of interest. Matt Yglesias offers his thoughts:

Here I think the key thing to keep in mind is that when you’re talking about new heavy rail construction, the potential benefits can be quite large but you have to decide if you actually want to seize them.

If you added a Metro station there, would the local area permit the surrounding quarter mile or so developed as a fairly dense walkable community? Or would people hear about proposals to build on the green space and up-zone the built-up area and decide that would lead to too much traffic? Maybe instead they’ll want to just turn the undeveloped patch into another parking lot. That’d be no good. And the existing land use patterns around Maryland’s Green Line stations don’t inspire a ton of confidence.

Of course, it’s much easier to create an urban environment in an urban setting – plus, you can create the same kind of TOD/urbanism with a heavily accentuated MARC service.

Ryan Avent also chimes in at The Bellows:

To expand on this a little bit, Metro is the region’s most expensive transit option, but it’s also the one with the greatest potential to drive development. Generally speaking, we want to plan our transit systems so that we’re maximizing the benefits we get for the cost of the investment. If Maryland isn’t prepared to zone for significant development around Metro stations, it would be very silly to make the large investment in Metro. Better to develop a commuter rail line or light rail line or both (depending on anticipated development and commuting patterns).

Metro can indeed help shape development, but it’s important to realize that Laurel is still Laurel – no matter how you slice it, it’s a long ways away from downtown DC.

The Silver Line, to take another example, is an expensive investment. It would probably have been much smarter to simply connect Fairfax County destinations (and Dulles) with Arlington and the District via commuter rail but for the fact that the new Metro line is part of a major effort to increase density at Tysons corner.

The key difference between a Green line extension and the Silver line, however, is that the Green line already parallels an existing transitway with huge potential to upgrade service on the cheap (relatively speaking). The Silver line doesn’t have a similar option – Commuter Rail beyond Tysons Corner would indeed be a great option in the abstract, but the conditions don’t exist to make it work.

Avent’s conclusion is spot on, however. Extending Metro further out along the Green line is a mis-match between location and mode, and these kinds of mis-matches will impose costs on the core. Instead of a Parisian system where the Metro and RER compliment each other, Metro’s hybrid nature pushes these two uses into the same system.

These costs are increasingly borne by users in the core of the system, where growth in the number of trains and passengers have led to crowded conditions on platforms and back-ups during peak periods. To some extent, this can be addressed by increasing peak fares, but given the obvious value of Metro, the growth in the system’s spokes, and the fact that the District is better suited than almost anywhere else in the metro area to handle increased density, it seems clear that new core capacity is needed (as well as a new river crossing over or under the Potomac).

Metro doesn’t stop running when it enters the District. If Virginia and Maryland want to continue to build Metro extensions, they ought to offer their full support to an effort to add capacity in the core.

What’s more – investments in the core (say, in the form of a new, separated Blue line) will bear fruit for lines outside the core as well. The new Blue line would eliminate the capacity constraints of the interlined portion of track through DC – thus increasing the potential capacity on existing Orange and Blue line track in MD and VA.

Transit Series

Image from wallyg on Flickr

No, it’s not a Subway Series. But really, I didn’t need any motivation to root against the Yankees. Now, the Phillies are just begging me to hop on the bandwagon:

I have no idea what it costs to charter an Amtrak train, but I love the idea. As I excitedly noted yesterday the World Series is coming and it’s a pure Northeast thriller with the Philadelphia Phillies taking on the New York Yankees. Apparently the Phillies chartered a train from Philadelphia to get to New York.

Evoking a bygone era when rail travel was the main mode of transportation in baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies rolled into Penn Station on a chartered train about 6:03 p.m. Monday, but they were not looking to the past century for inspiration.

The Phillies previously took the train to the World Series in 1950, when they were swept by the Yankees. But that dreary omen did not deter the defending champion Phillies from using the same mode of transportation that Philadelphia’s Whiz Kids took 59 years ago.

The reason for the train was neither historical novelty nor an exercise in team building in advance of the World Series, which begins Wednesday at Yankee Stadium. It was pure convenience. The distance between Philadelphia and New York is too short for a flight, and a fleet of buses traveling up the New Jersey Turnpike could spend as much time on the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel as the entire train ride.

The only shame about this trip is that the Phillies got the pleasure of starting in the glory of Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station but had to end their trip in the travesty that is New York’s New Penn Station

The NYT‘s baseball blog also looks into traveling between the two stadiums using nothing but local transit serivces:

But as seasoned frugal travelers between Philadelphia and New York know, you would not have to take Amtrak at all to get from stadium to stadium. A fan leaving Citizens Bank Park around 2 p.m. Monday could have gotten to Yankee Stadium for less than $25 in less than four hours.1. Take the Broad Street subway from Pattison Station to City Hall, and transfer to the Market Frankford Line and exit at 30th Street Station: $2, 28 minutes.

2. Take the 2:37 p.m. R7 Septa train from 30th Street Station to Trenton, arriving at 3:25: $8, 48 minutes.

3. Take the 3:40 New Jersey Transit train from Trenton to New York Penn Station, arriving at 5:08 p.m.: $12.50, 1 hour 28 minutes.

4. Exit Penn Station, walk to Sixth Avenue, take the D train to Yankee Stadium: $2.25, 37 minutes.

Total cost: $24.75.

Total travel time: 3 hours 42 minutes.

Nice.

ACS – Answering my own question

(hat tip to Dr. Gridlock)

In earlier posts, I wondered what DC’s regional transit data looks like – and with the release of the 2006-2008 three-year estimates from the American Community Survey, we have some answers.

Data is available for the Washington, DC urbanized area. That area looks like this:

So, that includes a lot of stuff, and a whole lot of suburbia.

The transportation data is as follows:

COMMUTING TO WORK
Workers 16 years and over	2,221,629	+/-8,331	2,221,629	(X)
Car, truck, or van — drove alone	1,415,834	+/-9,036	63.7%	+/-0.3
Car, truck, or van — carpooled	237,724	+/-5,008	10.7%	+/-0.2
Public transportation (excluding taxicab)	363,334	+/-5,319	16.4%	+/-0.2
Walked	77,067	+/-2,795	3.5%	+/-0.1
Other means	33,023	+/-1,979	1.5%	+/-0.1
Worked at home	94,647	+/-3,018	4.3%	+/-0.1

So, 63.7% of the region’s workers commute in a single-occupant vehicle, with 16.4% using transit. For the same three year window (2006-2008), DC’s stats look like this:

COMMUTING TO WORK
Workers 16 years and over	293,532	+/-3,568	293,532	(X)
Car, truck, or van — drove alone	108,373	+/-3,363	36.9%	+/-1.0
Car, truck, or van — carpooled	19,121	+/-1,591	6.5%	+/-0.5
Public transportation (excluding taxicab)	108,687	+/-2,469	37.0%	+/-0.8
Walked	34,455	+/-2,033	11.7%	+/-0.7
Other means	9,421	+/-1,023	3.2%	+/-0.3
Worked at home	13,475	+/-1,451	4.6%	+/-0.5

36.9% drove alone, while 37.0% used transit.

Note that this is the rolling three-year sample, so the data is slightly different from the 2008 ACS data released earlier.

This Week – Ice Hockey!

DDOT’s streetcar website has a lot of great resources. All the things you’d expect, like open house dates, construction updates, their new plans and other documents, are there and easily accessed.

They also have a gallery of some great old photos of DC’s original streetcar network.

This image (circa 1943), from the old underground turnaround terminus for the southern end of the 14th line features a nice vintage advertisement for upcoming hockey games at Uline Arena. Looks like Hershey and Cleveland will be in town to play the Washington Lions. Hershey, of course, is now the AHL farm team for the Caps.

More photos:

Georgetown

Pennsylvania Ave, looking at the Treasury Building, circa 1925.

DDOT’s got a whole slew of historical photos in their online archive, well worth checking out.

Looking north up Connecticut Ave towards Dupont Circle, 1958. Note the two underpass entrances – the nearest for streetcars and the other (currently extant) for cars.

Another from 1958, this is what’s now Freedom Plaza.

Feedback loops

The Tsarchitect succinctly summarizes the various discussions on McMillan Two. As noted in my thoughts on the plan, this kind of dialogue is vital to make this a better plan.

JD Hammond offers a counter-proposal, drawing on Asian cities and how they interface with their rivers.
Dave Murphy notes the opportunity/challenge this plan presents for the BRAC process, as it involves re-use of a lot of land controlled by the Military.
GGW summarizes DDOT’s newest iteration of the streetcar plan, making the comment rounds now.

With regard to the McMillan Two focus area of the Anacostia, the streetcar plan raises a couple of interesting points. The plan features a Minnesota Avenue line, which would parallel a great deal of the river while still running through established neighborhoods. As mentioned in the GGW summary, Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells suggested moving the N-S link through Capitol Hill further to the east, in order to better serve the planned Reservation 13/DC General development – a path that would also serve more of the proposed plan area, through both Reservation 13 and the RFK Stadium site. Such a line shouldn’t replace the 8th Street line, but it would be a nice compliment to it.

An interesting connection that’s not on the map is through Buzzard Point. The plan features two lines terminating on Buzzard Point, near Fort McNair. The obvious and interesting connection would be to extend tracks south across a new South Capitol Street Bridge, which would give you cross-river connectivity with multiple modes and via multiple routes.

Such a density of network connections is a great starting point to enable the kind of development needed to fill this plan with buildings. It’s not quite DC’s version of the DLR, but it’s a start.

Visualizing DC’s commute

Matt Yglesias cites a great infographic from Wikipedia on national commuting mode splits. The data, from the American Community Survey, again is only for work commutes for those residing within the central jurisdiction listed. This is a nice visual representation to see how DC stacks up nation-wide.

Since DC’s geographic area is small, both the population and corresponding bubble for the number of workers will be smaller than other cities. Hence, Boston (population: 609k) and San Francisco (pop: 808k) have similarly sized bubbles to DC. I’d love to see this same graph for metropolitan areas rather than just core cities, since metropolitan areas are a far more realistic representation of the functional unit of cities.

Nevertheless, given the jurisdictional limitations of the data, it’s interesting to see all the cities represented. Looking at the data in list form, it’s clear that DC is second to New York in a number of areas, but this graph shows how big that gap is – as well as three tiers of cities. New York is in a class of their own, followed by a group of transit-oriented cities (DC, Boston, Philly, SF, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle), and then everyone else.

End of the race

Team Ontario/BC’s house.

Ruthless efficiency:

The Solar Decathlon is over, and zee Germans have won. DCist has photos here, and DC Metrocentric has a few observations:

This year, it was evident that most of the houses were designed with mainstream marketability in mind. Most of the houses were designed around a contemporary aesthetic and open plan arrangement, while others like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Louisiana Lafayette referred to localized American Vernacular styles. The forms of the houses were primarily long thin rectangles, some had courts, while others had breezeways, but in total they were designed according to market standards for handicap accessibility and for mass production. This plan of public accessibility and marketability was definitely working. The grounds were extremely crowded and the lines to enter the winning houses wound down the main walk. Inside, the houses were obviously over maximum occupancy, and the crowds were really excited by what they saw. I overheard endless questions about fixtures and furniture from the most unlikely guests.

Also, one thing I hadn’t noticed – following on discussions of green infrastructure and urban hydrology:

What was the most striking in the engineering field was not what the teams did, but what they weren’t allowed to do, which was re-use gray water (waste water from non-sanitary means) or rainwater within the dwelling. Many of the houses had been designed with systems to reuse water, but the DC plumbing code forbids the use of gray or rain water for any domestic purpose except landscaping. Apparently, in many jurisdictions across the country using any water besides well water or municipal water for domestic uses is prohibited. The students at many of the houses made it a point to tell the crowds about their water reduction features and the specific reason why they couldn’t use it and encouraged people to contact their representatives to change this ordinance.

Water reduction is certainly an admirable goal, but it’s also one of those features that’s going to matter much more in some geographies than others. All the more reason for codes (enacted at the local level) to take their local context into consideration.

The other thing Lepler notes above is the popularity of the Decathlon. I stopped by several times, each visit clogged by people waiting in long lines to stand in small, crowded houses. This level of engagement seemed both genuine and tangible – people could envision themselves living in these places, in spaces of this size, etc.

Elsewhere…

NIMBYs under the microscope:

Ryan Avent’s found scientific discussions of NIMBYism.

Available here. This is the abstract:

This paper suggests a cause of low density in urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrstructure, environmental externalities, and unpriced congestion. The problem analyzed here is that urban growth creates benefits for an entire urban area, but the costs of growth are borne by individual neighborhoods. An externality problem arises because existing residents perceive the costs associated with the new residents locating in their neighborhoods, but not the full benefits of new entrants which accrue to the city as a whole. The result is that existing residents have an incentive to block new residents to their neighborhoods, resulting in cities that are less dense than is optimal, or too sprawling. The paper models several different types of urban growth, and examines the optimal and local choice outcomes under each type. In the first model, population growth is endogenous and the physical limits of the city are fixed. The second model examines the case in which population growth in the region is given, but the city boundary is allowed to vary. We show that in both cases the city will tend to be larger and less dense than is optimal. In each, we examine the sensitivity of the model to the number of neighborhoods and to the size of infrastructure and transportation costs. Finally, we examine optimal subsidies and see how they compare to current policies such as impact fees on new development.

Bold is mine.

Along those same lines…

Mammoth links to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Thomas Sugrue. Sugrue notes the problems of the ownership society and defining the American Dream in terms of homeownership – noting that renting is a far more prudent decision in many cases.

Yet the story of how the dream became a reality is not one of independence, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurial pluck. It’s not the story of the inexorable march of the free market. It’s a different kind of American story, of government, financial regulation, and taxation.

We are a nation of homeowners and home-speculators because of Uncle Sam.

I’ve had the pleasure of listening to Sugure speak on many items (including the state of Detroit), and this article doesn’t disappoint. Mammoth notes the cultural aspects of sprawl, complimenting the economic analysis:

I tend to focus on technological (automobile), infrastructural (the interstate system, the regulatory dictatorship of the fire engine and its turning radii) and political (tax policies that favor home ownership, strict single-use zoning) reasons for the development of the form and ubiquity of the American suburb, but it is also very interesting to consider the suburb as the outgrowth of a cultural ideal, of a particular understanding of the relationship between person and home, or to consider the financial crisis as the (il)logical conclusion of that ideal, cultivated to absurd proportion and applied without regard to circumstance. That ideal is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is nearly invisible, seeming not a cultural construction but an essential and timeless rule, as deeply-embedded ideals often do.

As we re-examine the cultural underpinnings of the American Dream, we ought to re-examine the policies that biased that dream into suburban form and ask how we can give walkable, transit-oriented places a fair shake.

Eco-City Beautiful

Yes. When I was talking of green, urban infrastructure for McMillan 2, this is what I was talking about.

From the comments on my post here and at GGW, mammoth weighs in with some fantastic links.

I find the plan’s approach to the nature/city interface deeply troubling, as the plan claims to create a great deal of new land through the channelization of the river, but a quick comparison of the before-and-after plans shows that the vast majority of the “new land” is actually acquired by altering land-use patterns on existing land, which makes it hard not to think that the plan (a) expresses a deep-seated distaste for wetlands (exactly the sort of retrograde classicism which New Urbanists work hard to assure us their opponents are projecting onto them) and (b) is interested in channelizing the river for the sake of channelizing the river (because, that way, it looks more like cities built in the heyday of classicism look).

This is more or less in line with my initial critique of the plan. To capture it in a phrase, the central element of the plan, narrowing the Anacostia River, is a solution looking for a problem. Instead of teasing apart the elements that make Paris’ urban waterfront successful, it simply attempts to recreate it in a completely different ecosystem and context.

The affirmation of the my critique is nice, but the citation of a better way is what really caught my attention:

A comparison with Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Toronto Port Lands project, which also adds a great deal of density at the mouth of a river, but does so while “balancing.. the needs of the environment and the needs of the city” (in the words of Andrew Blum’s excellent essay) is not favorable. The Van Valkenburgh team arrived at urban form through intensive collaboration with ecologists and hydrologists; fans of the Anacostia plan seem to assume that ecology and hydrology can be safely ignored in the design of cities, thinking that so long as the overall density of the metropolitan area increases, the plan must have beneficial environmental impacts.

Toronto’s Port Lands is the exact kind of approach I’d like to see taken with the Anacostia. Given the different context of Toronto’s port compared to the Anacostia, the form would likely be quite different, but the process the design team took (a team that includes architects, planners, hydrologists, and a litany of other experts as well) is the key. Instead of a solution looking for a problem, you’ve got a team that’s analyzing the problem to develop the solution. From Andrew Blum’s essay, cited in mammoth’s quote:

This collaboration between landscape architects and ecologists is complex, and not without conflict. There is a basic difference in stance: landscape architects necessarily apply a design intention to a landscape, while ecologists observe and compare a landscape with an idealized theoretical framework of undisturbed nature. Landscape architects eager to respond to practical ecological concerns must reconcile these fundamentally different approaches to achieve substantial functional improvements — especially if those improvements are to operate both technically and metaphorically, for their own sake and as legible symbols of the Eco-City.

Toronto's skyline from the Port Lands

Speaking of Toronto’s Port Lands specifically, Blum notes the tensions between the urban and the natural:

This is not an ecological restoration. Instead, it uses ecology as the foundation of a specific design intent. “Our shapes are related to the hydrological cycles of the river,” MVVA’s Matthew Urbanski said to me, “but we didn’t just let nature take its course. The river didn’t design the scheme, it informed the scheme.” By example, Urbanski points to the north tier of the site, which has a “mock natural” shape, like the bends of a river. It’s not meant to mimic nature, but instead is designed to create an experiential unfolding, encouraging a re-engagement with the landscape at each bend in the path.

What’s most notable here is the connection between the formal and ecological. While Urbanski may insist that the scheme is not merely imitative of nature, nature here is not fully flexible. The river may not have designed the scheme, but the scheme definitely designed the river — with the goal of creating ecological benefits. By restoring the mouth of the Don, the project doesn’t merely minimize the environmental impact of the neighborhood, but improves the ecological health of the site. And, as Steve Apfelbaum points out, those impacts are verifiable through soil samples and hydrographs. Ecology, unlike experience and aesthetics, is quantifiable.

Equally striking is the resolution of the traditional conflict between city and nature. The Port Lands proposal does not put a hard line between the park and the neighborhood, but rather intertwines the two to create a place at once more natural and more urban. As MVVA writes, the vision is to “make the site more natural, with the potential for new site ecologies based on the size and complexity of the river mouth landscape, and more urban, with the development of a residential district and its integration into an ever-expanding network of infrastructure and use.”

In my mind, the specific form of this urbanism would be different with DC’s river, its ecology, and its design heritage than it is in Toronto – with a smaller river, the lake, and former industrial areas to be redeveloped.

Simply being urban is not green enough. Nir Buras suggested it was to a caller during his Kojo interview, and BeyondDC echoed that sentiment:

If we can focus a few hundred million square feet of development along the Anacostia by taking a few wetlands there, how many wetlands out in the suburbs will we save from development?

The rhetorical question is certainly an axiom of smart growth. Dense, urban growth need not hurt the ecology of the river, however. This doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition, as these concepts are not mutually exclusive. BeyondDC also noted that the vast majority of the McMillan 2 plan is basically offering a classical aesthetic to projects that will happen regardless – Poplar Point, Reservation 13, etc. Adding that density is more or less a given – we just need to add eco-functionality.

That kind of green infrastructure and process can truly improve the general concepts of McMillan 2. As McMillan’s original plans embraced both the beauty and the functionality of City Beautiful infrastructure, this plan can help pave the way for the new Eco-City Beautiful.

Express yourself

Express subway service is one of those burrs in the saddle for DC folks measuring themselves and their city against New York.

Over the past week, there’s been a lot of talk about express train service. First, in a GGW point/counterpoint, posters weighed the merits of the current Silver Line proposal versus a hypothetical line along the W&OD trail; Matt Johnson noted the technical hurdles of re-using the W&OD right of way; Dan Malouf/BDC proposed running express train service with the currently planned trackage; Steve Offut looked at using the Route 7 corridor for a new transit line, one that mirrors the general path of the W&OD trail.

All of these discussions about express train service begin from the starting assumption that express service is necessary. On Friday, Matt Johnson provided some much-needed historical perspective. The takeaway from his post is that express tracks are 1) quite rare in the grand scheme of things, and 2) are only found in much older legacy systems.

Given that, had planners pressed for a four-track system, Metro would either be half the size it is today, would have taken twice as long to build, or would have been killed outright. The debate we’re having with the Tysons/Dulles Silver Line right now is case-in-point. Already the project has been sliced and diced in terms of frill, and it’s still uncertain whether it will ever reach the airport. The first phase dangled right on the cusp of being too expensive for FTA’s criteria, and several times the project looked all but dead. If things like redundant elevators and the familiar hexagonal tiles might be enough to kill the project, can you imagine the reaction of FTA if Virginia demanded four tracks?

These older, legacy systems were built in a different era of construction standards for disruption and process – New York’s massive cut and cover subways come to mind.

With that note, Second Ave Sagas throws in their two cents. While New York is constantly cited as a system that’s done it ‘right,’ the Second Avenue Subway doesn’t have express tracks in the works.

The real problem though will come in the future. What will we do when trains break down and hold up the line? What will we do when express service is needed because the local trains are at capacity? The untenable solution would be to construct a time machine and convince New York to build this subway system in the 1930s or 1940s or 1950s when the four-track option was on the table. For now, we’ll just have to live with a two-track line if and when it opens.

One commenter also notes that New York’s subway has lots of express tracks in Brooklyn and The Bronx that are unused – ridership doesn’t warrant express service. Four-tracked lines are extremely rare in the world for a reason – they’re very expensive and usually not cost-effective. New York’s express trains are also aided by the very close station spacing for local trains, giving express trains an advantage. However, when dealing with limited resources, using rapid transit with slightly longer station spacing (as is planned for the Second Ave Subway, and as Metro and most modern systems have been built) is a far more prudent use of funds:

Transit watchers were not pleased with the lack of express service. Considering the length of the route and its projected ridership — around 200,000 per day for just Phase I and 500,000 per day for the entire line — Second Ave. was ripe for an express line. Instead, the MTA altered the spacing of the stations and lengthened mezzanine station access to better serve neighborhoods. The 72nd St. station, for example, will have an entrance between 74th and 75th Sts. while the 86th St. station will have a southern egress between 83rd and 84th Sts. Thus, a station stop at 79th St. was deemed to be unnecessarily redundant.

Instead of pushing for the pipe dream of express tracks, we should push for more investment in the core. That’s the redundancy we want from Metro.

DC’s potential express tracks already exist – they just have freight trains running on them right now. A massive improvement in MARC and VRE, getting headways up and extending hours of operations, as well as through-routing, would be a de-facto regional express companion to Metro.

Bottom line – express tracks would be nice, but given the choice between, say, express tracks vs. a separated Blue line, you go for the Blue line, no questions asked. If tunnel boring machines make it economical to bore a 4-track tunnel, then let’s consider it. Until then, the marginal improvements in service aren’t worth the added cost.

This is an American city.

Detroit is a fascinating place. I’m not sure what I can specifically add to the dialogue on the city – except to say that the images of the city, as powerful as they are, don’t do justice to the impact of seeing it with your own eyes.

I feel a connection to the place, having spent a fair amount of time in city while I was in grad school. When JD Hammond posts a picture from the old Michigan Theater, I feel a certain bond to the place.

I had seen pictures of the theater before. It was featured in a scene from 8 mile, where the theater-turned-parking-garage serves as a backdrop for a rap battle – I thought the director had gone over the top with the post-apocalyptic set design. The theater closed in the 70s, and the owners of the attached office building wanted more parking, but couldn’t demolish just the theater portion of the building without jeopardizing the structural integrity of the whole structure – so they gutted the seats and walls, and put in a parking deck.

Spending nights in downtown Detroit gives you a different perspective on the city. I remember walking past the theater, seeing the interior through old doors and emergency exits (now blown out for ventilation) as the interior glowed in an orange hue from sodium vapor lamps, with the rest of the street wrapped in darkness.

There’s something extremely compelling about the place. Twin Cities Streets for People recently posted this video from florent tillon on Vimeo. It does an amazing job of capturing the images of the city, how desolate it is, yet it’s still home to 900,000 people.

Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

It’s well worth a watch – beautifully shot (and in full HD!), it captures the experience of the place, as well as featuring some of the city’s gems.

City Block

a work in progress…