Tag Archives: DC

Nightlife agglomerations & the corner bar

The Corner Bar, Divernon IL - CC image from Randy von Liski

The Corner Bar, Divernon IL - CC image from Randy von Liski

A few booze-related items I thought I’d comment on:

The Hill is Home takes note of ANC 6B‘s seemingly preferred method to avoid “Adams Morganization” – a moratorium on all new liquor licenses.  Nevermind that the trigger for this fear of Adams Morgan is Moby Dick House of Kebob – which makes me think those leveling this barb have neither visited Adams Morgan recently nor dined at Moby Dick.

Matt Yglesias notes that such efforts to control liquor licenses is fighting the natural tendencies urban economics, where things like to cluster.  That’s what cities are, after all – clusters and agglomerations of people, firms, skills, capital, etc.  Yglesias makes a great point about the appropriate scale of governance of these issues.  While small, local groups (such as an ANC) might be affected by a new bar or restaurant, the practice of giving them veto power over things like liquor licenses has some severe implications:

The bigger question here is about levels of governance. Insofar as you empower residents of my building in DC to make the decision, we will attempt to regulate the food service establishments on our block so as to minimize late-night noise. After all, the service sector jobs lost in the process aren’t the jobs that we do while as homeowners we bear the losses of reduced property values on the block. And to simply disempower us, as a block, would be arbitrary and unfair. But empowering each and every block leads to highly inefficient outcomes with the bulk of the pain felt by low-income people and there’s no obvious reason of justice to think this kind of hyper-local empowerment is more legitimate than taking a broader view would be.

Ryan Avent adds on, noting that these kinds of restrictions and inefficiencies lead to poor outcomes for consumers:

That’s largely because it’s very difficult to open new bars. And the result is a pernicious feedback loop. With too few bars around, most good bars are typically crowded. This crowdedness alienates neighbors, and it also has a selecting effect on the types of people who choose to go to bars — those interested in a loud, rowdy environment, who will often tend to be loud and rowdy. This alienates neighbors even more, leading to tighter restrictions still and exacerbating the problem.

Sadly, this is the kind of dynamic that’s very difficult to change. No city council will pass the let-one-thousand-bars-bloom act, and neighbors can legitimately complain of any individual liquor license approval that it may lead to some crowded, noisy nights. It’s interesting how often these multiple equilibrium situations turn up in urban economics. In general, they seem to cry out for institutional innovation.

Avent specifically laments DC’s lack of the ol’ neighborhood corner bar.  Having been born and raised in the boozy midwest, where the small, corner bar is an institution and people drink alcohol the way others drink water, I miss the corner bars, which aren’t as common as they could be in the District.

One of the problems is in the tools used to limit these licenses.  As Avent and Yglesias note, the kinds of tools bandied about by ANCs lead to an inefficient marketplace.  Instead of preventing Adams Morgan, something like a moratorium ends up ensuring a slippery slope towards “Adams Morganization” rather than preventing one.

On the broader issue of retail mix (ANC 6B’s stated reason to oppose new liquor licenses), the December issue of the Hill Rag had two contrasting pieces on the issue of retail on Barrack’s Row.  The first discusses potential options – none of which seem palatable for actually encouraging retail.  Regarding a moratorium, the impact is exactly what Avent describes:

One problem he cites is that it seems to be “too easy to become a bar or pub once you have the license.” So, even if there is a moratorium on new licenses, there is always the chance that existing licenses can morph from restaurants, which most neighborhoods don’t mind, to bars that operate later and attract different customers.

Another suggested tool is a zoning overlay district, but such a tool is a mismatch between the stated problem and solution.  Zoning is best used to regulate the physical form and the use of buildings, broadly defined.  Zoning can separate a retail use from a residential one, or an office use from light industry – but it is not an adept tool to parse out specific kinds of retail, or in differentiating between Moby Dick and Chateau Animeaux. The issue of bars and liquor licenses is more an issue of how those physical spaces are programmed.  Zoning is not a good tool to control these kinds of issues, and these types of regulations often backfire.

Refreshingly, another article in the issue (about parking, no less) from Sharon Bosworth of Barracks Row Main Street gets at the real reason 8th St SE is more favorable to bars and restaurants instead of retail:

By mid 2009, The Wander Group, consultants who make saving America’s historic corridors their specialty, reported back to BRMS: our commercial corridor, specified by none other than Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, is today uniquely suited to businesses requiring small square footage because of the antique proportions of our buildings which are well protected in the Capitol Hill Historic District. Restaurants require small square footage and restaurant owners would always be on the hunt for charming, historic sites. Wander Group predicted more restaurateurs would find us, and so they did. Our tiny buildings are difficult (but not impossible) for most retail footprints, yet they work perfectly for restaurants.

In addition to those challenges, there’s the broader issues facing retail – online competition, fighting against the economies of scale for big box and chain retailers, etc.

Instead, we have an industry that works well in an urban setting and wants to cluster here.  Here’s one vote in favor of more corner bars.

Low impact development near the Navy Yard

Near the soon to be opened and fantastic Park at the Yards, there’s a lot of new low-impact development infrastructure.  These bioretention areas should be a great example of the new kind of both urban and environmentally sustainable infrastructure can be.

IMG00071

These are not ordinary tree boxes.  Instead of draining into a standard storm sewer, these gutters drain into the tree boxes, where stormwater then naturally drains into the ground instead of into a storm sewer.  This reduces the amount of water entering the combined storm and sanitary sewer, and thus can help reduce the number of combined sewer overflow (CSO) events.  Since the combined sewer system mixes storm water and regular sewage, substantial rainfall will force the system to overflow into area rivers, dumping raw sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the Anacostia and Potomac.

From the street side:

IMG00072

Storm water will slowly absorb into the ground, aided by the various plants soils that can capture pollutants though the process of biofiltration.  Look at other rain gardens and tree boxes under construction – note the drainage layers of soil and gravel to be added.

IMG00073

IMG00075

In this completed rain garden/tree box, note the grade of the soil in the box, below the grade of the curb:

IMG00070

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Frequency Mapping

Last week, Jarrett Walker had a great post illuminating the basic reasons for ‘frequency mapping,’ where a transit agency maps out transit routes that meet some threshold for frequent service (such as buses every 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, etc).

There are many degrees of frequency and span, but in general, most transit agencies’ service can be sorted into three categories of usefulness based on these variables:

  • The Frequent Network runs often enough that you don’t have to plan your trip around a timetable.  That typically means every 15 minutes or better all day, but it needs to be more frequent than that where aiming to serve relatively short trips — as in the case of downtown shuttles for example.  If you aren’t willing to plan your life around a bus schedule, you are interested only in the Frequent Network.
  • Infrequent All-day services are the rest of the service that runs all day.  This network often relies on timed connections.
  • Peak-only service exists only during the peak period.  It mostly takes the form of long commuter-express routes that add lots of complexity to a system map but represent very specialized services for limited markets.

These three categories are useful in such completely different ways that I would argue they are at least as fundamental as the three basic categories of urban road — freeway, arterial, and local — that virtually all street maps clearly distinguish.

We have some great examples of this in DC.  The entirety of the Circulator network is, in essence, a Frequent Network.  The Circulator aims for 10 minute headways, the routes are fairly simple and easy to understand, and thus people can look at the map and understand where the bus is and where it’s going.

WMATA’s bus map for DC, however, doesn’t make this distinction.  While there is a extra color designation for Metro Extra service (meeting the Frequent Network threshold), the other color distinctions merely show which jurisdiction the bus route operates in.

DC Bus Map WMATA crop

The distinction between which services operate only in DC (in red) and those which cross into Maryland (green) isn’t really important for a rider.  Furthermore, the overwhelming use of red for the DC routes makes it hard to follow those routes across the map, seeing where they turn and what streets they travel down.

DC Bus Map WMATA legend

Blue services with dashed lines, however, is indicative of MetroExtra (for some reason, a separate brand from Metro Express), and at least makes a effort at differentiation based on frequency – but that tends to get lost in the visual complexity of the overall map.

There’s a common phenomenon of ‘rail bias,’ (hat tip to The Overhead Wire) where riders will opt for riding a train rather than a bus.  However, rail systems tend to have several key attributes that make them more attractive – the investment in the infrastructure both enables and requires a high frequency of service, and the route structure is almost always simple enough to convey in an easily-understood diagram or map.

The lesson from Jarrett’s post is that simple mapping based on frequency can help address some of the perceived shortcomings of buses.  Even without addressing route structure, this is a relatively simple improvement in communication that helps riders a great deal.

Weekend Reading – Hauling Freight

Amtrak-UP

Amtrak and Union Pacific trains pass each other. Photo by SP8254.

While American passenger rail often leaves much to be desired, our freight rail network is second to none.  This privately owned and operated network often finds itself at odds with desires for increased passenger service and high speed operations.

Hauling the Freight: Freight rail companies have been reluctant to embrace the recent enthusiasm for high speed rail.  In a recent article from the Economist, railroads expressed all sorts of concerns, from technical considerations for offering mixed-speed service along shared passenger and freight lines to a complete re-regulation of the industry, which was de-regulated in 1980.  One such pending requirement will be use of Positive Train Control (PTC) on all routes where freight and passenger trains share the same tracks.

Freight railroads fear a return to the bad old days.  From the Economist article:

Federal and state grants will flow to the freight railroads to help them upgrade their lines for more and faster passenger trains. But already rows are breaking out over the strict guidelines the [Federal Railroad Administration] will lay down about operations on the upgraded lines, such as guarantees of on-time performance with draconian penalties if they are breached and the payment of indemnities for accidents involving passenger trains. The railroads are also concerned that the federal government will be the final arbiter of how new capacity created with the federal funds will be allocated between passenger and freight traffic. And they are annoyed that there was little consultation before these rules were published.

There have been some heated meetings between freight-railroad managers and FRA officials. Henry Posner III, chairman of Iowa Interstate Railroad, ruefully notes that freight railroads, in the form of passengers and regulation, “are getting back things that caused trouble”.

Prior to de-regulation, American railroads had obligations to offer money-losing passenger services, dealt with heavy taxation, and paid for their own infrastructure in the face of heavy subsidized interstate highways undercutting their core markets.   Mark Reutter documented these challenges back in an excellent 1994 Wilson Quarterly article entitled “The Lost Promise of the American Railroad.”  One core issue is defining the best balance between public and private interests.  America’s railroads are private enterprises, and back in the day where they dominated all travel and enjoyed de facto monopolies on various markets, they were regulated accordingly.  As transportation infrastructure financing shifted towards public funding (such as the interstate highway system), the regulatory structure did not evolve to meet the new realities.

The current debate is essentially one of re-defining the proper roles for each of the partners in this mother of all public-private partnerships.  Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic suggests that the Economist’s take isn’t as dire as the railroads might make it seem:

If the public is committed to the funding of improved tracks along privately owned freight corridors, it has the right to demand that those companies allow passenger trains to run along them. From that perspective, the freight companies have little room to complain.

But the federal government does have a long-term interest in promoting investments that offer improvements in both freight and passenger offerings. Freight lines that run through the center of cities should be moved to new routes that detour, allowing passenger services to take over these access corridors much more essential for people than for cargo. Lines running both passenger and freight trains should be expanded to three or more tracks to allow multiple running speeds in both directions. Projects could theoretically be sponsored by public-private partnership, using both government and freight company funds directed to investments that benefit both.

These changing roles are not without tension.  The California High Speed Rail project has run into problems in their negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad.  Likewise, DC has been involved – CSX’s rebuilding of the Virginia Avenue Tunnel to a double track, double stack standard is a direct example, and the impacts on passenger rail in the region are unclear.  CSX is poised to see a huge jump in traffic with the opening of new, larger locks at the Panama Canal.  MARC has big plans for future expansion and Amtrak has an eye on electrification to Richmond – how these projects will all fit together is unclear, indicative of the larger dialogue and coordination that needs to happen regarding freight and passenger rail.

Coordination needs to encompass technical questions (standards for train control? shared track? dedicated track? electrification?) as well as financial ones (who will pay for these infrastructure upgrades? what kind of control will come with public dollars?).

Get on the Bus: Aaron Renn writes about bus service improvements over at The Urbanophile, building off of this New York Magazine piece on New York’s new select bus service.  The article outlines many relatively cheap and easy to implement programs that can vastly improve the bus experience – fare pre-payment, limited stops, exclusive lanes, multi-door boarding, etc.  Renn writes:

[C]learly there is enormous opportunity in the US to start transforming the transportation infrastructure of our cities with high quality bus service in a way that is faster, cheaper, and much more pervasive than we’d ever be able to achieve with rail.

In the piece, Jarrett Walker highlights Jay Walder’s quote on taking bus lanes seriously.  He also notes, however, that such seriousness is not without compromises.  Others, such as Cap’n Transit have noted that while these bus improvements are tremendous, we should be careful to not oversell them, as many often do with terms such as a ‘surface subway.’

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

The Need for Speed

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

A streetcar speeds by in Toronto. CC image from Matthew Burpee.

Jarrett Walker has a wrap-up post on his debate with Patrick Condon on the need for speed in urban transit.   Condon is a professor of sustainability, not a transportation planner or engineer, and his view is that we need to improve the experience of sustainable transit and not enable the sprawling lifestyles of yesterday, no matter what mode we use to get to and fro.  Jarrett sums up Condon’s thesis in an earlier post:

Condon heads the Design Centre for Sustainability inside UBC’s Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and is the author of the very useful book Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities. In his 2008 paper “The Case for the Tram: Learning from Portland,” he explicitly states a radical idea that many urban planners are thinking about, but that not many of them say in public.  He suggests that the whole idea of moving large volumes of people relatively quickly across an urban region, as “rapid transit” systems do, is problematic or obsolete:

The question of operational speed conjures up a larger issue: who exactly are the intended beneficiaries of enhanced mobility? A high speed system is best if the main intention is to move riders quickly from one side of the region to the other.  Lower operational speeds are better if your intention is to best serve city districts with easy access within them and to support a long term objective to create more complete communities, less dependent on twice-daily cross-region trips.

It’s an interesting question, and it’s having a significant if not always visible impact on transport planning.  Darrin Nordahl’s 2009 book My Kind of Transit, reviewed here, also praises slow transit; he makes that case in the same way you’d advocate for “slow food,” by pointing to the richness of experience that comes only from slowing down.

The implication is clear, as Jarrett states in the title of his posts – “is speed obsolete?”  Jarrett’s counter-point, however, is that speed matters, and it matters a great deal:

So here’s my main point:

Rapid transit is a far more viable “augmenter” of pedestrian trips because its travel speeds, and thus the trip-lengths for which it’s suited, lie entirely outside the pedestrian’s range, whereas the streetcar overlaps the pedestrian range substantially.

The rapid transit and pedestrian modes play entirely complementary roles, while streetcar and pedestrian modes have partly overlapping roles — a less efficient arrangement.  You’ll walk further to a rapid transit station, but once you’re there you can move at a high speed that makes that extra walk worthwhile […]

Rapid transit’s speed also exceeds typical cycling speed, by a large enough factor that it makes sense to cycle to the station.  So rapid transit works with cycling to a degree that local stop transit, such as the Portland Streetcar, just doesn’t.

Obviously, the usefulness of rapid transit requires a longer trip length, so rapid transit should be considered only for relatively long corridors.  As several commenters have mentioned, the problem with Condon’s view may be in the corridors to which he’s applied it, including Vancouver’s Broadway corridor, where he’s presented it as an alternative to a SkyTrain extension.

Streetcars and rapid transit are different tools, each suited for different jobs.  I’d argue that some of the value in streetcars is precisely because they can fill in the gaps of a hub-and-spoke system like Metro, while the aforementioned Broadway corridor in Vancouver probably should be one of the spokes. The question is then one of how you use that tool.  One thing to remember about Portland’s streetcar is that the station spacing is very close, especially when you consider Portland’s short blocks. Small adjustments, such as wider station spacing and some signal priority treatments could greatly improve performance and reliability.

DC’s proposed streetcar system can take better advantages of the streetcar’s strengths as a mode.  Yonah Freemark’s excellent graphics on DC’s network show how streetcars can fill in some of the crosstown gaps that exist in the current Metro network. However, streetcars certainly are not and cannot be a substitute for Metro’s utility to the city and the region.  Yonah also chimes in on the subject over at The Next American City:

By advocating streetcars, Condon is implicitly arguing that people should stay in their neighborhoods for most of their trips; that they should find work, go shopping, and be entertained in their near surroundings. If people have to rely on slow transit, they simply won’t have the time to be making trips across the region. (Or, of course, they might switch to driving their private automobiles, which would defeat the point of the transit investment entirely.)Though this approach would likely produce better ecological outcomes (less energy consumption per person as a result of reduced transport mileage), it would exacerbate spatial inequalities. Because jobs (especially well-paid ones) tend to be concentrated in the favored quarter, poorer inhabitants living far away from that zone would be isolated from employment opportunities and thus be deprived of chances for income growth. Or they would face devastatingly long commutes.

Stepping outside of the fiscally constrained world, the obvious answer is that both rapid and circulator systems serve different and complimentary needs.  The economic implications (for a city’s economy, rather than just real estate development) are the really interesting – Walker’s commenter ‘micasa’ highlights Jane Jacobs and the very nature of cities:

What does the venerable Jane Jacobs have to say about the notion of a “city of neighbourhoods”?

“Whatever city neighborhoods may be, or may not be, and whatever usefulness they may have, or may be coaxed into having, their qualities cannot work at cross-purposes to thoroughgoing city mobility and fluidity of use, without economically weakening the city of which they are a part. The lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods – simply because they are parts of cities.”

Jacobs is describing what does, and always has, made cities “tick”.  To be against intra-urban mobility is to be against the very proposition of the city.  I don’t think we can afford to let the threat of climate change, peak oil, or whatever, destroy that. We may need radically different, more sustainable cities in the future if we are going to survive, but rest assured, we will still need cities. Not agglomerations of inward focused neighbourhoods, but cities.

I’m not suggesting that the debate over transit technologies in this particular case ought to be closed. But I am suggesting that Condon’s particular argument for surface rail – that it encourages local living in a neighbourhood setting – is fundamentally anti-urban.  A better argument, and one that actually addresses the urban mobility issue, is that perhaps surface rail is a cheaper solution that can be designed “fast enough” to allow those neighbourhoods on the West Side (including UBC) to cohere with the rest of the region without the necessity of cars (and vice-versa). But that’s not the argument as presented.

Is speed obsolete?  I’d say no.  To micasa’s last point, surface rail can indeed be designed to be ‘fast enough’ to address urban mobility, particularly when paired with an existing rapid transit system (such as DC’s Metro).

DC Photo Map

A couple of blogs today (GGW, DCist) featured this fantastic map of DC and environs from Flickr user Eric Fischer.

DC Photo Map_1

Fischer has a set of similar maps from various cities around the world.  Fischer’s methodology takes data from the images and the user accounts to determine the location of the photo (via geotagging), as well as the time and date and the type of user (tourist, local, or unknown).  Tourist photos are in red, locals in blue, and unknown data in yellow.  Each dot represents a photo.  Photos taken in succession by the same user within 10 minutes of each other are connected by a line.

DC Photo Map_2

Fischer also has maps of cities that do not discern between tourists and locals.

Changing suburbia

Some suburban items to share today:

Design: Infrastructurist takes a look at the problem of culs-de-sac (which I believe is the proper plural of cul de sac).

cul-de-sacs

Commenters take note of some serious issues with this particular study, but the general point still stands – culs de sac remove key links from the street network, requiring longer and more circuitous routes to get to the same destinations.  Developments of these kind of street patterns are no small part of America’s long history of vehicle miles traveled increasing far faster than the rate of population growth.

Diversity: The Washington Post has an article on the changing face of suburbia – more socially and economically diverse, and dealing with new sets of problems that many of these communities have never had to deal with before:

Demographers at Brookings say suburbs are developing many of the same problems and attractions that are more typically associated with cities. And cities, in turn, have been drawing more residents who are young and affluent, so the traditional income gap between wealthier suburbs and more diverse cities narrowed slightly.

“The decade brought many cities and suburbs still closer together along a series of social, demographic and economic dimensions,” said the report, titled “State of Metropolitan America.”

The other substantive point is about how Americans perceive their surroundings (urban, suburban, rural) compared to how their city and their urban economy actually functions:

The report outlines a decade in which several demographic milestones were passed as the nation’s population topped 300 million midway through. About two-thirds of Americans live in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, virtually all regions with populations of 500,000 or more.

“We think we’re a small-town nation,” Berube said. “But small towns exist because they’re connected to something bigger, which allows residents to make a living.”

Density: Ryan Avent has long marked the economic benefits of density and the nature of urban agglomerations, but he has an interesting point on the marginal benefits of added density, noting that modest increases in the less dense suburbs could have a troubling impact, while modest increases in the already dense core, already designed at a walkable scale, would have serious benefits for local retail.

So let’s think about the effects of doubling density in Fairfax and the District. Now on the one hand, the benefits to doubling density in Fairfax are likely to be larger than those in Washington for reasons of scale alone — in the Fairfax example, more people are added. That makes for a deeper labour pool, a larger skills base, and so on. On the other hand, Fairfax density is likely to be less effective density. Fairfax is built in a fairly standard, suburban way. It’s not built at a walkable scale, the road system is arterial rather than gridded, transit options are limited, and so on. Doubling density, absent major infrastructure improvements, might actually reduce the metropolitan access of Fairfax residents.

Not so in the District. Yes, with more people roads, buses, and the Metro would be more heavily taxed. At the same time, every neighborhood would become individually more convenient. Brookland is fairly low density for a District neighborhood, but it’s basically built to be walkable. Were density in Brookland to double, the retail and commercial options within easy walking distance of Brookland residents would more than double.

The problem with doubling the density in a place like Fairfax County, aside from the infrastructure issues that Ryan highlights, is that you’d end up with a place that’s stuck in the no-man’s land of density – too dense for the auto-oriented infrastructure to function smoothly, but not dense enough to really tap into the critical mass and benefits of walkable urban places.

Briefly noted

7000Series

Some items of note today:

Economists for cities, density

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

CC image from urbanfeel on flickr

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard, chimes in on cities, density, and their economic value on the Economix blog:

But now humanity is marked more by concentration than by spread. In 2007, one-half of the world’s population became officially urban. One-third of Americans inhabit just 16 large metropolitan areas, which collectively use only a tiny fraction of the country’s land mass…

Understanding the appeal of proximity — the economic advantages of agglomeration — helps make sense of the past and future of cities.   If people still clustered together primarily to reduce the costs of moving manufactured goods, then cities would become increasingly irrelevant as transportation costs continue to decline.

If cities serve, as I believe, primarily, to connect people and enable them to learn from one another, than an increasingly information-intensive economy will only make urban density more valuable.

Glaeser highlights several conclusions – including a key one that density increases productivity. Ryan Avent has harped on this before.  Any way you slice it, the end idea is that cities are the intellectual and economic hubs of our country.

Improvements in transportation and communication costs made it cost-effective to manufacture in low-cost areas, which led to the decline of older industrial cities like Detroit. But those same changes also increased the returns to innovation, and the free flow of ideas in cities make them natural hubs of innovation. Since the death of distance increased the scope for new innovation, idea-intensive innovating cities were helped by the same forces that hurt goods-producing cities.

Humanity is a social species and our greatest gift is our ability to learn from one another. Cities thrive by enabling that learning, and they have become only more important as knowledge has become more valuable. Understanding what makes cities work is more important than ever.

In order to avoid alienating groups on political grounds, it’s worth noting that we’re talking about cities, broadly defined.   Just as the focus on urban, walkable places is an urban design distinction rather than a political one, the benefits of urban agglomerations are regional.  Design matters, of course – I’d be curious to see if an economist could measure if economic benefits of agglomeration can be attributed to any other characteristics other than density.

Streetcar smackdown watch

Over the last few days, the Washington Post featured a number of streetcar pieces.  First, Lisa Rein laid out the basis for the debate on overhead wires.  The Post’s editorial board then chastised all the players to find a realistic and reasonable solution.

Today’s print edition features two pieces delving deeper into how streetcars fit into the mold of historic preservation, urbanism, and urban untidiness.  The first comes from Adam Irish, a member of the DC Preservation League and a volunteer at the DC Historic Preservation Office.  Irish starts by marking the difference between those who seek to preserve urbanism and those that seek to preserve DC’s monumentality above all else:

This kerfuffle is about more than just ugly wires, however. It gets to the heart of an old and familiar conflict over how Washingtonians and Americans at large envision the city. In its coverage, The Post has referred to opponents of wires as “preservationists,” but I think “D.C. monumentalists” better describes their stance. For the monumentalist, Washington, D.C., the city comes second to Washington, D.C., the sanitized and photogenic capital.

The monumentalist vision of Washington has choked nearly all urban life from the Mall and its environs. It has fashioned large sections of our city into pleasing vistas for tourists but has given the rest of us lifeless wastelands (if you’ve ever stepped foot outside at L’Enfant Plaza, you know what I’m talking about).

Urban life and urban form isn’t always pretty.  In fact, the sometimes-messy complexity is part of what makes cities such interesting places to live in.  Spiro Kostof described it as “energized crowding,” a kind of messiness that’s inherent to creativity and day to day life.  This isn’t to discredit the formalism of Washington’s City Beautiful aesthetic – merely asserting that such monumentalism shouldn’t trump all other facets of urbanism.

Philip Kennicott expands on those themes in his piece, also running in Sunday’s print edition:

If you listen to preservationists, the most ardent of whom oppose any overhead wires in the city, you might think Washington was loaded with great vistas. And it is, but not the awe-inspiring views they’re thinking about, which turn out to be fairly few and often not that impressive. Even down our wide avenues, sightlines tend to terminate in small monuments that are best seen up close.

The great views down the streets of Washington are just coming into their full glory as the leaves of spring return. These aren’t wide-open vistas with monumental buildings in the far distance; they are tunnel-like views of shaded streets, overarched by majestic elms, oaks and maples. These shady tubes of green, which are rare in newer and suburban neighborhoods, are the truly distinctive beauty of Washington. The only reasonable concern about running overhead wires should be the protection of trees that create these glorious canopies.

Nobody in this debate would argue that overhead wires look good, but too often the debate is framed in either/or terms – either the wires are ugly or they are not.  Kennicott addresses this false dichotomy as well:

Arguments against overhead wires rest on two essential assumptions: that the city is filled with streets that have historically significant and aesthetically impressive views; and that wires and poles would be ugly intrusions on these grand vistas. The former is questionable, the latter a matter of opinion.

The point about wires obstructing views that don’t always exist is a good one.  As noted, DC’s canopy of street trees is a legacy worth protecting, yet these same trees (on, say, East Capitol street) make for a wonderful streetscape – but at the cost of forgoing views of the Capitol Dome beyond a few blocks.

East Capitol dome view

Google street view of Capitol Dome (it's in there somewhere) from East Capitol Street, near 4th Street.

This isn’t to say that wires wouldn’t obstruct this view – but the key point is that the streetcar plan does not propose to obstruct these types of views with wires at all.  Kennicott hammers on this point, noting that the current plans do not include major obstructions, both by avoiding major view corridors and considering the fact that wire ‘obstruction’ is relatively minor.  Like the trees that line many of these grand avenues, the positive benefits of the streetcars vastly outweigh the negative costs.

The takeaway message from all of these articles should be that a reasonable compromise – a hybrid of wires and battery power to protect key viewsheds – is both realistic and palatable to most Washingtonians.