Tag Archives: DC

Parking, Census, & Maps

Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city. The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated. Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application. The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking. Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%. Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.

Historic DC Maps

In the same vein as UCLA’s Hypercities maps I’ve discussed previously, I recently ran across some more historical maps from Shannon over at We Love DC. The maps themselves are ok, not nearly as detailed or interesting as the Hypercities maps, taking the historic maps and re-projecting them onto an interactive Google maps interface.

More interesting to me, however, is an older post of Shannon’s that directs you to David Rumsey’s historical map archive, as well as a world-wide index – which includes (unlike the Hypercities site) two DC maps – from 1851 and 1861.

The index page shows you the wide variety of locations covered:

The interface is similar to the hypercities one, allowing you to toggle on a historical map that has been manipulated to match the projection of the underlying Google interface. This allows you to navigate around the environment.

First, the base layer, a current aerial of DC:

Here’s the 1851 map of DC:

And the 1861 map:

You can adjust the opacity to directly compare the current conditions to the map – some interesting details concern the shoreline of the Anacostia, the existence of Hains Point, as well as the evolution of the city’s built environment:

The detail in the 1861 map is fantastic. Extremely detailed, right down to the figure ground of individual buildings – as well as demonstrating how much of L’Enfant’s plan had been built out on the eve of the Civil War.

On the edges of the L’Enfant city, the map shows how historic roads have shaped the current city, such as Columbia Road meeting Connecticut:

Also, the property boundaries outside of the L’Enfant plan influenced the street patterns of later developments. Note how the slightly off-kilter grid of LeDroit Park corresponds to the landholdings of one C. Miller:

Very cool stuff.

Snowpocalypse III – Linkage

Image from Wayan Vota on Flickr

Some more pleas for realistic expectations: Ryan Avent chimes in on the economics of it all, and Jon Chait notes the basic, physical problem with dealing with so much snow in such a short period of time:

In my neighborhood, like much of Washington, people park along the street. When it snows, plows go down and shove the snow away from the middle of the street and toward the sides. When it snows large amounts, the plows create massive snow barriers between the cars and the street. Digging out one’s car becomes a huge task. You have to scoop all the snow off the car itself, around the perimeter of the car, and this is just a tiny warm-up to the major task, when you have to breach the snow wall so that your car can get out to the street. This is even harder than it sounds. Every shovelful has to be carried back form the middle of the street and deposited on the front lawn.

Before the latest snowfall, the barriers in my street stood at around three or four feet. When the plow comes, they’re just going to get bigger. The nearly-intractable problem here is that there’s simply no place to put the snow. All the spare space along the side of the street is taken up by parked cars. The snow has nowhere to go.

One part of the solution is to truck the snow away to a remote location. Washington is already beginning to do this. With enough money to hire enough trucks and equipment, the government could probably remove all the snow. But this is a massive project that would take an unthinkable commitment to finish. I’m wondering if I’ll see my office again until spring, or spring-like weather.

This is the crux of the issue. Where is it going to go? Who’s going to move it? Any solution requires participation from the city’s residents.

Gabe Klein agrees – where is it going to go? Dr. Gridlock’s blog has some good notes on the challenges:

“This is no longer just a plow operation,” said Gabe Klein, director of the District Department of Transportation. “There is too much snow accumulation on some streets for the plows to adequately move the snow, the snow has to be physically removed and hauled away. This will add some time to our cleanup efforts but we have crews working around-the-clock to minimize how long and to assist us in being as efficient as possible.”

In addition to 250 to 270 pieces of equipment for plowing and treating roadways, the city has deployed specialized equipment such as backhoes, frontloaders, dump trucks, and dumpsters.

Dumpsters, eh? Sounds unorthodox. Speaking of unorthodox…

Snow removal tools, realistic and not: The City Paper has some great suggestions for makeshift snow removal tools – but missed one of the obvious ones I’ve seen out there – the dustpan. In previous snow storms, I’ve seen cutting boards and spatulas making their way from the kitchen to the front yard. Still, that’s not as sweet as the flamethrower option (appropriately tagged under ‘cool shit‘).

Don’t bring the grill inside: Just don’t do it. Seriously.

And then there’s this:

Snowpocalypse III – the removal

Photo from InspirationDC on Flickr.

Well, it’s official. The winter of 2009-10 is now the snowiest winter on record in DC, eclipsing the snow season of 1898-99 That’s saying something, since DC’s current official weather station is at National Airport, which has abnormal weather conditions compared to the rest of the District, thanks to being surrounded by water on all sides and at low elevation. That 1898-99 record wasn’t taken at DCA of course, since the airport then was nothing but Potomac River mud flats. Hell, heavier than air human aviation wasn’t even around yet.

So, we’ve got a lot of snow. Now we have to deal with it.

While grades for this current snowfall are obviously yet to be determined, DC did an excellent job for the first round back in December. The response to round two this past weekend was also, all things considered, quite effective.

I bring this up because I hear a lot of complaints about snow removal, and almost all of them strike me as a product of unrealistic expectations and a lack of experience dealing with snow.

Snow doesn’t magically disappear. Having grown up and lived in several cities in the Midwest frostbelt, I’ve dealt with plenty of snow. It seems to me that many DC residents equate snow plowing with making the snow disappear – this simply isn’t the case. Plowing moves snow around. In the Midwest, you get used to this – snow sticks around, and you learn to deal with it. Snow Emergency routes will get plowed down to the pavement, but most residential streets will have snow on them until winter ends – this is considered ‘plowed’ because those streets are more than passable.

Still, snow takes up a lot of space – even Minneapolis has run out of places to put it this winter, forcing them to implement permanent one-side parking restrictions as the ever-growing snowbanks are encroaching on street space.

Shoveling is your responsibility. Plenty of DC bloggers have noted this (as is the case in just about every snow city in the US), but the responsibility for sidewalk snow removal falls on residents/tenants/occupants/owners.

“It shall be the duty of every person, partnership, corporation, joint-stock company, or syndicate in charge or control of any building or lot of land within the fire limits of the District of Columbia, fronting or abutting on a paved sidewalk, whether as owner, tenant, occupant, lessee, or otherwise, within the first 8 hours of daylight after the ceasing to fall of any snow or sleet, to remove and clear away, or cause to be removed and cleared away, such snow or sleet from so much of said sidewalk as is in front of or abuts on said building or lot of land.” (D.C. Code § 9-601)

There are good reasons for this – the city is struggling to deal with the current snowfall – adding miles and miles of sidewalks to their duty list would make the task impossible. There’s absolutely no way such removal could be handled in a timely fashion. It’s your civic duty, it’s good public policy, and (when people are engaged with the snow culture), it works far better than any other option.

Perspective matters. Other cities might be better at dealing with snow, and they might have a stronger snow culture to deal with shoveling and whatnot – but let’s not forget that this particular snowfall is exceptional. These kinds of storms, dumping several feet of snow on an area, will cripple even the best-prepared cities. As noted above, this is the most snow DC’s ever had on record. Sure, it’s a ballpark total similar to the average snowfall in Minneapolis, but the snow in Minnesota comes in small increments that are much easier to deal with than the huge storms we’ve seen.

All of that record snowfall has basically come in three storms. Even the best prepared snow cities will be slowed down significantly by storms of that magnitude, especially when they hit back-to-back.

Adaptation in housing, organically

A few housing-related tidbits that I’ve accumulated over the past week.

Richard Layman laments the lack of quality development, noting the difficulties involved with larger scale infill projects, especially when compared against smaller scale renovation projects of single rowhouses or small apartment buildings. The smaller scale renovations take on a more organic character, while the scale of the larger projects necessitates more centralized planning and development.

As for your point about “organic” development, in my experience, which I admit is relatively limited, my sense is organic (re)development that includes significant amounts of new construction is more about adaptive reuse of extant places, complemented by (hopefully high quality) infill.

Along similar lines, Rob Holmes over at mammoth points to a great discussion of housing in Haiti (Incremental House, Wired), with a particular focus on adaptation and organic elements. This isn’t the first time mammoth has mentioned the idea of incremental housing development, which Rob touched on in his very interesting list of the best architecture of the decade (including more infrastructural/engineered spaces like the Large Hadron Collider). Quinta Monroy, an incremental housing project in northern Chile, has a fascinating approach to both building shelter and also growing and adapting with the residents:

Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert. Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades. The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.

Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required. High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions. Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:

We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.

In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.

Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.

Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.

Obviously, applying this idea to a western city (as opposed to a slum) raises a whole different set of issues, but it’s a particularly interesting idea when contrasted against the highly planned and professionally designed structures Richard Layman notes. It provides a jumping point to look at the continuum between several of the elements that the Incremental House mentions in their self-description:

Much of the housing around the world occupies a space in between the planned/unplanned, formal/informal and the professional/non-professional, offering people a small space space to negotiate the tremendous shifts taking place in the urban landscape.

DC’s stability provides less of an opportunity to shift between those poles, but the idea is nevertheless interesting. Rob Holmes expands on what this means:

Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families. While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture.

Framework is a good way to put it – much of the work in planning seeks to establish frameworks (legal, physical, financial) around which cities and grow, evolve, and adapt – Layman’s point shows there is more we can do on that front.

Perceptions of density often miss the mark

Photo from cacophony76.

Density is one of the most important elements of any city, but also one of the most misunderstood.

However, the density of a site is often not what it initially seems – people will key on things like height, design, maintenance, and context rather than actually looking at what density means to them. It’s a natural, emotional reaction – but often misses the underpinning reality. Educating people on what density looks like is vitally important, as density is a crucial element of sustainable, urban places.

In Washington, DC, like many other places, people often have a visceral reaction against density. They assume more density means taller buildings in a low-rise city, but that need not be the case. These fears of density are not unfounded, however. Complaints about density often reveal other concerns, such as traffic congestion or design.

Dan Zack is a planner for Redwood City, CA. He recently gave a presentation out in California which included the following ‘quiz,’ asking attendees to quickly assess how dense a building or development is based on a passing glance at a photograph of the site. The clip is just shy of 12 minutes long. Take a look and see how accurate your perceptions of density are:

Density often gives rise to fears from neighbors about traffic congestion, crime, environmental quality, and many other factors. Outside the immediate community, people scream about social engineering and forcing people to live in dense environments, despite the fact that increased density is a product of market forces and substantial pent-up demand. Mr. Zack’s quiz shows how density is often not what it seems.

Height, for example, is only one factor in density. Paris is almost uniformly low-rise in nature, yet has extremely high densities. For DC, the takeaway message is that the city can continue to grow and add density without fundamentally altering the low-rise nature of the city. As DC continues to grow, adding more housing supply will be of vital importance. More households can also help certain areas of the city reach a critical mass of retail buying power, enabling stores and restaurants to survive and thrive.

Just as height is only a factor in density, density itself is only a factor in the overall health of a city. Put in simple terms, a city needs the Three D’s – Density, Diversity, and Design – to thrive. As Mr. Zack’s quiz shows, diversity (of housing sizes, price points, neighborhoods) and design all factor in to how we perceive density. Each of the Three D’s is deeply interwoven with the others, and touch on all urban issues, from transportation to affordable housing.

Emphasizing the need for density at this juncture is important, as well. Cities are not static environments. They change a great deal over time. In the next 25 years, approximately 75% of the American built environment will either be renovated or built anew. Even accounting for a lull in demand from the Great Recession, American cities are in for a great deal of change.

The entirety of Mr. Zack’s presentation is well worth watching, and can be found below. His presentation is about 50 minutes long, and includes the ‘quiz’ clip above. In the remainder, he discusses at length all of the companion issues that need to be dealt with in addition to adding density, such as design, parking, transit, and walkability.

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Links – bad day for the Midwest

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

The US has narrowed their list of potential host cities for the US Soccer Federation’s bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup – and shockingly, that list does not include the Windy City.

The final cities are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, East Rutherford, N.J., Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa, Fla., and Washington.

“With Chicago, I think there was some Olympic fatigue,” Gulati said, referring to that city’s unsuccessful bid to host the Summer Games in 2016. “And in this group, Soldier Field was one of the smallest stadiums.”

Good news for DC – both FedEx Field and M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore made this cut, which almost assures the region of hosting some World Cup games should the US win the right to host. This list of 18 cities will be trimmed to a final list of 12 stadiums.

However, the exclusion of Chicago is baffling. Chicago regularly hosts US World Cup qualifiers, Gold Cup matches, is home to an MLS team, and hosted many matches the last time the US hosted this event in 1994. Renovated Soldier Field is indeed small in terms of capacity, but this is Chicago we’re talking about here.

Only slightly less confusing is the exclusion of any stadia from the San Francisco Bay Area, but at least this can be explained by the poor quality of the extant stadiums in both SF and Oakland. However, the San Francisco 49ers stand to get a new football stadium in the near future, certainly before 2022 rolls around. Likewise, given Dan Snyder’s constantly rumored talks about wanting to build a new stadium for his micromanaged Redskins, DC could be looking at a new stadium, too.

Point being, 12 years is a long time from now. Leaving off two of the US’s greatest cities from a bid that’s meant to showcase not just America’s stadiums and hosting abilities but the host cities as well is just inexplicable.

(advice to the USSF folks – it’s 106 miles to Chicago. Hit it.)

Picture of 'Detroit Industry' mural. CC image from flickr

Detroit is another city that hosted World Cup matches in 1994, but was left of this bid’s list. That obviously isn’t the focus of Detroit’s current issues. Mammoth directs our attention to a piece by Bruce Katz on re-industrializing Detroit. Katz looks to international precedents (Turin, Bilbao), addresses the need to Detroit to shrink and shift – even with re-development and re-industrialization, and the huge impact this might have on the shape of the city.

Obligatory DC connection:

Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare. Even more than its European counterparts, which had much less severe population losses, Detroit will have to become a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its boundaries. The new Detroit might be a patchwork of newly dense neighborhoods, large and small urban gardens, art installations, and old factories transformed into adventure parks. The new Detroit could have a park, much like Washington’s Rock Creek Park, centered around a creek on its western edge, and a system of canals from the eastern corner of the city to Belle Isle in the south. The city has already started on the restoration of the Detroit River waterfront, largely bankrolled by private philanthropy. The city has created a new “land bank,” which can take control of vacant and derelict properties and start the process of clearing land, remediating environmental contamination, and figuring out what to do next with the parcel, whether that’s making it into a small park, deeding it to a neighbor to create a well-tended yard, or assembling large tracts of land for redevelopment or permanent green space.

Also from mammoth, Rob Holmes takes a peek at the massive scale of some new solar infrastructure, linking to this post on the sprawling SEGS facility in California – conveniently located next to the world’s largest boron mine for scale comparisons.

Similarly, the scale comparisons remind me of a video recently shared with me about mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The video comes from Yale University’s Environment360. the 20 minute video is extraordinarily well shot and edited, and well worth a watch. Given DC’s proximity to Appalachia and our (relative) reliance on coal power in this region, it’s definitely of interest to those of us in the Mid Atlantic region.

At a bare minimum, the images in the video alone are worth a watch.

When I think of tools for urban living, GMC trucks aren’t the first thing that come to my mind. I guess using that kind of comparison is like saying a jackhammer is a tool for hanging picture frames around the house.

Portland hasn’t seen big shifts in travel modes recently, as Jarrett Walker notes. However, Jarrett and a few of his trusty commenters seem to have a bead on to the potential cause – relatively cheap parking.

In other recent work we’ve been doing, we’ve repeatedly seen that parking price is the most powerful locally-controlled lever for shifting people out of single-occupant cars, in the absence of more direct congestion charges. Increases in parking costs drive big shifts to transit or other options.

In my experience working on various transportation demand management programs, this is absolutely true. Since TDM programs do not usually have the scope to implement congestion pricing, parking pricing is the single biggest contributor to mode shifts.

Fun with maps and movies

DCist takes note of Matt Yglesias’ tweet on the New York Times’ fantastic interactive map of various metropolitan areas, broken down by zip codes and how popular each of Netflix’s top 50 rentals of 2009 was in those areas.

The geographic patterns are fascinating, and quite revealing about the social and economic geography of the DC area.

Some screenshots (click to see full size):

Tyler Perry is popular in PG County, but not so much at Andrews AFB. Also note the other cities on the right.

Milk presents an almost complete opposite map of popularity.

Role Models. Complete with spikes in popularity at couple military bases (Andrews AFB, Fort Meyer, and Fort Meade) and two colleges (Georgetown and Maryland).

Absolutely great stuff. Maps are available for 12 Metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, the Bay Area, LA, Seattle, the Twin Cities, Denver, ATL, Dallas and Miami.

Hump-day late-night link-dump

CC image from chethan shankar on flickr

Stuff that’s been piling up in my open tabs…

Jarrett Walker takes a look at Seattle, and how the city’s geography of natural chokepoints and barriers aid the city’s transit usage, despite lacking an extensive rail transit system (though it’s getting bigger as we speak).

Transit planning is frustrating in such a place, but road planning is even more so. Ultimately, Seattle’s chokepoints have the effect of reducing much of the complex problem of mode share to a critical decision about a strategic spot. If you give transit an advantage through a chokepoint, you’ve given it a big advantage over a large area.

A follow-up post on the subject delves deeper into chokepoints.

For DC, there are a whole lot of factors that shape the balance (or lack thereof) of development between the western portion of the metro area and the eastern half – but these kinds of choke points are certainly part of the success in shaping that development around transit for Metro’s Potomac River crossings.

Free parking FAIL. This is out of date now, but the Mayor of Providence’s plan to offer free on-street parking as means of encouraging downtown shopping backfired, big time.

Since there’s free parking all day at metered spaces, employees from the nearby courthouse and some from other government offices are taking parking spots early and are staying all day.

It’s leaving holiday shoppers out of the stores.

Not a good idea to try and offer the same things malls offer when you don’t have the means to do so. Better to use price to encourage turnover and maximize usage, while marketing the advantages that urban shopping districts do have over malls.

Seventy Percent. Previously, I’ve looked at some details of transit plans elsewhere, and Denver’s FasTracks system, centering on a revamped Union Station is as interesting of a case study as any. They’ve now released the 70% design documents for Union Station (large PDF – 15.3 mb).

Denver Union Station - Diagram of transit facilities, with underground bus concourse connecting light rail platforms (left) with commuter rail/inter city rail (right) and the historic station building.

Headquarters? What is it!?! It’s a big building where Generals meet, but that’s not important right now.

Huh? Oh, that. Northrup-Grumman is moving to town. Ruth Samuelson handicaps the race for capturing the actual HQ building, and she’s not betting on DC:

So I guess being right in the thick of Washington D.C. could make a difference. But, realistically, people are betting against the city (this is again from the Sun story):

Washington, which has 1,000 Northrop jobs now, strikes him as out of the running. The potential threat of a terrorist attack is omnipresent in defense contractors’ minds, so he doubts one would choose to locate its leaders there. Maryland and Virginia benefit from being near the nation’s capital but at a potentially safer distance, though “there’s a clear pattern among the recent arrival of defense companies in Washington: They tend to favor Northern Virginia,” [Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute] said.

Now, if we’re all blown into oblivion by a rogue nuclear weapon, is there really that much of a difference between having your HQ in Rosslyn or Crystal City, as opposed to NoMA or the Capitol Riverfront?

The Census is coming. And Maurice Henderson wants you to fill it out. Do it. Doooo it.

US v. Canada. While this particular hockey fan is basking in the glory of a thrilling, 6-5 overtime victory for the US over Canada in the World Junior ice hockey championships (with the game winner scored by John Carlson, a prospect for the Washington Caps), TNR’s Avenue blog looks at the economic and metropolitan implications of re-shaping the NHL into more of a rivalry between countries and between cities. Taking the same passion you see from national team competitions and channeling it into club competitions – perhaps taking a page from soccer’s rivalries and sense of place?

Biosphere. BLDGBLOG takes a look at the abandoned and deteriorating Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

Lighting, again

I had a chance to stop though Judiciary Sq’s north mezzanine today, the one with the new lighting scheme. My concern from the initial photos was that the lighting along the escalators, where the coffered vault has less headroom, requiring direct overhead light rather than the indirect lighting in the rest of the system, was too much of a departure from one of Metro’s distinct design elements.

New mezzanine lighting. Note the difference between the indirect fixtures in the middle and the direct ones over the escalators. CC image from flickr.

The white lines from those lights take away from the pattern of the coffers, despite the increased lighting in the area (which is substantial).

Direct light fixture detail. Photo of the author.

Increased light near escalators. Note the birghtness of the walls.

Increased light near escalators. Note the brightness of the walls. Photo of the author.

The increased illumination does indeed make a big difference, particularly in seeing where to walk. However, might there be another solution to illuminate the walkways without some of the awkward, direct light fixtures. Several of the new and newly renovated stations make use of LED lights embedded in stairway handrails. These lights, directed downward, illuminate the floor to ease navigation without the need for overhead fixtures.

LED handrail lights, Navy Yard station. Photo of the author.

In anticipation of the baseball crowds for Nationals Park, Metro expanded the Navy Yard station’s Half Street entrance to include an elevator and a new staircase from the mezzanine to the platform, which uses the LED handrail lights to illuminate the stairs.

Might this type of fixture be integrated into the brass handrails in Metro mezzanines? While these lights might not have much range, they wouldn’t need much – the new, hanging indirect lights in the Judiciary Sq mezzanine work just fine with enough overhead clearance.

City Block

a work in progress…