Get Around
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
Summer in Washington means the return of many familiar sights, some welcomed, others not as much. It means baseball, but also sticky heat and humidity. It means evenings at barbecues and bars with outdoor seating, but also children roaming the streets with backpacks full of cherry bombs and bottle rockets. It means, for many of us, time off. For others it means dodging packs of interns and tourists, and sweating it out in hot, crowded, and malodorous Metro cars heavy with the weight of added humanity.
Transit ridership is increasing all the time, it’s true, but only in the summer, when the city’s visitors add to the local crowds, does the impact of steady growth become really apparent. Each year, unremarkable days are added to the list of Metro’s top ten busiest; half of them now are from 2007 and another two from 2006. These totals are all around 800,000 trips per day, which is below the 1 million daily riders Metro was built to handle, but car shortages and three decades of wear have eroded the system’s top capacity. Many lines now carry as much as they can. When problems develop, the crush of riders and lack of redundancy quickly turn small problems into minor crises. And so we get new summer traditions for the city—problems and delays, and calls for investment in and improvements to Metro.
The situation is sure to get worse in the near future. It does seem that new funding will eventually be on its way, but the backlog of capital needs will probably absorb much of what has been allotted, limiting the potential for system expansion outside of what is already on the books. What is on the books—a spur through the heart of Fairfax County’s most populous areas—will add to the number of people riding Metro without adding capacity in the core, the hub that gives the hub and spoke design its valuable connectivity. Throughout the system, that connectivity has spurred growth in transit oriented development. Such growth allows the city to get denser without getting bogged down in congestion and pollution, but as development continues, it will also add new riders to the existing system. Without bold new expenditures, Metro will have to work hard just to continue to tread water.
That’s not acceptable for the District. With limited land available for dense growth, the city must be able to take full advantage of such space as it exists, and that means transit. Given the realities of Metro system planning, however, what’s a city to do? Fairfax County spent nearly two decades planning for its Silver Line through Tysons to Dulles, and for its trouble the county received a design it isn’t sure it wants. Making expansions happen is hard--maybe, it’s sad to say, impossible. Them’s the breaks. So now what?
Picture taken by Eye Captain.
Metro is going to remain vital to residents of the District as a way to get around, but the system was constructed as hub and spoke, designed to get people into the heart of the metropolitan area. As suburban growth continues and places new burdens on that system, District leaders need to find other ways to allow people to move about the growing core. If things remain as they are, new density and a crowded Metro will mean more people opting to buy cars. More cars will mean poorer bus service, curtailing the benefits of the only other real public transit option available to those in the District.
The new go-it-alone strategy for transportation planning in the region means we have to look out for ourselves. Here’s a short list of humble suggestions for the District. Do add your own policy ideas in the comments.
1. It’s still worth our while as a city to pay for a detailed study on the options available to us for Metro expansion within the core. Expansion may be too disruptive, or it could be that the cost of tunneling through the District given current technology is prohibitive. It would be nice to know, however, one way or another. We can’t expand alone, and we can’t start negotiating with the suburban jurisdictions if we don’t know what we need or can do. So by all means, we should study. It’s time, too, that Mayor Fenty move forward on the Anacostia and H Street streetcar lines. Delay won’t make their completion any cheaper, and the sooner the city can boost investment around those lines by improving the transportation infrastructure, the sooner the city will start realizing the benefits of new tax revenues from dense, inviting areas that previously struggled with poor connectivity to the city at large.
2. What then? The city desperately needs to begin thinking about these matters in a comprehensive way. Many of the most promising areas for dense development don’t lie along existing Metro corridors. The proposed Abdo development near the National Arboretum, for example, could be a great thing for a long neglected part of the city, but the residents who’ll live there will not be able to walk easily to a Metro station. Similarly, the development that will take place along North Capitol, at the McMillan Sand Filtration site and the Armed Forces Retirement Home property, will add people to an area that could use new energy but will also stress existing infrastructure. Already, the Brookland station, which I use daily, enjoys high ridership relative to the residential density around the station, because every morning hundreds of workers exit there and take buses to the massive Washington Hospital Center complex, which sits between the McMillan and AFRH sites. Brookland residents are rightly concerned about the effect of North Capitol development on both street and metro traffic. In addition to developing around transit, the city needs to figure out how to bring transit to developing areas that will need it.
The city should designate special transit corridors and begin working with residents and businesses to determine how to improve transit along them and how to pay for capacity upgrades, through designated bus lanes and, eventually, light rail. We should also allow large developers to build more densely in exchange for the payment of fees to be used for transit improvements. We already allow density boosts to developers that add affordable housing units; development in D.C. is a rich enough game that big projects can afford to chip in towards transit, especially since better connections mean better returns to new projects.
3. Other issues need to be considered with an eye toward how they’ll affect transit in the city as a whole. It looks like Mayor Fenty is willing to consider a plan to levy tolls on those entering the District from the suburbs. Assuming the city can find a workable system for doing that, then fine, I don’t have a problem with recovering some revenue from suburban commuters. But Fenty and the Council also have to think about the side effects of such a plan. Unlike congestion charges, tolling plans will likely not involve payment by District residents. As such, reduced congestion in the city from the tolls might result in more driving by city residents, who’ll have to spend less time sitting in traffic and fighting for parking.
If the city is determined to reduce traffic through tolls, they might consider setting space on major roads for dedicated bus lanes. Reduced congestion would make bus commutes much faster, while less lane space for local drivers would give District residents an incentive to stay on transit when they can. Dedicated bus lanes could also act as placeholders for light rail on lines where use is particularly high.
4. We have to take the easy steps. We need to improve trails and move forward on bike friendliness. We need to fix our taxi system and work to accommodate car sharing services. We need to quit giving government employees free on-street parking, and we should stop allowing or encouraging surface parking for new projects, especially when those projects are within sight of a Metro station--more drivers will only mean slower buses, less room for bikers, and fewer walkers. These are no-brainers, where small efforts and spending can make real contributions toward making the city an easier and better place to get around. Let’s quit shuttering clubs for a moment and get this stuff done.
5. Most importantly, the city needs to abandon its practice of separating uses. Large portions of the city are currently designated for residential development only, and that’s unlikely to change in the near future. Elsewhere, new growth should include residential, retail, and office development. Developments need to be created with an eye toward friendliness to walkers and users of transit. If you build huge parking lots, people are going to drive. If you build giant office blocks with no shops or homes to break the monotony, people aren’t going to walk around them any more than they have to. By combining walkability with mixed uses, new developments can minimize the extent to which new residents mean new car trips. Sometimes it seems like city planners understand this; other times, it doesn’t.
The city needs to start thinking about transportation as key to the economic vitality, aesthetics, and quality of life of the city, and as something that feeds into everything else the city does. We need to think about the kind of city we want, and we need to figure out how to get there. We have already passed the point where suburban style growth is an option; moving back in that direction erodes our advantages over the suburbs and reduces the amount of growth we can comfortably handle, limiting our market and dooming us to rump status in a metro area where other jurisdictions sometimes seem more serious about getting away from total car dependency than we do. That’s not what we deserve or, I have to think after listening to discussions here and around the city, what we want. Let’s plan ahead for once! I don’t want to be writing these same things in Julys five and ten years down the road.