Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. Not too long ago this site, along with the D.C. Council and much of the rest of the Washington area, was actively debating the incentive package for the new Washington Nationals stadium. At the time I was well aware of the questions about costs and benefits and was familiar with research on the subject suggesting that new stadia did not boost metropolitan......

Happy Friday morning, D.C. If you're like us, today is payday, and maybe you're feeling pretty good about the number of digits in your bank account. Perhaps you even plan to go out and make a major purchase this weekend, like say, finally upgrading that crappy stereo system you bought from K-mart before you started college. Maybe you're even smiling at your desk right this second, thinking of how proud you are to have saved......

If you approach the District every morning via the I-270 Interchange at the Capital Beltway in Montgomery County, you probably let an impressive barrage of expletives escape your lips on a daily basis about how bad a bottleneck the meeting of those two highways are. Luckily, Forbes magazine is here to tell you, you're not alone. Via WTOP, we learn today that the interchange in question has once again been named the 7th worst bottleneck......

Good morning, Washington. International politics watchers will no doubt spend their day today assigning meaning to the resignation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They'll speculate about the future of the Labour party, and draw conclusions regarding the possible consequences to the war in Iraq. Here at DCist, we toil with no such weighty topics. Nay, we'll spend our day fantasizing about what it must be like to live in a country where a massively......

If Alexandria officials are to be believed there has already been some impressive upside to their recruitment of the Patent and Trademark Office from the canyons of Crystal City to Carlyle, a neighborhood west of Old Town and north of the Capital Beltway. "We are now the intellectual capital of the world,'' says Stephanie Landrum, acting executive director of Alexandria's economic development office, according to the Washington Post. In addition to the over 7,000 employees......

It certainly is telling that even with all of the crime emergencies, red-light enforcements, speed traps, juvenile curfews, ShotSpotters and surveillance cameras, there's still no end of criminal mischief that can be had by any poorly-mannered child with an armload of rocks. Earlier this year, as the spring gave way to the heat of the summer, every major press organ in the city covered the upswing in incidents related to the damage and injury caused......

If we've learned one thing from the effort to extend the Orange Line through Tyson's to Dulles Airport, it's that two billion and change can buy you a pretty substantial amount of rail transit. Or, if you please, it can buy you 18 miles of road. The Inter-County Connector passed its final hurdle today, receiving official federal government approval and allowing construction to begin on the highway in the fall. The road will travel from......

In the 70's, Karen Carpenter sang that "Rainy Days and Mondays" always got her down. Well, this would chart as a real downer, as today combines the two. On a cheerier note, Saturday morning I took in the unveiling of Cultural DC's Shaw Heritage Trail, which included a fabulous performance by the Shiloh Baptist Church choir and had a great turn-out from the community; check out the Trail, and the local Shaw businesses, sometime in......

The National Harbor, a perplexing development scheme rising from the Prince George's County river flats just outside the Capital Beltway, has attracted additional hotel investments, giving the complex a planned total of 3,000 available rooms. The development will be anchored by the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, which will house 2,000 hotel rooms and a massive convention area and is scheduled to open in 2008. Yesterday, officials revealed that five more hotels will be......

It isn't much of a secret that twice daily the Capital Beltway becomes something of a parking lot. But a recent report prepared for the Federal Highway Administration tells us just how bad a parking lot it becomes. In a report assessing freight bottlenecks throughout the country, the interchange between I-495 and I-270 ranked seventh in the country, causing some 19,429 hours of delays annually. The interchange between I-495 and I-95 came in fifteenth, with......

It's military base closure and realignment time! Can't you feel the tension? A day after Northern Virginia went on alert that as many as 50,000 Defense Department workers could be leaving the area because their buildings do not meet federally mandated terrorist safeguards, a quiet corner of Bethesda might be the next area to see a Pentagon retreat. The Post reports that the Defense Department is considering consolidating agencies like the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on......

Thanks to How Now BrownPau posting an image on DCist Photos, we learn that the Post's Snow Cam is still up and running. From the Post: Oh, the weather outside is frightful! This image, taken inside the Capital Beltway, shows an unofficial measurement of accumulated snowfall, in inches. As BrownPau put it: "Today the forecast calls for 1.5" of light mulch." For the real forecast, go check out Capital Weather.......

Whether you agree with highway expansion or not, the new Springfield Mixing Bowl interchange (where a worker was killed this weekend) and the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge under construction are impressive pieces of infrastructure considering the amount of concrete and engineering ingenuity that have gone into the projects. The Capital Beltway connecting the two chokepoints is slated for some major improvements as well, and one of the most controversial is how Virginia is planning......

DCist doesn't have to tell anyone who regularly drives Interstate 95 in Virginia that traffic is bad. So we're going to refer you an AP article that the W.Times picked up saying that roadways like I-95 are reaching capacity. That means that there is no more room for additional vehicles, which means that rush hour lasts over many more hours. Virginia may be for lovers, but at least in Northern Virginia, only lovers of traffic.......