Results tagged “driving”

You have to feel sorry for the 15-year-old son of Vienna's Jenifer Joy Madden, who got outed by his mom in an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post for having only just now learned how to ride a bus.

We couched it as another test of their mettle. After all, if these 15-year-olds could swing at objects flying 90 miles an hour and get whacked by titanium lacrosse sticks, they could walk to a bus stop and ride a few miles across town.

The story of Madden's teenage son's first public bus ride home from school comes off sounding like a joke to those of us who live inside the District (one commenter on the Post's web site, who noted that they were "sure the kid was about 10, not 15!", neatly summed up my initial reaction), but we suppose sometimes we forget how different life is out in Fairfax County. And hey, if Madden's article inspires a few other suburban families to rethink their car-centric lifestyles just a little bit, then that's certainly a good thing.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty likes to keep active. The man gets up almost every day and runs, bikes or otherwise exercises for a solid hour (if not more), and he likes to be seen always zipping across town to take care of his mayoral business, whether in his little Smart Car or his big Lincoln Navigator. But ever since Fenty got in a fender-bender about a week ago, the Washington Post has had a hard-on about whether or not the mayor did anything wrong to cause the accident, and today Nikita Stewart goes ahead and asks the question: Should the mayor be driving himself around the city at all?

Reuters (via MSNBC) has a story about an annual driver survey that now ranks New York City drivers at the top when it comes to overly aggressive driving. Miami had been number one for the last few years, but New Yorkers have since taken their rightful place as the rudest Americans (behind the wheel). So how does D.C. stack up? Washington was actually ranked fifth on the list of least courteous driving cities last year, but has since fallen out of the top five. So have we really become nicer drivers? Umm... not so much:

Most people, 43 percent, reacted to bad driving by honking the horn. But 36 percent resorted to cursing, 13 percent waved their fists or arms and 10 percent made an obscene gesture.

Continue reading "D.C Drivers Admit to Bad Road Rage Behavior "

A tip of the hat to Loose Lips Daily for pointing us to this nugget from NBC4 on Friday: Ward 2 D.C. Council member Jack Evans says he wants the District to "reconsider" its cell phone driving ban. Now, we've written before about how most D.C. area drivers appear to be ignoring the law and how while the number of tickets issued keeps going up every year, enforcement is still pretty lax and certainly doesn't seem to be discouraging many people from breaking the law.

They very well might be "the devil," but that doesn't mean we don't want them to drive safer.

Back in November of 2007, we cited a report from the Washington Times, which showed that citations for simultaneously driving and using a cell phone were sharply rising every year. Well, this year is no different - take a look at the chart to your right.

Whilst browsing through our usual feed of transit news, we came upon this USA Today article about the Drive 55 campaign -- it was of modest interest, but nothing that seemed to be too D.C.-area related. After all, the speed limit for all our major highways in Maryland and Virginia have been set at 65 since the national limit was raised by Congress in November 1995 (see page 20 of this PDF), and only a scant few of the District's roads could even come close to safely allowing such high speeds.

We thought that we had noticed more Metro Transit Police patrolling at the mouths of Metro stations and up and down platforms in recent weeks, and now we might know part of the reason why: the total count of reported thefts in the system, both violent and not, is way up from last year. According to the Metro crime statistics site, year-to-date robberies and larceny in the entirety of the system are up about 38 percent and 14 percent respectively over 2007 numbers. At the same time, the overall arrest rate for Transit Police has slightly declined.

The amount of miles logged by Maryland, Virginia, and District drivers fell sharply in May, contributing to a national drop of more than 9.6 billion miles, the third largest slide in the country's history. The decrease saw local drivers notching between 1.7 and 4.2 percent fewer turns of the odometer. So, you might ask, what's this got to do with Metro?

You may have read Eric Weiss's story in Sunday's Washington Post, which described the District's attempts to improve pedestrian safety and encourage walking and mass transit use as a "war against workers who drive into the city." There's not much more to say about it that David Alpert and Ryan Avent haven't already said. This sums it up nicely (from Avent):

Essentially, Eric Weiss went around the suburbs asking folks to bitch about the District’s efforts to make the District a better place for people who live and pay taxes in the District

What we found especially irritating was how washingtonpost.com packaged the story with two online polls, one asking District residents whether they "agree with the city's plan to discourage people from driving into the District", and the other asking suburban residents the same thing. If you look at the results, you'll see that a majority on both sides think the city is doing the right thing, even though perhaps predictably, suburban respondents were less enthusiastic than city dwellers. A WaPo commenter did our work for us:

I applaud your coverage of the regional transportation issues. Re-examining our choices in light of current resource presures and climate risks is increasingly important. However, as you report, please be careful not to "make the news" by framing issues from one side or the other? For example, the poll associated with this article asks "Do you agree with the city's plan to discourage people from driving into the District?" I suspect the response would be different if it read "Do you agree with the city's plan to improve air quality and pedestrian safety, and provide safe routes to school?"

We've added our own poll below.

Do you own a car and have it registered in the District of Columbia? If so, you've already been through the nightmare of attempting to get your vehicle inspected at the District's only inspection facility at 1001 Half Street SW. Many of you have complained that there has to be a more efficient way to conduct inspections - well, now there is. WTOP reports that the D.C. DMV is now accepting reservations for appointments at the inspection station between 6:30 a.m. and 6 p.m., Tuesday through Friday. One word of advice though, for those of you with ESP: appointments scheduled during a major heat wave could get bumped.

Major roadwork is scheduled on the Outer Loop starting Friday night and lasting until Sunday afternoon, which will reduce traffic to one lane in preparation for next week's shift to moving traffic onto the second span of the Wilson Bridge.

The Examiner reports on a new bill before the D.C. Council that would levy a $25 per month tax on all private employee parking spaces. The legislation is the brainchild of Ward 1 Council member Jim Graham and At-large member Phil Mendelson, and is designed to discourage employees from driving in to work even though they have access to a parking space at their office.