Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

We've spent plenty of time debating whether or not the District's taxicabs should stick to the zone system or join the rest of the modern world and employ meters. Last year, Congress passed legislation giving the District until this October to switch to meters, and more recently, the D.C. Taxicab Commission released a study that found that on average, meters were cheaper. Of course, cab drivers have long opposed the prospect of a switch, and......

Too often, when we think of problems with our transit service here in D.C., it's from the perspective of a commuter headed to work. It's not an unreasonable point of view; much of the travel that takes place in the District is for commuting. Ensuring Metro's morning and evening rush are as smooth and painless as possible is critical to keeping business in the city, as well as attracting more of it. Commerce is......

Steve Eldridge over at the Examiner notes that fewer Washingtonians are driving themselves solo to work than they were three years ago. According to the unfortunately titled “Preliminary Draft Commuter Connections State of the Commute Survey 2007 Survey Technical Report,” the number of those in the region driving by themselves to job locations outside the home was 71 percent, compared with 74.1 percent in the 2004 survey. This survey is put together by the Metropolitan......

Feel like your morning commute isn't already filled with enough ads for Lockheed Martin or the anti-abortion lobby? Then the Examiner brings you good tidings, as a proposal is on the table to greatly expand the amount of space available to advertisers on Metrorail and Metrobuses. Metro General Manager John Catoe hopes the proposal will help balance the long out of whack WMATA budget without increasing fares. But just where would the ads go? Some......

Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network. It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by......

Good Morning, Washington. It looks like another fine spring day from our vantage point at DCist headquarters -- weather fit for a queen, as it were. Thanks to Flickr user Jon-Miles for sharing some of his shots with us from yesterday's press event with President Bush and Queen Elizabeth II. Today is the final day of the Queen's tour of the region. Before a private dinner with the Bushes, she'll spend it by visiting the......

Good Monday morning, D.C. Since we get up early to skim the day's headlines, we couldn't help but notice that today was one of the first days since we switched to Daylight Saving Time that the sun was up before we were. Not to mention that it's already staying light until 7 p.m. We love this time of year, when suddenly, as things get steadily warmer, we're filled with a desire to get outside and......

We're all familiar with The Rules. You know, that iron clad system by which every woman can land herself the man of her dreams and keep him, if only she's willing to act like the most obnoxious kind of person you've ever met. Of course, men have rules, too. They just don't publish them. They've been passed down in locker rooms, cigar-choked men's-only clubs, and fraternity houses for time immemorial. The fact is, I could......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an ideal......

Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues. I asked in a post last week that developers not go out of their way to accomodate cars and that residents not go out of their way to drive. Reasonable propositions. Still, as a number of commenters noted, you can't suggest something along those lines and then expect Washingtonians to be heroes, throwing knapsacks over their shoulders as they head off on......

Though we often sing the praises of public transit, there's usually not anything fun about jumping on the Metro at rush hour to get to work. It's crowded, people are surly, and you inevtitably engage in that awkward two-step dance to get around the one commuter that has decided they're going to occupy the middle of the aisle, everyone else be damned. But now and then something breaks up the daily monotony of Metro commutes......

Just when Jim Graham does something to make us mad, he comes back and does something good. As part of a pilot program sponsored by the Ward 1 council member, there is now a crime camera outside the 13th and U entrance of the U Street Metro, which the station managers will monitor. Interestingly, Graham opposed a similar camera in Adams Morgan. While there are legitimate reasons for discomfort with the overall crime camera program,......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

While D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty officially pays tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today at the University of the District of Columbia, one question comes to mind -- how well has the District actually guarded and promoted King's legacy? Given the state of a library and an avenue named after the famed civil rights fighter, not too well. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library stands as a contradiction at the corner of Ninth......

Happy Holidays! Chances are, you're reading this the day after Christmas, back at your day job after all-too-short a holiday, and the last thing you want from us is stuff about the holidays. But that's just too bad. Because, see, here in the Ist-A-Verse, we do things ahead of time. It might be December 26 for you, but that's what you get for not checking your Favorite Local Blog on Christmas Eve. Austinist is......

Torontoist visits the site of a new Frank Gehry structure, stalks "the elusive Bahamas streetcar", and watches Tom Green get surgery. Phillyist rejoices in the Phillies' wild card chances, mourns the injuries sustained by Eagles defensive end Jevon Kearse, and goes pirate on our asses. SFist notes that Guns and Roses were in town, that San Franciscans are taking over reality TV, and that the San Francisco Chronicle's skills of original nomenclature could use some......

Happy Wednesday, Washington. We don't know about you guys, but we feel strongly that last night was excessively hot. Especially if you were stupid enough to wear jeans while sitting outdoors drinking beer — as muggy as it was, just peeling those suckers off and managing to climb into bed with a fan pointed straight at your head was a minor miracle. So it is with great fanfare that DCist announces, starting today, three days......

When the new span of the Wilson Bridge was first opened, the Washington Post published an editorial asking, "What's next?" Given this area's staggering growth rate, we're all in serious trouble if another 35 years goes by without another new bridge. Yet there is no active planning for another Potomac crossing.That may be true for the Potomac, but when it comes to D.C.'s other river, plans are moving rapidly forward for reconstruction of the 11th......

Breaking the law, breaking the law We -ist folks love us some crime, and no misdemeanor is too petty for a post on any of our sites. This week, join us for a rogues' gallery of miscreants major, minor, and alleged. Gothamist gets us started with "Law & Order", muppet style. Oh, you know what isn't a crime? Taking pictures on the MTA. So, why are cops stopping photographers? In other Gotham crime, a......

Ok, so we're no Portland or San Francisco, but we're also not Columbus or Oklahoma City. According to rankings released yesterday by SustainLane.com, the District is the twelfth most sustainable of the nation's 50 largest cities, coming in just behind Baltimore (11) and fellow -ist cities Boston (8), New York (7), Chicago (5), Philadelphia (4), Seattle (3), and San Francisco (2). According to the write-up on the city, the District fared well on public transit......

We're not big fans of Dick Cheney. It's not the whole obsession with secrecy, or the way he's encouraged his aides to out CIA officers. It's not the refusal to accept that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda are not the same thing, or his long-standing ties to government contracting juggernaut Halliburton. It's that damn motorcade and security detail. A few months back WTOP discovered that Cheney's motorcade -- yes, the one that regularly snarls traffic......

We spend plenty of time complaining about the state of the region's public transit network, be it delays on Metrorail, unpredictable arrival times for Metrobuses, or just too much traffic along area roadways. But at least we don't have to hitchhike to work. Today the Post features an entertaining feature on John Schindel, a Stafford County man whose decade-old DUI conviction has left him at the mercy of fellow motorists to get him to and......

Opinionist runs every Sunday. DCist welcomes your thoughts on life in DC. Drop us a line if you've got an opinion to share. I'm pleased to see that a vocal opposition to Mayor Anthony Williams' current proposal to raise fees and place limits on residential parking permits has already cropped up, because it is a truly terrible plan. Not only will it create an additional financial strain on D.C. residents who already pay through the......

The Back of People's Heads: It invariably happens to us all. For one reason or another, we get stuck on a Red Line train from Metro Center to Shady Grove with nothing to read, nothing to distract our attention from staring out into the darkened tunnels or straight ahead at the back of the person's head seated in front of us. So we stare. We start judging the health of their hair, the quality of......

It may not have been scenic, but it was intended to make a point. As Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's Republican gubernatorial candidate, stood above I-66, he sold a plan he hopes will sway enough Northern Virginia voters to pull in his favor come the November 8 election -- the addition of two lanes to I-66 from the Beltway into the District. With Democratic candidate Tim Kaine leading Kilgore in both Northern Virginia and the state at......

If you own your own car, the already limited parking in the District is slowly getting scarcer. The District Department of Transportation today designated an additional 50 on-street parking spaces for car-sharing services like Zipcar and Flexcar. The new spaces will be located throughout the city, will be specially marked, and join the 150 parking spaces currently in use. Given the notorious congestion and parking difficulties in the District, transportation officials have promoted car-sharing as......

Today Transit on Thursday will focus on one issue -- public officials and public transit -- to allow for an exclusive interview we are finishing up for tomorrow. We caught up with Dennis Jaffe, a Sierra Club volunteer whose tireless work all but created the newly-formed Riders Advisory Council. We're picking his brain, and we'll have that on tap tomorrow. In the meantime, can anyone guess to what metro system the above picture belongs?......

Good morning, Washington. Today it will be partly cloudy with a 30 percent chance of rain, so be prepared. Flickr user birdcage from Missives from the Birdcage posted this photo of the Prince George's County Fair to DCist photos. We are getting excited for our first birthday party tomorrow at Stetson's - will we see you there? Cost of Living Rises in Area: Yesterday we reported and analyzed the news that affordable housing in the......

For the sake of not having to write separate posts for all these different yet interesting events, here is a list of some things you may not want to miss in the area this week. TUESDAY >> Has your commute on public transit been especially bad recently? Or is there something you've just had to get out, something you've wanted to scream at a WMATA executive for the longest time? Tonight is your chance. WMATA......