We’ve written before about DDOT’s plan to build a streetcar system throughout the District.  The city already owns three streetcars and is storing them temporarily in Greenbelt.

The city recently installed rails and mini-platforms (see below) along the western end of Benning Road in Northeast Washington.  Here are some photos we took this weekend of our shiny new infrastructure.

Above: Median platform at 19th Street NE.

Below: The tracks are embedded in a linear concrete pad that runs along the inner lanes of Benning Road.

The rails will continue along H Street NE toward Union Station.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen

The District recently renovated and reopened Champlain Street to cars under the Marie Reed Center.  The new street is one-way southbound for cars and includes a northbound contraflow bike lane.  The reopened street will improve street connectivity between Adams Morgan and the U Street corridor.  Currently, much of the car traffic is forced onto Ontario Road on the east and Eighteenth Street on the west.

The northbound contraflow bike lane will connect nicely to the westbound bike lane on V Street (mapped below).  Though bicycles are entitled to ride on all District streets, LeDroit residents who prefer bike lanes will find a more relaxed route along V Street (from Vermont Avenue) westward to Florida Avenue, then northward on Champlain Street.

Champlain Street and vicinity. The blue line marks the northwestern edge of the L'Enfant Plan

The roadway just south of the Marie Reed Center has been renamed Champlain Street to signify its continuation from the north.  Its old namesake, Old Morgan School Place,  has since been shortened from its former L-shape to its one remaining block between the Reed Center and the PEPCO substation.

We applaud DDOT and Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who spearheaded the reopening, for accommodating cyclists and connecting the street grids.  Connected streets alleviate traffic jams as they provide more alternatives routes when the main streets become unexpectedly crowded.

Highlights from Thursday’s monthly meeting of ANC1B: New restaurants and lounges are on their way to U Street.  Office construction in the District may be hurting, but neo-Victorian townhouses will replace an old parking lot on Vermont Avenue.  Fifteenth Street’s protected bike lane will finally enter Ward 1.

Bar Fights

Several commissioners bickered over the process of approving liquor licenses— in this case a procedural dispute— but the commission relented and took no further action on Cuckoo Marans and the U Street Music Hall, both of which we wrote about earlier.  The ANC typically protests all new licenses officially as a means to goad applicants to reach voluntary agreements with the ANC.  These voluntary agreements tend to be less permissive than the District’s standing liquor laws.

In new business, a new liquor license applicant presented his plans for Café Society, which he billed as an affordable and upscale (oxymoron?) steakhouse that will feature steaks (of course) and local produce.  The 139-seat steakhouse will occupy the ground floor and upper floors (and a roof terrace) of the newly renovated building on the northeast corner of Fourteenth and U Streets.  Cuckoo Marans will occupy the basement of the same building.

Against the Grain

DDOT sought and received the ANC’s support for extending the Fifteenth Street southbound contraflow bike lane from U Street northward to the foot of Meridian Hill at W Street.  Fifteenth Street is one-way northbound from Massachusetts Avenue on the edge of downtown all the way up to Columbia Heights. Though one resident complained of renegade cyclists disobeying traffic laws, the ANC voted to support the lane anyway.  Commissioner Brianne Nadeau (ANC1B05 -  Meridan Hill) expressed her desire to see the lane extended all the way up Meridian Hill to Euclid Street, but DDOT is not seeking that extension just yet, though they seem to be studying it, if informally.

When DDOT began installing the contraflow lane in November, Councilmember Jim Graham (D – Ward 1) flipped out at DDOT’s alleged inadequate notification of his constituents.  In response DDOT built the lane along Fifteenth Street in Ward 2, but stopped at Ward 1′s boundary at U Street.  A chastened DDOT now has the ANC’s approval.

Home Again

A local developer and his architect presented plans to build three townhouses (two units each) on the south side of the parking lot at T Street and Vermont Avenue.  The architect displayed several handsome elevation drawings, all in a Victorian style, that match the rich neighboring architecture.  Each of the three townhouses will feature alley-accessible garages.  The developer will also replace the existing concrete sidewalk with brick, our favorite paving material.  The north side of the parking lot will also be redeveloped as part of a separate project.

Have you ever waited 30 minutes for a Metro train?  That may become the norm on evenings if WMATA has its way.  The transit agency is proposing to close a $40-million budget gap for the current fiscal year with a variety of measures, including the elimination of some jobs, the closure of certain mezzanines (including Shaw’s R Street entrance) at night, and by the reduction of call-center hours among other things.  The worst part of the proposal, however, involves the reduction of train frequencies in the early mornings, late-nights and on weekends.  One part of the proposal also calls for eliminating the eight-car trains that run on the Orange and Green Lines.

Many transit and urban planning bloggers around town have are warning of the “death spiral” that occurs when public agencies sharply reduce the quality and reach of their core services.  Since reducing the frequency of trains reduces the intrinsic value of the transit system, the cuts risk driving away customers, thus ensuring a vicious cycle of ridership declines and subsequent revenue declines and service cuts.

The proposed frequency reductions mean that on Saturdays, Metro will actually run less often than the subway of Los Angeles.  Los Angeles!

Our ANC Commissioner Myla Moss (ANC1B01 – LeDroit Park) emailed Councilmember Jim Graham (D – Ward 1) criticizing WMATA’s plan to close Shaw’s R Street entrance (the south entrance) late at night.  Though we see how mezzanine closures will inconvenience a few riders by a few minutes at a few stations, we believe the real disservice is happening on the platforms: reducing train frequency will inconvenience all riders at every station.

Mr. Graham, we should remind you, is also the chairman of the WMATA board, which will hold a hearing and vote on the cuts on January 7.  We have already emailed Mr. Graham to alert him to the dangers in some of the proposed cuts.  We encourage you to let him know what you think.

Jim,

Can you imagine waiting 30 minutes for a Metro train to arrive? WMATA’s budget-cut proposal will leave many riders doing just that.

I’m worried that WMATA’s proposal to drastically cut rail and bus service is a terrible mistake that may lead to a “death spiral” in ridership and revenue. The proposed cuts to train and bus frequency will further turn off riders from the system, since reducing service makes the system intrinsically less valuable at a time when the District’s population is rising.

Your constituents in Ward One, a ward with some of the city’s highest population densities and lowest rates of car-ownership, will suffer greatly from reduced mobility options.

I urge you to vote against the proposal and request that WMATA management return with other options (e.g. fare increases, pay/benefit freezes, further staff reductions, entrance closings) that do not sacrifice the system’s core mission of providing decent mass-mobility.

Let us not follow the mistake of New York City, which, when faced with tax revenue shortfalls in the 1970s, reduced basic city services sharply. The reduction in services (park cleanings, street repairs, street sweepings, etc.) reduced the city’s attractiveness and further exacerbated the city’s financial woes— why stay in the city if the services are declining? Please do not let Metro (and DC, by extension) suffer a similar fate. Your constituents (and I am one of them) are heavily reliant on convenient and frequent transit service, which gives the District a competitive advantage over other cities and over the surrounding jurisdictions.

Eric Fidler
LeDroit Park

P.S. I am willing to pay a reasonable fare increase to avoid service cuts.

P.P.S. These proposed cuts will make trains less frequent than they are in Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, and New York. I can’t imagine a world in which even L.A. has better train service than Washington.

Let’s hope the board avoids these core-service reductions.

We wrote earlier about the rebirth of DC’s streetcar system and even suggested our own alignment for a full-length Rhode Island Avenue line.

As we reported, the city’s three streetcars were collecting dust in the city of Plzeň in the Czech Republic, where they were manufactured.  Today they completed their transatlantic voyage and landed at the Port of Balitmore. DDOT recorded the event:

The streetcars will be transported to the Greenbelt Metro railyard, where WMATA staff will maintain them until the tracks are ready.

Speaking of tracks, DDOT has finished laying down the streetcar tracks along Benning Road in Northeast.

DDOT took this photo on Benning Road NE at 17th Street NE, just two blocks outside the L’Enfant Plan, where overhead catenery wires are prohibited by law— another issue DDOT will have to resolve.

DDOT is ambitiously moving ahead with the streetcar plan, but Councilmember Jim Graham (D – Ward 1) told us that though he may not see the streetcars in his lifetime, I’d see them in mine (you’re writer is 25).  Not fully reassuring, but better than nothing.

Careful observers occasionally spot the old street signs adorning a few of the light poles in LeDroit Park.  When the neighborhood was originally planned, most of the streets were named after trees.  LeDroit Park’s street system didn’t fit with the L’Enfant Plan in either name or alignment—much to the dismay of the District commissioners—and the street names were eventually changed to fit the naming and numbering system.

A perusal of old maps reveals that the street names changed over time, not all at once.  Elm Street is the only street that has retained its name.  Since your author lives on Elm Street he has learned to respond to puzzled faces that know that Elm doesn’t fit the street naming system: “It’s kinda like U-and-1/3 Street”.

Anna J. Cooper Circle didn’t have a name at all until 1983, when it was restored to its circular form after a decades-long bisection by Third Street.

Just outside of LeDroit Park, the city renamed a few streets as well: 7th Street Road became Georgia Avenue and Boundary Street, the boundary of the L’Enfant Plan, became Florida Avenue.

Here is a table matching the current street names with their previous names.

Signs bearing the old street names have reappeared in the neighborhood, and according to the Afro-American, were put up in 1976:  “The LeDroit Park Historic District Project was instrumental in getting the D.C. Department of Transportation to put up the old original street names for this Historic District Area under the present street name signs”.¹

Unfortunately, some of the signs are showing their 33 years of weather, as this sign at Third and U Streets shows.

Eventually these signs will have to be replaced, but rather than placing the old names onto modern signs using a modern typeface, we suggest something that evokes the history without being mistaken for the current street name:

White text on a brown background is the standard for street and highway signs pointing to areas of recreation or cultural interest.  Seattle started using the color scheme to mark its historic Olmsted boulevards and New York has long used the combination for street signs in its historic districts.  The adoption of this style of sign would alert visitors and residents to the neighborhood’s historic identity while the different color and typeface would prevent confusion with the actual street names (U St NW in this case).  Typographers would be pleased by the use of Big Caslon Medium, a serif typeface based on the centuries-old Caslon typeface.

1. Hall, Ruth C. “Historic Project”. Washington Afro-American. 1 May 1976.

One wonderful feature of living in LeDroit Park is not only its proximity to downtown, but the variety of options in getting downtown.

A cab ride to Chinatown is only about $5.50.  A walk is only 25 minutes. The Green and Yellow lines stop at 7th and S Streets in Shaw.  Numerous buses run along 7th Street and Georgia Avenue toward downtown.  For those of us who can’t tolerate the 70s buses that stop every block, the limited-stop 79 stops at 7th and T Streets, just two stops before downtown.

Yet there is another frequently overlooked option: picking up a SmartBike at 7th and T Streets and riding downtown to another bike station.

SmartBike was established by the advertising company Clear Channel Outdoor as a quid-pro-quo for having the right to advertise in the city’s bus shelters. For a flat, annual $40 fee, subscribers receive an RFID card (just like a SmarTrip card) that they wave at a station, which then unlocks a bike in response.  A member may use the bike for up to three hours and can return it to any station.

When the weather is nice, your author frequently picks up a bike at 7th & T Streets and rides it to work near Metro Center.  He returns it to a station located on his office’s block at 12th and G Streets (across the street from Macy’s).  Since the cost is a flat $40 per year, there is no additional cost for each ride.

DDOT, which pushed Clear Channel for this program, is ultimately responsible for bringing the idea to the District.  DDOT Director Gabe Klein, formerly a Zipcar executive, promises to expand the program by next spring.  Currently there are only ten stations, which limits the program’s utility for many residents.  Since a bike must be returned to a station, but may be returned to any station, SmartBike is subject to something akin to the the network effect, i.e. the more stations there are, the more inherently useful the system is.

Though Mr. Klein did not specify if the SmartBike expansion would use a new bike vendor, Greater Greater Washington noticed that the Montréal newspaper Le Soleil (The Sun) is reporting that their hometown bike-sharing champion, named Bixi, is preparing to sign a deal with the District, presumably replacing the current Clear Channel arrangement.  The main advantage of the Bixi bikes is that their stations are solar-powered and can be deployed virtually anywhere, whereas the current stations require the costly (and often complicated) installation of power lines under existing sidewalks downtown.

Hopefully by next spring we will be able to pick up a bike and tool on over to places other than downtown.

With some careful consideration of DDOT’s proposed streetcar system, we suggest one alteration regarding the Rhode Island Avenue route.  DDOT would prefer to run the purple route all the way down Rhode Island Avenue from P.G. County to Florida Avenue (at the edge of LeDroit Park), at which point it would follow Florida Avenue northwest to U Street, then down 14th Street to K Street.

We suggest that DDOT study placing the route entirely along Rhode Island Avenue all the way to downtown.  Rhode Island Avenue empties out onto M Street, which the route would follow onto New Hampshire Avenue and then to Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom, where it could turn back.

Our proposed route has several advantages:

• It’s more intuitive. Rather than zig-zagging from Rhode Island Avenue to Florida Avenue to U Street then to 14th Street, then to K Street, the proposed route would simply follow Rhode Island Avenue all the way downtown.  In fact, the route would become synonymous with the avenue, which is well known in the city and P.G. County as one of the main arteries.  Riders familiar with the city but unfamiliar with the map will know exactly where the line goes.
• It avoids congestion on Florida Avenue. The 400, 500, and 600 blocks of Florida Avenue NW, on the edge of LeDroit Park, are frequently congested even during non-rush hour periods.  Avoiding this section of road will reduce delays on the line.
• It’s more direct. DDOT’s route would take inbound passengers southwest along Rhode Island Avenue, and then northwest at Florida Avenue.  Our alignment cuts the distance from LeDroit Park to Washington Circle by 29% (2.0 miles versus 2.8 miles).
• It’s more central to Shaw. The proposed route passes closer to the center of the Shaw neighborhood and passes by the Metrorail station entrance at 7th Street and R Street on Rhode Island Avenue.  DDOT’s alignment passes on the edge of Shaw and two blocks from the Metrorail entrance.
• It provides more redundancy downtown.  In the event of a closure of the K Street Transitway (for an accident, vehicle breakdown, street protest, etc.) anywhere from Washington Circle to 14th Street, the proposed route provides a parallel set of tracks just a few blocks away allowing a quick diversion around the trouble spot.

This proposal will not reduce coverage at all, since the route we suggest eliminating is already covered by at least one other proposed line.

The map below illustrates the difference.  Click the buttons to switch between the DDOT proposal and the DDOT proposal with our amendment.

DDOT proposal
Left for LeDroit Amendment

Download an image of our proposal.

To follow up on the previous post on reviving the city’s streetcar network, d. has produced a video simulation of what the K Street Transitway will look like.  Skip ahead to 5:07 to see the streetcar cameo.

The District Department of Transportation (d.) is holding several open houses to display the department’s long-term and short-term plans for expanding transit in the city.  These plans, often dubbed DC’s Transit Future, have been on the record since 2002 and a few of the recommendations (the creation of Circulator routes and Metro Extra service) have been in place for some time now.

The most ambitious feature, a network of streetcars, is still in the works.  As it stands, the city already owns a set of three streetcars (one is pictured above) and is storing them in Plzeň, Czech Republic, until they can be deployed on the reconstructed H Street in Northeast.  The first segment of the reincarnated streetcar system was set to be the short Anacostia streetcar “demonstration” project, but a series of delays and heavy lobbying by Councilmember Tommy Wells (D – Ward 6) have caused Mayor Fenty to reallocate the streetcars to H Street NE (more on the trouble with that below).

Earlier this evening d. released its latest proposal for an eight-line, 37-mile streetcar network to be built in three phases.  Three of the proposed routes will border LeDroit Park:

• Orange Route – Georgia Avenue-U St-Downtown-Foggy Bottom-Waterfront: In Phase 1 this section will run along Georgia Avenue from Petworth to Florida Avenue, at which point it will turn west to follow Florida Avenue onto U Street, then south on 14th Street into downtown.  At K Street, it will turn west and follow the forthcoming K Street Transitway to Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom.  In Phase 3, the train will be rerouted so that it stays on 14th Street all the way downtown, where it will turn east on F Street, then south on 7th Street all the way to the Waterfront on M Street SW.  The route will end on 4th Street SW at Fort McNair.
• Purple Route – Rhode Island Avenue-Florida Avenue-U St-Downtown-Foggy Bottom: Phase 2 calls for constructing a line along Rhode Island Avenue in Prince George’s County all the way to Florida Avenue on the edge of LeDroit Park, at which point, the route follows Florida Avenue (a very congested section of roadway)  northwest and onto U Street, then south on 14th Street to K Street.  At K Street, it will turn west and follow the forthcoming K Street Transitway to Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom.
• Green Route – Woodley Park-Adams-Morgan-U St-Florida Avenue-Capitol Hill-Anacostia-Southeast: Phase 2 also calls for a crosstown route route to pass beside LeDroit Park between Woodley Park and Southeast Washington.  The route will start on Calvert Street in Woodley Park, cross the Ellington Bridge into Adams-Morgan, where it will follow 18th Street south to U Street, where it will turn east all the way onto Florida Avenue (at 9th Street).  It will follow Florida Avenue all the way to 8th Street NE, on which it will travel south into Capitol Hill to the Navy Yard at M Street SE.  It will cross the Anacostia River on the future 11th Street Bridge and follow MLK Avenue through Anacostia and into the far southern reaches of the District.

We have created a map illustrating how the streetcar plan will enhance mobility for LeDroit Park.

Don’t be mistaken; these are just three of eight lines under consideration.

Though we are enthusiastic about the plan, we harbor several concerns about the future direction of this effort.

First, the city must sustain the political will to follow through on these projects.  Building a streetcar network requires money and popular support.  We have lamented privately that DC’s leadership often ignores transit improvements, but it appears that the projects have the support of Council Chairman Vincent Gray (D – At large) and Councilmember Wells as well as the support of Mayor Fenty and d. director Gabe Klein.  However, the fact the Anacostia line is several years late illustrates some of the complexities involved with building a new system.

Second, some jurisdictions have seen the price tags of such improvements and lost their nerve.  Some have sought to build cheaper alternatives to streetcars by providing buses that run in their own dedicated bus lanes.  This mode, called bus rapid transit, usually requires payment before boarding and has worked well in some cities (e.g. Curitiba, Brazil).  The problem is that in America, buses carry a negative image and will have difficulty attracting middle-income riders who would otherwise drive.  Additionally, streetcars have higher ridership capacities and are better able to attract development to their routes— no one has ever marketed a property by noting its proximity to a bus stop, after all.

Third, streetcars require overhead catenary wires for power.  For the past 120 years Congress has prohibited such wires within the L’Enfant Plan (roughly the area bounded by Florida Avenue, the Potomac, and the Anacostia) and in Georgetown.  Unless Congress repeals the ban, streetcars will stop at Florida Avenue or the city will have to invest in some alternative, experimental source of power (e.g. batteries or electromagnetic induction through the street pavement).

Either way, it’s important for residents to ask questions and show their support.  The Ward One open house is set for Monday, October 26, 2009, from 7 – 8:30 pm at the Columbia Heights Education Campus, 3101 16th Street, NW (metro: Columbia Heights).  d. is hosting open houses throughout the city through November 4.