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It was more than mere citizen opposition that led to the canelling of the Georgetown Metro station. As I understand it, there is some significant natural/geological impediments that would have made placing a stop there quite difficult. The common story is that the well-heeled Georgetown socialites rose up and defeated Metro, but the reality is that even without citizen opposition a stop there was no sure thing.
There were engineering challenges to serving Georgetown, but if the citizens of Georgetown had wanted Metro, IMO it would have happened. The primary issue would have been the depth of the stations, but the Forest Glenn station is so deep there aren't escalators. Something similar would have worked in Georgetown.
Most cities with public transport have the same design. Look at the map of NYC subway, clearly some lines were added later as an afterthought, but you can see that all lines lead, well, to Manhattan. Same thing with the BART system in SF Bay Area where you have absolutely no connections between nearby suburbs and must go to the city center to jump to another line. Driving between let's say Walnut Creek and Dublin would take 20 min or 50 min in traffic, but taking BART between the two (both have stations) would take about 2 hours.
The reason why most cities developed this design is because public rail system were meant to bring people from the suburbs to the jobs in the city. The suburban corporate parks were the developments of the recent decade and have caused the sprawl to get uglier and created the entire mess of the inter-suburban commute. When most public transit systems were laid out suburbs were purely residential areas with not too many offices and most of the commute was between the suburb and downtown.
I do like strolling around Georgetown, when I'm back there.
However, it's clear that the lack of a metro stop in Georgetown has had a huge negative effect on the area. Sending a fleet of #30 buses that travel at a rate of 1 block per seven minutes through already congested Wisconsin and M Street is not a transportation plan. And to zone parking until 10 PM is insane.
And what prevents you from walking a few blocks to get to either Dupont or Foggy Bottom metro station? I lived in Foggy Bottom near metro and didn't think Gtown was that far away, in fact I thought it was one of the closest interesting areas around, it took about 10 min to walk there or less if you walk fast. 20 min walk everyday to get to the metro is good for you, if the weather is bad, take a bus.
Most cities with public transport have the same design. Look at the map of NYC subway, clearly some lines were added later as an afterthought, but you can see that all lines lead, well, to Manhattan. Same thing with the BART system in SF Bay Area where you have absolutely no connections between nearby suburbs and must go to the city center to jump to another line. Driving between let's say Walnut Creek and Dublin would take 20 min or 50 min in traffic, but taking BART between the two (both have stations) would take about 2 hours.
Good point. And Chicago's El gets connected at The Loop. Metro's design is perfectly fine and gets you to a lot of places. The only subway that gets more riders is NYC's. So people obviously like it, and you(Orlando) having a problem with it isn't going to cause any of us missing sleep over it.
I also agree with KT that the walk isn't long at all. If you go to NYC, you still have to walk 10-15 minutes to a lot of place.
Another good option for Georgetown is taking the Circulator bus. There are limited stops on a shorter route, it costs $1, and runs every 10 minutes.
I was thinking about it, and I've come up with a series of steps the city of DC must take soon if it wants to become a world class business center. Otherwise, it will continue to be like some quaint prehistoric insect trapped in amber in a museum while some edge city in VA or MD overtakes it:
1. At least one real highway going into the city that can handle a large volume of traffic and ease congestion.
2. Metro is better than it used to be, but it's still more of a showpiece than an efficient public transportation system. It needs to make the following changes:
a. hire more elevator repairman so that elevators not constantly broken
b. tear out seats and put just two rows of seats facing each other, to fit more passengers on trains
c. Dump the current pricing system. Raise the price and have just one price for any trip. This will make things so much simpler, and cut down the queues at the machines. The current system is too confusing for tourists.
d. Create a new metro card that's more durable and doesn't get demagnetized as easily.
e. Create more metro stops. There needs to be at least a stop in Georgetown and palisade.
f. Change the card system so that you only need to put the card in once, when you enter the system.
g. Improved safety training so that there are less train crashes and other incidents.
h. connect the suburban metro stops to each other better. You should be able to take the metro from silver spring to nearby bethesda without riding through 30 stops first.
3. Improve customer service. Right now too many employees with a surly attitude at stores, and generally slow service. Customer service in DC needs to be brought up to the level of the rest of the country.
4. Experiment with removing the building height restriction in just one area of the city to see how it goes.
I was thinking about it, and I've come up with a series of steps the city of DC must take soon if it wants to become a world class business center. Otherwise, it will continue to be like some quaint prehistoric insect trapped in amber in a museum while some edge city in VA or MD overtakes it:
I'm at work while writing this, so forgive me for any mistakes:
You have some good points, but I think that DC can thrive just fine without a few of them. First of all, I wouldn't worry about any edge city coming up and stealing DC's thunder. Tysons is still the 800-pound gorilla in that department, and it is still a mere pittance compared to DC in terms of office space and infrastructure. That tends to be a problem in Sunbelt cities, because the downtowns are pretty weak in to begin with.
Putting another highway into DC isn't going to solve anything, and the city is actually taking steps to go into the opposite direction. If you look at cities like Paris and London, you'll see that they also don't have highways that go into the core of the city. DC doesn't need them either. At this point, we would have to tear down neighborhoods, and reconfigure the street grid in order to get something like that accomplished. NYC actually doesn't have high-volume highways that go directly into Manhattan either. They take you into the borough, and dump you onto the street grid. The point is to encourage people to use other modes of transit, instead of clogging the streets. Atlanta is a good example of what not to do in this instance (not to harp on ATL).
I agree that they should hire more maintenance people for the system, but I don't know how realistic that will be for the forseeable future with the budget problems. The new Smartcard, while rather pricey to many, is actually an antenna inside of a card, and more sturdy. They are also creating infill stations, such as NY Ave, and soon Potomac Yards in VA. They have talked about reconfiguring the seat structure on the trains, but I don't know what happened with that, maybe it'll come up again.
The biggest changes to the system will be the light rail/streetcars that will fill in some of the blanks (provided that they are implemented correctly): the Purple line (which will connect Bethesda and Silver Spring), the Columbia Pike light rail project, and the revival of the DC streetcars. A Georgetown metro stop is probably out of the question at this point, just because of cost, and I can't see Palisades crew supporting a metro stop in their neighborhood. NIMBYism is already starting to get more intense as of late (see Tenleytown).
I agree with you in earnest about the customer service. There does need to be some type of retraining of sorts, so that some of the image of the typical Metro employee is not similar to that of a DMV employee.
I would love to see the height restriction lifted outside of the Federal City, perhaps in some up and coming retail areas. But you can't experiment with a 50 story building...you'll end up with Tour Montparnasse, which the Parisians felt was an eyesore, but one they can't get rid of. Maybe a gradual process staring in areas that are slated to go along the streetcar line, provided that they are already successful districts in terms of density, retail, and office space.
One of the biggest beefs that I have with people in this area is that they forget that this is a big-city transit system, not a tourist attraction. There is NO PERFECT rapid transit system in the US, because for many tax-paying Americans, transit is of secondary importance compared to highways. WMATA needs a dedicated funding source, instead of having to beg, borrow and steal every year to make the numbers work. Having it being held hostage by a combination of local government whims and Congress isn't helping the situation at all.
Sorry, I might have confused you with bluefly or dcsailor.
I never said Metro is perfect. Not by a long shot. But neither is NYC's (which, though on a much large scale, is still a spoke system in the sense that everything funnels to Manhattan and Burrough-to-Burrough travel is pretty much non-existent without coming into Manhattan and then going back out).
Was DC's Metro designed poorly? No. It's a great system that has done wonders for keeping economic activity centralized and for maintaining the structure of DC. I doubt DC would have rebounded so powerfully if they'd built a diffuse transit system and plowed a highway through some of its greatest neighborhoods today like they planned.
I think, now that they've finished building the original design, it's time for the next 30 year phase, which should cater more to what the area has become by linking suburbs, connecting the city to Tysons and Dulles, and fleshing out access within the city.
But, in the end, your continued argument for cars is against everything DC is doing now and not what people in the city want. People who live in the Palisades make a conscious decision to depend on their cars. Those who choose freedom from a car choose to live where that is possible. Given the high value Metro-accessibility has in apartment advertising, it would seem that the people of DC have chosen the opposite of the sprawl of Orlando.
Thank God for that. Hopefully the suburbs will continue to follow suit.
Transportation is certainly a conumdrum in the DC area. On one hand we have the 2nd highest public transportation usage in the country but at the same time we have the 2nd worst traffic. I can't speak for Maryland but I can say that with the exeption of side roads in Arlington, the roads in VA just have just not kept up with the population growth. The sprawl that affects the VA suburbs is spurred by the high cost of living inside the beltway.
Driving in the District is a headache at best. The city is fairly anti-car. Although many DC folks are always ready to attack the car drivers. There are numerous and confusing rules regarding parking and all those one way streets don't help either. With that being said I will agree that building another highway into the city wouldn't help. Most people I know who commute into the city either live in the city or take the metro to work at least part of the week. So even though I rarely use public transit I think improving the roads that we have through out the DC area not just the city, is a more sensible and affordable answer.
I think more suburb to suburb transit is part of the answer. Not everyone works in the city and lives in the suburbs anymore. I know several people who do reverse commutes from city to suburb. The silver line to Tysons is a good start but I'd like to see a more direct line that goes from say Springfield to Tysons traffic on 495 is terrible. On a personal note I'd like to see the metro in south Arlington. I dont' forsee that happening but the streetcar on Columbia Pike will be a good start but I wish it'd go further out to Annandale.
Lets bring back this old thread shall we?
Because I'm tired of D.C. being underdog in terms of being a "real city".
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