Posts in the 'Urban Development' category
These plans for a new bus terminal and mixed-use development behind Union Station have the potential to be truly transformative. First, by connecting the Greyhound bus station to Union station, you make it functionally intermodal. You can take local transit ...
The Post’s article about how U Street residents are beginning to get tired of the increasing noise of their neighborhood. My first reaction was basically the same as Ryan Avent and BeyondDC’s, that it’s hardly as if these residents didn’t ...
Strip malls need a makeover. Not just to look prettier, but to be safer and more accessible to pedestrians, cyclists and other people on the street. Photo by Dean Terry. On the beauty spectrum of community design, nothing’s uglier than ...
This is a serious question, but can any of the folks who get so upset with arguments for BRT point me to any resources showing that high-investment BRT—Bogota, not Houston—with physically separated right-of-ways and permanent-seeming stations and the rest, do ...
I hate to do another round on BRT with The Overhead Wire, but I can’t help myself. It’s an important discussion, particularly with BRT gaining momentum in D.C. The latest discussion started with Streetsblog making what seems like a very ...
Now that there’s significantly more information available than a short AP article, I thought it might be useful to compare the fairly extensive transportation plans of the two candidates for governor of Virginia. Let’s start with Bob McDonnell and really ...
I hadn’t noticed this fun parlor game of an article in Sunday’s Post: “Where Should Sonia Sotomayor Live?” It’s really further proof, along with good restaurants, that D.C. is becoming more like New York; we talk about real estate! Unfortunately, ...
Another day, another set of notes from an interesting speech: this time Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, one of the founders of the New Urbanism, speaking on Retrofitting the Suburbs at the National Building Museum It was quite a good talk and I ...
Funny business abounded in D.C. development news yesterday. I’m not sure what to make of it, so if you have any sense, please help me out. First, the Washington Business Journal reported that Councilmembers Mary Cheh and Kwame Brown have ...
I wrote a couple of days ago about the need for smart growth advocates and urbanists to get smarter about playing the inside game. We’re winning the messaging but then losing behind closed doors, I argued. So I was particularly ...
One of the most pervasive critiques of urban life is that suburbia is the only good place to raise a family. It’s a powerful argument—parents will do anything for their children—and it’s a deeply rooted one. So it was very ...
For the real nerds among you, go read Kaid Benfield’s 3-part series about the changes in the LEED Neighborhood Development criteria from their pilot program here, here, and here. It’s deep in the weeds—how do you define buildable land for ...
What more can be said about I-270? David Alpert is calling it Gaithersbungle: the Montgomery County Planning Department has decided to spend $3.8 billion widening the highway to a truly massive 12 lanes. Then they’re spending $450 million on a ...
It’s very easy to forget just how lucky D.C. is with regards to its ability to create a sustainable, urbanist region. In fact, the region has a nearly ideal political structure to make real progress.
I wrote last week about Fairfax County’s renewed interest in becoming Fairfax City. But the Post gave it a lot of coverage over the weekend and I want to reiterate an important point. The Post had two big stories on ...
