How Capital Bikeshare is making D.C. a better place

Photo by M. V. Jantzen

 The Washington Post ran a Local Opinions piece last Saturday (How those red public bikes are changing D.C.) by D.C.-area blogger and founder of the Greater Greater Washington blog, David Alpert.  The article laid out all the great reasons Capital Bikeshare is doing well and should be supported and expanded.
Here's an excerpt:

Building roads or trains is expensive, while growing CaBi (usually pronounced “cabbie”) is one of the cheapest ways we have to quickly improve mobility. Consider this: Simply rebuilding the Gainesville Interstate 66 interchange will cost about 18 times as much as setting up the whole CaBi system.

Caribou beats up on Starbucks (400% greater savings!)

I've beaten up on Starbucks before (here and here) for their lackluster effort to get people to use reusable cups. On a recent visit to Caribou Coffee, I encountered this sign in their bathroom.

The sign says: "Think Happy Everyday.  50 cents off any drink with reusable drinkware."

Starbucks offers only a dime for a reusable cup, and they hardly market it. It's posted in the smallest font possible on their wall menus if it appears at all.

Go Caribou!

Falls Church Folly

The BJ's Wholesale Club that opened in Falls Church near Seven Corners last October was a short-sighted decision by Falls Church and works against taking steps towards an improved urban/suburban environment. Rather than taking maximum advantage of an opportunity to improve an area that is in dire need of better design, Falls Church resorted to the same-old, same-old, big box store, with an enormous parking lot out front and little regard for the future urban design or long-term planning.

The BJs opened last October 9 to much fanfare and pretty big crowds. Most of the press leading up to and at the time of the opening was very positive: people were excited about the new store.

The heat wave and human influence on climate

Most of the United States just endured a remarkable heat wave in which hundreds of daily temperature records were broken and a number of all-time high records were also broken.  Additionally, because of the flooding of the Mississippi River, humidity levels were also very high, leading to extremely high heat indexes, as high as 131 degrees in Knoxville, Iowa on Monday, July 18.

Farragut "Virtual Tunnel" close to reality (after only 3 years!)

The Washington Post reported today that Richard Sarles has included in his first 6-month report as full-time Director of Metro, that the "Virtual Tunnel" between the Farragut stations will be functional this fall.

I first promulgated this idea almost three years ago on the CommuterPage blog and have followed up numerous times since (More of the Invisible Tunnel, Testing the Invisible Tunnel, Now Even More Invisible?, Metro's response). Here's what the Post said today:  "In his first six-month report since being hired as Metro’s permanent chief, Sarles also said the agency will create a 'virtual tunnel' between Farragut North on the Red Line and Farragut West on the Orange and Blue lines, allowing riders to go from one station to the other without paying a new fare."

Why it took this long is a bit of a mystery.  Metro has been tying this service to changes in the SmarTrip card, which are finally just now being completed.  However, I learned way back in 2008 that the capability has always existed--even with paper farecards--to implement this service.

It will be interesting to see how popular the tunnel is once the ridership is educated about it.

Another missed opportunity to provide better service on Metro during track work

Metro has another opportunity to provide enhanced shuttle service to Orange Line riders the next two weekends while they perform work on the tracks. Thousands of hours could be saved by travelers with an intelligently designed and managed shuttle service.

Metro has announced that shuttles will run between East Falls Church and West Falls Church stations. Between West Falls Church and Vienna trains will single track while workers perform track work in this area. Metro's announced plan is to operate single-tracked trains on 24-minute headways between WFC and Vienna.

As I suggested previously (and received a reply from Metro), a better strategy for customers would be to not run trains at all for the three stations west of East Falls Church. Instead, they should run express shuttles from Vienna to East Falls Church and a secondary shuttle serving the other two stations.
There are approximately 20,000 boardings and deboardings at the three westernmost stations on a Saturday, divvied up as follows:

New bike/ped bridge on W&OD over the Beltway is now open

The bridge that carries the W&OD trail over the Capital Beltway is now open.  According to the W&OD Trail Report, it opened on June 15.  I've been out of town for most of the time since then, so this was my first time using it.  The new bridge replaces the old one just to its south.  The replacement was necessary, because the highway is being widened, and the old bridge was not long enough to span the wider road.

See photos below.  The new bridge is wider than the old one.  There is still a little work to complete on the approaches and landscaping as well as the removal of the old bridge.

Approaching the new W&OD bridge from the east

Approaching the new W&OD trail from the west

The new bridge (looking west) being used.  Note the 12-foot width.

The partially deconstructed old bridge

As an aside, I was told that VDOT offered the old bridge to Arlington County.  Although staff at the county identified a possibly beneficial location for the bridge, it was determined that by the time it was taken down, all that would be left would be a couple of long, steel supports that would be very difficult to move anyway.  So they declined.

Turn out the lights!!!

Why is it that lights are on so much when they make no difference whatsoever?  And sometimes they seem deliberately wasteful.  I notice this all the time. Here's one example.

For the last couple of years I have attended a UConn football game on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in East Hartford CT at Rentschler Field.  The game is played in the early afternoon.  In both cases it was a bright, sunny day.  Also in both cases, all the field lights were on from the time we arrived.  I have no idea how early in the day they were lighted, but they were on for at least a couple of hours prior to the start of the game.

Note the bright sunshine.  This was late in the game; earlier there were no shadows on the field at all

According to the Rentschler Field website, there are 316 fixtures affixed on four light towers and above the press box.  My best guess is that each fixture is 600-1200 watts. The lights were on for at least 6 hours.  I'll concede that it may have been worthwhile to turn on some of the lights towards the end of the game as the sun got low, but they could have played the entire game without the lights, and no one would have noticed until at least 3:30 PM and probably not at all if they had never come on.

CentralSpace in Rosslyn demonstrates cooperation between developer and local organizations to create a positive community amenity

There's a nice little urban space in Rosslyn that is a good example of how several organizations working together can make a small but positive impact on the urban form.  It's called CentralSpace, and it's pictured here.  What would typically be a weedy, fenced-in lot awaiting groundbreaking has been transformed into a usable, aesthetically interesting urban space.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen

Electricity industry executives are either delusional or math illiterate. You choose.

The consulting firm, Black & Veatch conducts a survey (pdf) of the electricity industry each year, which provides insight into what the industry itself believes is happening and will happen in the future.  (Thanks to Grist for bringing this to my attention).

One of the questions and answers in particular caught my attention, because it struck me as being totally absurd.  Upon further digging, it turns out I was right; it is absurd.

Nissan Leaf

The question asked of the executives was:

What proportion of your annual energy load do you expect electric vehicles to represent by the end of each of the following years?

Here is the graph showing how they answered.

When the Mississippi River Finally Wins. Let's Start Planning.

The Mississippi River flooding of 2011 is one of the greatest flood events in the river's history.  High water mark records were set in many places along the river, and the US Corps of Engineers has used every trick in its book to reduce the impact on cities.  Millions of acres of land have been inundated and economic losses are enormous throughout the basin.

One story that was not as widely disseminated, but needs to be understood is the story about how the Mississippi River reroutes itself every 1000 years or so and is trying to do so again.  This article by Thomas Lewis discusses the scenario in great detail.


View New Mississippi River Route in a larger map

How is Renewable Energy like Swine Flu?

Recently I visited an old friend of mine, and at one point our discussion turned to climate change and renewable energy.  He made the comment that renewables certainly make a lot of sense, but it's "up to the market" to determine their viability.  My initial response was that the fossil fuels we have depended on for so long have been getting, and continue to get, subsidies already.  So it makes sense to subsidize the renewables.  He conceded this point, but I don't think I totally convinced him.

What I didn't tell him, because I thought of it later, is that renewables are more like swine flu vaccine than like a regular marketplace technology.

Innovations Towards Zero. Upcoming event at House of Sweden re: electrification and safety in vehicles

 

9th of June, 2011 ∙ House of Sweden ∙ 2900 K Street, NW ∙ Washington, DC

Join us for a seminar that will focus on the latest findings on safety and electrification of 

vehicles and discuss how manufacturers, government and the public can work together to 

reduce emissions as well as reduce fatalities and injuries on our roads.

Agenda

8:30 - 9:00 a.m. Breakfast around exhibition in Anna Lindh Hall
 Exhibition will include:

Clive Hamilton Says:

"In sum, the most important assumptions on which international negotiations and national policies are founded—that we can stabilise the climate at some level, that overshooting and returning to a lower target is feasible, and that we can accommodate 2 or more degrees of warming by adapting to it—have no foundation in the way the Earth’s climate system actually behaves. When one understands these facts, the state of political debate around the world takes on an air of unreality. Rich country policies—including cutting emissions by a few per cent and outsourcing most of the cuts to developing countries; waiting for carbon capture and storage technology to save the coal industry and continuing to pollute at high levels until that happens; planning the construction of new coal-fired power plants; and even, in Australia, entertaining the idea of exporting brown coal—are so at odds with the scale and urgency of the emission cuts demanded by the science as to be almost laughable. They reflect a child-like belief that climate change can be averted by ignoring the truth and hoping for the best, a form of wishful thinking whose costs will prove incalculable."

- Clive Hamilton
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Australia.

Arlington County installs new bike signal on Custis trail

Arlington County has installed a bike-only signal in the Rosslyn area of the Custis Trail at the corner of N. Oak Street and Lee Highway, which went into service on Tuesday, May 17.  This is one of the intersections on the "Rosslyn Hill" section of the Custis that includes several crossings.  There have been collisions at some of these crossings in the past.  This area is definitely the most dangerous section of the Custis Trail.


View Custis Trail bike signal location in a larger map