Walking to DCA, and driving away

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[Part of an occasional series of FAQs about traveling to Washington, D.C. For more, please click on the “dc-faqs” tag above. Updated September 2023]

For those arriving/departing DCA on beautiful days like today, you might be interested in walking or cycling (perhaps using the marvelous Capital Bikeshare system) to DCA. It’s not just possible, it’s really pretty easy and fairly well signed. Indeed, it may be America’s most pedestrian friendly major airport. Note that there are multiple approaches, depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going.

It takes about 20 minutes to walk to the airport from the nearest points of interest, which are Crystal City or Gravelly Point.

Where you’re going:
Concourse A is at the south end, Concourse C is at the north end, and B is closer to the north. Higher gate numbers are north.

As of this writing, American Airlines is at the north end (C/B), Delta, JetBlue, Alaska, and United in B, and everyone else in A.

Where you’re coming from:
1. From northern Crystal City, via the Mount Vernon Trail access at the Water Park/18th St. S., this map shows two route options:

DCA walk/bike access route

The yellow route is the signed route from the Mount Vernon Trail, without any grade crossings. It’s reasonably direct for cyclists approaching from the south, but for pedestrians from the north it adds almost 1/2 mile (and even more for people headed to the south pier or Terminal A).

The yellow route has (as of 2020) a bikeshare station alongside it.

The red route is much more direct for those coming from Crystal City (to the north) but requires jaywalking across a three high-speed roads, each one 1-2 lanes and with okay sight lines. Use extreme caution.

2. From southern Crystal City, or for the south end of the airport (Terminal A, south parking garage & car rentals), start at the sand volleyball courts and walk along the northbound exit ramp, over the Airport Access Road bridge, and follow the signs around the offices to the terminal.

There is a Capital Bikeshare kiosk next to the sand volleyball courts, or use the one next to the garage on the yellow route above.

3. From points north along the Mount Vernon Trail, like Rosslyn, D.C., and Gravelly Point, you can also exit the Mount Vernon Trail into the airport employee parking lot at the airport’s north end. (There are usually American Eagle regional jets parked behind the fence here, right next to the trail.) Just follow the sidewalk alongside the airport offices to Concourse C.

There are Capital Bikeshare kiosks at Gravelly Point, north of the airport, or on the west side of the parking garage along the yellow route highlighted above.

(Another transportation option: Gravelly Point has a small boat launch; I’ve docked an inflatable kayak there, then walked it the one mile to DCA’s Metro station.)

4. From points south along the Mount Vernon Trail, the trail directly crosses a spur to Aviation Circle at the airport’s south end, by the Signature Flight Support building. Just exit the trail there and head north along Aviation to the concourses.

Once you’re on airport grounds, there’s adequate signage along the walkways, several outdoor bike racks, and a shuttle bus connects the concourse curbsides, rental car center, and Metro entrance. In most cases, walking is just as fast as waiting for the shuttle.

Driving away

DCA’s easy accessibility opens up another multimodal possibility: car rentals. In particular, Hotwire and CarRentals.com weekend-special rates from DCA can often be found for around $10-15 (+ required fees = $30); these rates are generally available Friday morning to Monday morning, and sometimes at the last minute on weekdays.

Note: At peak times, e.g., when daily car rental rates exceed $30-40, it might be cheaper to use Car2Go, Zipcar, or Turo. Plus, you might save the hassle of getting to the airport.

If you prepay online, check-in takes a few minutes at an automated kiosk, and the cars are parked upstairs; the entire process takes about 10 minutes. The car rental center is in the south parking garage, across from Concourse A and near the south exit of the Metro station (map).

Driving part way in

Coming to town by car, but don’t want to deal with traffic once here? Good move. However, parking will still be a hassle — particularly on-street, between residential permits, rush hour restrictions, street cleaning restrictions, bad signage, and assorted scratches and dings.

So how about park-and-ride? The problem with this approach is that you’re competing with countless commuters; hence, most areas within easy walking distance of Metro will either have paid parking or some kind of permit system. A quick glance at DC’s permit parking map confirms that nothing within a few miles of downtown has free-to-the-public street parking.

I think it’s worth a few dollars to not worry about being towed, sideswiped, etc. Indeed, there are some reasonably priced garages that allow overnight parking. (Overnight parking at Metro-run lots is so limited that it’s just not worth trying.)

  • Free weekend parking, Friday evening through Monday morning, at Crystal City. Very convenient to the Mall and DCA.
  • $7/day at New Carrollton. Better yet, many northbound Amtrak trains stop here, including those to BWI.
  • $8/day at Eisenhower Avenue Metro. Close to I-95 for those approaching from the south, not a bad trip to DCA (and less than half as expensive).
  • Maryland SHA runs a bunch of free parking lots for its commuter buses, but these are mostly pretty far from metro DC.
  • $5/day at several non-WMATA garages (with fewer rules about overnight parking) along the Silver Line and Dulles Toll Road, such as Wiehle/Reston Station or those in Loudoun County.

Flying in: the river visual approach

2011.11.27-IMG_5255

The flight approaches to DCA fly over the Potomac River, in order to avoid noise impacts over the city and to avoid flights over “P-56” (aka the Monumental Core). If winds are from the south/east, flights will land from the north and take off to the south. Planes are closer to the ground during landing than during take-off, so if you have this landing you’ll be treated to fantastic views of central D.C. (on the left side) and Arlington (on the right side) in the last few minutes of flight.

As a planner, I find it fascinating to watch the cityscape unfold:
– the topographical shift, from hilly up by Great Falls through to Georgetown, then the coastal flats below
– the formal straight lines of the Mall and L’Enfant Plan, reinforced by the dense built fabric, and on the other side the curves of Arlington Cemetery and its riverfront roads
– tracing the lines of activity and development along roads like Wisconsin and Connecticut, and the Metro subway lines
– the D.C. skyline of public monuments and churches, and how close planes fly to Rosslyn’s office towers
– further out, the clear distinction between preserved farmland in Maryland and suburban sprawl in Virginia

Where are some hotel values around D.C.?

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[Part of an occasional series of FAQs about traveling to Washington, D.C. For more, please click on the “dc-faqs” tag above.]

Washington is a huge destination for business travelers, so hotels tend to be expensive. If you are at all flexible in the times that you can visit, you can find much better prices on hotels on weekends and during Congressional holidays — particularly in August and around Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other major holidays. Transient Washingtonians tend to leave town to visit families elsewhere during major holidays and even summer weekends.

The most reliably affordable, quality (3* to 5*) hotels are those in Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood, often marketed as being near National Airport. There are thousands of hotel rooms there, with most major U.S. chains represented, and except during conventions or other big events (cherry blossoms, Independence Day, Memorial Day) they rarely sell out. That means that you can often use Hotwire or Priceline to get low rates.*

What’s more, Crystal City is very conveniently located right on two Metro lines, less than 15 minutes from the Mall. It’s also just off I-395 and offers free weekend garage parking. Capital Bikeshare docks around the neighborhood make it easy to get onto local trails or to shops in neighboring Pentagon City. Arlington is almost laughably safe.

The downside is that it’s not the most scenic neighborhood: it’s almost entirely concrete towers from the 1970s and 1980s, and interior renovations haven’t appreciably improved that aesthetic. Since the surroundings are mostly offices, it’s really quiet on evenings and weekends. There are a few restaurants there, so you won’t go hungry, and there’s a mall half a mile away at Pentagon City, but most locals will stifle a yawn at the very mention of “Crystal City.”

Just on the other side of the city, Silver Spring has a few hotels. It’s a livelier area than Crystal City, but historically their rates have been higher as well.

Within the city, the prime neighborhoods within or adjacent to downtown (including Dupont, West End, and Georgetown) often move in lockstep, so there are few bargains to be found. Dupont has some quirkier boutique options; Kimpton Hotels, in particular, has converted several 1960s studio apartment buildings in the neighborhood into themed hotels that have quite spacious rooms, if spare common facilities.

There’s a cluster of cheap motels along New York Avenue NE; these hotels often market themselves as “near Union Station.” Beware of the low prices: NY Avenue is a loud, busy highway that offers little connection to the rest of the city, and some of these hotels have a seedy reputation.

Similarly, there are dozens of hotels around the other two large airports, Dulles and Baltimore-Washington. These are generally very inconvenient to D.C.: getting to/from town requires going to the airport, then paying extra for transit service into town. I’d book a room near BWI before Dulles, and even then it would have to be at a steep ($50+) discount to justify the added travel time and cost.

You can also, of course, look for alternative lodging arrangements like AirBNB** or Couchsurfing or even camping.

* Affiliate link to BetterBidding, a useful site if you want to try and discern the identity of a hotel before you bid
** Affiliate link that could benefit me, but probably won’t

Same road safety crisis + different contexts = different results

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When urban America motorized in the 1920s, it faced a crisis of children crushed by cars, with 7,000 deaths in 1925. Our solution then was to blame the victim, ban pedestrians from the streets invented for them myriad years ago, and turn over the roads to cars. Today, ~7,000 pedestrians each year still die on American streets, in addition to the untold violence our auto-centric transport system wreaks upon local and global ecosystems. This process was extensively documented in Peter Norton’s book “Fighting Traffic.”

Holland faced the same crisis in the 1970s — after feminism, environmentalism, historic preservation, and the bike boom had emerged — and arrived at a radically different and much safer solution for both humans and our planet. London Cyclist magazine has the full story on how “Stop de Kindermoord” (yes, the unsubtle “Stop Killing Kids”) catalyzed these movements and created one of the world’s safest road cultures.

If you’re now inspired to rearrange the streets that you traverse — add some trees, a turning lane, a cycle track, wider sidewalks — you can go ahead and easily try out a new street section at StreetMix. (Hint: you can easily measure street widths using the ruler in Google Earth.)

(H/t to Eli at Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.)

War on cars continues: bike lane takes 0.2% of parking!

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L Street Protected Bike Lane Ribbon Cutting

Per Downtown DC BID, “In 2006 the Washington Parking Association (WPA) estimated that there were 199 parking garage locations in the Downtown and Golden Triangle BID areas providing 45,721 spaces.” That does not include the 17,000 street parking spaces that even AAA acknowledges still exist. Therefore, the 150 parking spaces removed to build the “controversial” L Street bike lane pictured above = 0.2% of downtown parking supply. In other words, 417 out of every 418 downtown parking spaces remain even after AAA whines that “The bike lanes have taken up all the parking spaces.” [posted to TheWashCycle]

Also, calendar note: the JITI Urban Transportation Seminar on February 6 will feature speakers from Tokyo Metro and Tokyu Corporation. Tokyu is notable for being one of the more profitable commuter rail + real estate + retail conglomerates in metro Tokyo.

Interrupted

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CMD East Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

The building in the middle of this ensemble — directly below the street sign — burned in a recent fire and is now being demolished. It was built a century ago as part of the Central Manufacturing District, and provided part of the original industrial park’s regal face to the city along Ashland Avenue. (The CMD’s front door was its better-known, mile-long streetwall along Pershing Avenue.) Together, they defined two of the few well-defined streetscapes on Chicago’s south side.

A weekend in Washington

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[Part of an occasional series of FAQs about traveling to Washington, D.C. For more, please click on the “dc-faqs” tag above.]

Unlike other cities, you’re here in Washington not to understand a city, but to understand a country, so there’s no way that I would recommend that someone skip the usual monumental sights. Unlike other cities, I can think of few “tourist traps” here that are filled with visitors, but which locals can easily go a lifetime avoiding; all I can think of is that a single block of chintzy shops across from Ford’s Theater.

Let’s start with what the experts recommend.

To which I’d add these personal favorites among the monuments, memorials, and museums — although bear in mind that most people find what I’m interested in to be terribly boring, so you should take the time to find the things that interest you:

  • since I volunteer at the National Building Museum, I can vouch for its amazing space, thoughtful (and fun) exhibits, and fascinating museum shop; other architecture geeks might also see what’s in the windows at the District Architecture Center
  • the Smithsonian American Art Museum: be sure to spend time curating your own art experience at the library-like Luce Center on the third floor, and stop in to admire the magnificent Renwick Gallery across from the White House
  • most assume that the Smithsonian’s collections of Americana would overshadow its collections about the rest of the world, but in fact its connected Freer, Sackler, and African Art museums have some of the finest collections in their respective fields anywhere and are joined by a contemplative garden
  • whenever I’m feeling homesick for Chicago, the simulated “L” ride at the American History museum takes me right back to the Loop
  • the NMAAHC’s History exhibits can be overwhelming, since they follow a set path–they took me two separate day-long visits to complete. The Community and Culture exhibits upstairs are perhaps more reasonably attempted during a shorter visit.
  • the Library of Congress has consistently fascinating public exhibits, and getting a reader card to explore the reading rooms’ vast reference collections — and just maybe request a book, any book — takes just a few minutes
  • the National Gallery of Art’s East Wing towers are each given over to immersive installations; one for Alexander Calder mobiles, one for Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and one for changing single-artist installations
  • the the Georgetown / Foggy Bottom waterfront has a cluster of enjoyable outdoor spaces: the Kennedy Center’s rooftop, promenade, and Reach gardens; nearby cinemas (from Hollywood blockbusters at Georgetown AMC Loews to indie documentaries at West End); woodland and wetland trails on Theodore Roosevelt Island; the waterfalls and urban alleys along the C&O Canal; and a waterfront park with, pubs, splash fountains, and boathouses
  • if a Hollywood blockbuster is showing at the Smithsonian’s [true] Imax screens, it’s really not worth seeing anywhere else (plus, these are the closest cinemas to my house, not counting the outdoor film fests that have movies every night all summer)

I also find the monuments at the west end of the Mall to be too widely spaced for a comfortable walk. Instead, use bike share and this handy Monuments by Bikeshare route, which uses  off-street paths or low-traffic roads. For a great look at the city behind the monuments, the “13 Colonies Ride” is an excellent place to start.

Climate shorts

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I’m on a sporadic publishing schedule this month since finals decided to start arriving earlier, but there’s been a lot of noteworthy things happening on the global warming front:

1. I’d earlier mentioned that a tax swap proposal was actually warmly received by Republicans in at least one poll. A September (pre-Sandy!) update to said poll showed even stronger support:

A majority of Americans say they would vote for a candidate who supports a revenue neutral carbon tax if it created more American jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries (61% would support such a candidate), decreased pollution by encouraging companies to find less polluting alternatives (58%), or was used to pay down the national debt (52%). A large majority of Americans (88%) say the U.S. should make an effort to reduce global warming, even if it has economic costs.

And, in Mitt Romney (!), there was a candidate who at one point (you never know with that guy) put pen to paper and seemed to like the idea (from his book “No Apologies”):

a tax swap… would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens. It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth. And profit incentives–rather than government subsidies–would stimulate the development of oil substitutes and carbon-reducing technologies… a tax swap may be the best among the four alternatives currently under consideration…

And Al Gore agrees: “It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” [Gore] said. “One way is with a carbon tax.”

That said, David Roberts discounts the possibility of a carbon tax swap, as does the White House. Oh well.

2. Even if there isn’t a carbon tax in our near future, and even if global warming was hardly mentioned at all during the entire Presidential campaign, Joe Mendelson at NWF notes two more promising takeaways from 2012: Big Fossil’s huge “I’m an Energy Voter” campaign flopped in a huge way, and the year’s numerous weather disasters have perhaps reminded Americans that adapting to climate change will be neither easy nor cheap.

3. Sure, the right-wing spin machine’s anti-empiricism (or, as Noam Scheiber calls it, “intellectual nihilism”) got its just desserts with their embarrassingly wrong election forecasts. However, I doubt that this will have a lasting impact on other important policy topics, notably the climate.

What I worry about is:
(a) the time scale differential between an election prediction (results are splashed across every newspaper within weeks, and a new cycle begins the day after) and a global warming prediction (when the result slowly reveals itself over decades, and is irreversible by then) is like the difference between a cornstalk and a sequoia. With humans’ short attention spans, by the time the former is over and done with, we can still maintain plausible deniability about whether the latter has changed at all.

(b) that the Right has shown little interest in empiricism before — when they’ve been objectively proven wrong, they instead retreat even further into their bubble. We’ve seen it before on, say, supply side economics, where the top marginal rate has fallen by half since 1980 but where (to hear Romney say it) the already-dubious Laffer curve theory is apparently stronger than ever — even though few academic economists agree.
That said, I am really excited about a future in which Nate Silver-esque analytics can help to more broadly inform decision-making from the individual to the national level. All the buzz about “smart cities” is just the beginning.

[Adapted from a comment posted to Grist]

4. A nice quote about said anti-empiricism, by Mark Potok of the SPLC:

“It just seems that on issue after issue after issue we are no longer having disagreements about a certain set of facts. Instead we have two sides presenting absolute alternative realities. And the bottom line, I think, is that from the political right, or the far right, that we are seeing almost nothing but a string of conspiracy theories that have virtually nothing to do with reality. So we cannot even have a rational debate about things that we admittedly disagree about. Instead, we spend our time fending off utterly baseless, fear-mongering conspiracy theories that prevent us moving forward in any way as a society.

“At the turn of the 21st century we are facing very major problems. We are at a time of great social and environmental change and we need to seriously address them — not poison ourselves with the conspiracy theories and baseless fear-mongering that we see today.

5. As if to confirm 3(a) above, I was recently frightened by the documentary “Chasing Ice” (very similar clips are viewable for free at National Geographic). Even though the documentary covers land glaciers, the most dramatic story over the past year has been the collapsing sea ice cap in the Arctic Ocean: ‘experts say that recent data on plummeting ice extent and volume show that the Arctic has entered a “new normal” in which ice decline seems irreversible.’ Over my lifetime, 15,000 cubic kilometers of ice has disappeared from the Arctic Ocean. That’s enough to fill 6,003,910,273 Olympic swimming pools with molten ice!

This kind of change doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. Reshaping the face of the earth on this scale seriously matters. It will permanently shift weather patterns, particularly the jet stream that sets medium-range weather for the Northern Hemisphere, and could be to blame for the very long cold/hot/wet/dry patterns that many of us have seen lately.

6. Curiously, right after I attended the “Do The Math” tour program, none other than the IEA confirmed McKibben’s arithmetic: “No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal.”

The world can’t wait for Peak Oil. (I never really liked that too-tidy eschatological scenario, anyhow.) We can’t wait for the fossil age to end by running out of fossil fuels. We will have to will its end, or it will end our age.

Three more election thoughts: coalition, gerrymandered House, cities’ voting power

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1. The “Coalition of the Ascendant” narrative continues to be validated by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Richard Cohen; Sully has a roundup. (James Joyner: ‘The only question is how many more elections they’ll lose clinging to a “traditional America” that’s a distant memory.’)

2. The tidal wave of Big Money and a House map spectacularly gerrymandered in their favor only downgraded the Republicans from a stern rebuke to a slap on the wrist. As a geography nerd, I’m particularly concerned about the electoral map: “the ridigity of the gerrymander is more impressive when you see it hold off a minor wave,” says Dave Weigel in Slate. He points to several states, particularly Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the House delegation and the Presidential vote diverge sharply. One could also look at the average winning margin across Democratic and Republican districts, or, as Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang points out, that the total national vote may go to Democrats even as the actual House went to Republicans. (Put another way, if there were national, or even state-level proportional representation, the House would be balanced or slightly Dem.) Update: Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress points to a preliminary House tally of 53,952,240 (50.3%) Democratic votes vs. 53,402,643 (49.7%) Republican, with the caveat that West Coast vote-by-mail states have incomplete results and that uncontested races were excluded.

Another indication: the opposite may well be true at the Presidential level, which is tied to House representation but at a slightly more macro level. Republicans rack up huge margins in their core red states, but Democrats seem to have a persistent edge in several of the battlegrounds.

3. Sommer Mathis ties the ascendant demographics to the “urban archipelago,” a theme from the 2000 campaign that I heard echoed recently in discussions at NACTO (an event I’ll be posting notes from soon). Interesting to note that Romney’s largest county margins so far appear to have been in Maricopa at 131,770, Utah County (Provo) at 126,546, and Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth) at 95,897. Obama pulled six-figure margins even in suburban and second-tier counties like Contra Costa, Hartford, and Mecklenburg (Charlotte, a traditionally Republican city whose former mayor won N.C.’s governorship in a rare GOP pickup) — never mind the nearly million-vote margins in population centers like Los Angeles and Cook.

Flat fare falls flat

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“Metro should have a flat fare.” I’ve seen this mind-boggling argument all over the place, much to my consternation. This scheme prizes mind-numbing simplicity over all else — economy, equity, efficiency, environment, everything.

Such a move would penalize DC & Arlington residents who take transit, rather than road-clogging and pollution-spewing cars, to make their trips around town — while giving a huge and highly regressive gift to some of the country’s wealthiest, sprawliest suburbs. Within DC & Arlington, Metro charges a $1.70 base fare: actually one of the cheapest for a subway in North America. Bus fares here are even lower: $1 for Circulator, $1.60 for Metrobus. You’ll pay almost twice our subway fare (C$3) just for a mile-long bus ride in poorer Toronto. The vast majority of people paying that short-distance fare are indeed actually residents, not tourists, and many of those people are transit-dependent and lower-income. The suburban commuters who would overwhelmingly benefit from a flat fare are people who can easily just drive to the grocery store or to visit grandma three miles away; that’s not an option for the transit-dependent.

Distance-based and time-based pricing recognizes that:
– it’s more expensive to provide longer trips in lower-density suburban areas.
– conversely, that trips within the core present a low marginal cost (so much so that cities like Pittsburgh, Portland, and Seattle have “fareless squares” where all downtown service is free): besides their short distance, the trains have to run through the core anyways just to distribute their suburban passengers. (If Alice is going 1-2-3 and Brenda is going 2-3-4, the marginal cost for the train to carry Charlie from 2-3 is $0, as no additional trains or drivers are needed.)
– more frequent rush hour service costs more to provide (since it requires purchasing more trains and paying more drivers).
– people are willing to pay more for longer trips at peak hours. This is especially true since many local employees, including most federal workers, have access to some kind of flex time.
– make more frequent transit trips, best customers who are traveling within the most congested areas and thus should be encouraged to ride space-efficient transit
– hundreds of thousands of suburbanites demonstrate every day that they’re willing to pay the higher fares charged to them, so cutting their fares leaves money on the table.

Therefore, if it costs more and the customers will pay more, then charge more. M arket economies use the price mechanism as the primary way in which consumers and producers match incentives, and transit is not an exception. We never question why the New Jersey Turnpike or American Airlines factors distance into pricing, so why is it bad for transit? We tacitly understand that hotels cost more during conventions, and restaurants cost more at dinner than at lunch, so why whine incessantly about how peak fares “confuse” the world’s most over-educated city?

Confused tourists do not merit a new fare system, they merit a better way of presenting the information at fare machines. Presenting a map instead of a table of fares might work: I could quickly figure out ticket prices in Japan that way, even at stations where nothing was in English. Selling 1/2/3-day passes and round-trip tickets would certainly simplify matters, and fare vending machines should have larger, more informative displays with more helpful prompts.

It’s telling that very few new subway systems use flat-rate pricing, and in fact some newer, all-electronic transit systems have even more bewildering pricing schemes: Singapore changes road tolls every five minutes, Capital Bikeshare has four price bands ($0/$1.50/$3/$6). Those transit systems that have flat-rate prices are usually older systems with antiquated, token-based fare collection systems, and as a result are hobbled by path dependence. We live in the 21st century, so let’s use the technology that we have to make things smarter and better. Stored-value smart cards like SmarTrip only increases the incentive for transit systems to have more complex, Metrorail-like fare structures. A huge percentage of fares are paid by regular commuters who either use passes or have auto-reloading cards and thus don’t have to count out the fares they’re paying — so why not optimize the fare structure with rush-hour surcharges, zones, and the like?

Also, people complaining about high fares should be throttled. $3.85 from Bethesda to Capitol Hill? So what? A 10-mile trip on New Jersey Transit commuter rail is $5; on MBTA commuter rail $4.75; on a NYC Transit express bus $5.50 (and with slower, less frequent service). Per AAA, driving a 10-mile trip is $7.40 even before paying for parking — or for the $5.25 in tolls that a 10-mile rush-hour commute on the Dulles Greenway, or for the wages foregone by having you drive yourself. Typical Bethesda families can spare that change; their median income of $170K would pay for 60 roundtrips every day. Atypical Bethesda families can save money by traveling off-peak, or riding buses or bikes instead. Indeed, typical Metrorail riders are considerably more affluent and educated than Americans as a whole. 80% of Metrorail riders and 59% of Metrobus riders have college degrees — compared to 27.5% nationally and 47.5% in DC (all 2007; the best-educated state is Massachusetts at a mere 37.9% college grad). And get this: over half of Metrorail riders earn six figures.

Perhaps a 10-mile trip is cheaper in Tokyo or Hong Kong or NYC, but the cost of providing transit service falls dramatically with such high densities — Hong Kong crams 10X more population density into its urban core and 80% more passengers onto every single subway car (which are of surprisingly similar dimensions).

[Themes developed in comments posted at WeLoveDC, GGW]

Take a tour, any tour

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A few months ago, I started working on a few bike tour routes reaching into D.C.’s suburbs, towards points of interest in urban planning history or just boozy destinations (and, even better, places with both). I’ll try to continue updating this map, but here are the completed and under-construction routes (the latter marked with POIs, but not connected yet):

  • Wine, spirits, and beer in Alexandria & Mount Vernon
  • Route 1 in Maryland: streetcar suburbs (Brookland, Hyattsville, Riverdale Park, College Park) and Greenbelt
  • Montgomery County Agricultural Preserve to Purcellville distillery (back on W&OD)
  • National Capital Streetcar Museum via Rock Creek trails
  • Falls Church, Merrifield, old & new Reston via W&OD
  • South Arlington redevelopment sites
  • Columbia & Ellicott City
  • Rockville & Gaithersburg

I’m aiming to present a few of these as guided tours, depending on whether I can find good tour guides at the POIs. Let me know if you can help.