Transit planning in Baltimore and DC

1. The Urbanite, the pro-urban monthly free paper in Baltimore, has a nice article on the possibility of streetcars in Baltimore, "A Streetcar Named Conspire."

2. I think there are many many gaps in what they've written, but the Downtown DC Business Improvement District offers a Leadership Paper on transit, "Getting from Here to There."

As you can imagine it's downtown-centric, and I am not sure about how to articulate the various biases that don't come across in the snappy pdf format, but the paper does make some good points and is reasonably fair. E.g., I don't understand why they see the need to replace the National Park Service concessionaire, tourmobile, with a DC-funded bus system.

NPS doesn't want to give up Tourmobile because NPS is underfunded, and I think it is required that 80% of concessionaire fees must be spent on park improvements for the park (in this case the National Mall) where the concessionaire operates.

It's not like DC runs the Circulator so well that it promotes tourism. For example, none of the audio announcements on the bus provide any information about tourist destinations proximate to the various stops. And as the Circulator routes proliferate, the "map-based" graphic design pf the bus fails to communicate the real route of the bus.


Top: Except for Union Station, none of the primary destinations on the Navy Yard - Capitol Hill - Union Station Circulator bus route are depicted on the bus. Bottom: None of the primary destinations are depicted for the Woodley Park - Columbia Heights - McPherson Square route.

I like what they do in Brighton & Hove, labeling specific routes on specific buses.


3. This means that starting tomorrow, I will finally produce my four-part DC Transportation Vision Plan set of entries.