When size doesn't matter

Images from the NoMA Farmers Market.

Professionalism in marketing exists as a principle regardless of the size of an organization. Your marketing approach and plan and execution is either well done or it isn't. And it's not about money either (well some money). You don't need millions of dollars to do excellent marketing, but it does cost money...

I complained last night at an Eastern Market meeting about the continued failure to have a decent marketing plan and program. (The city has retained a firm and a kind of planning process is underway, although thus far I am pretty unimpressed.)

I made this point and one of the merchants commented (as he does frequently) "we aren't [a big market] like Lexington Market [in Baltimore] or Pike Place [in Seattle]."

It's not about size, it's about vision, mission, and demand for excellence.

There's no excuse for an organization that has been in business for 100+ years to not have a directory, branded materials like a shopping bag, directory, postcards (FreshFARM Markets has a series of well done postcards for each of their markets), etc., and coordinated marketing plan with programming, advertising, and other media promotion.

And that should be recognized and addressed, rather than excused.

Last week, I went to the "new" Farmers Market, Wednesday evenings in NoMA. I bought some amazing lamb sausage which I used with vegetables in a pasta dish. And a chef from Vidalia Restaurant was there, with a sample and recipe for Watermelon Gazpacho. I liked it so I made it the next day...

A few weeks ago, I was in Bethesda on a Sunday--I thought I wrote about it, but I guess not--and they have a farmers market there now called Bethesda Central Market. From the standpoint of Eastern Market, I was left very "chilled"--the Bethesda version was well organized down to the variety and quality of the vendors, and the add on type of merchandisers (e.g., high quality cooking pots) also present. This market, and the other retail and restaurant and entertainment options at the adjacent Bethesda Row mean that people in that area have very little reason to come down to Eastern Market/Capitol Hill on a Sunday...

It's a shame that the various farmers market promotion organizations (either nonprofit or for profit) doing markets in the DC region do a 10x better job than Eastern Market.

The food marketing landscape isn't static, it's very dynamic. And after awhile, expecting patronage based solely on your age isn't enough. Ask A&P, one of the nation's oldest supermarket chains, which continues to shrink, is in and out of bankruptcy, and has just sold off or closed all but 2 of its remaining stores in DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

The issue is about maintaining relevance and providing excellence.

Shocking news: newspaper owned by an oilman doesn't support raising gas taxes

From "Commuters have clear choice in Virginia Senate race" in today's Examiner:

Ordinarily, political neophytes have little chance of ousting incumbents like Sen. Chap Petersen, D-34th. But the Oakton resident has two unlikely advantages, both courtesy of the Democratic Party.

The first is a bill Petersen sponsored this past session to raise the state gas tax every year. Opposed by Gov. Bob McDonnell and a majority of Virginia voters and legislators, the bill died, but not before exposing Petersen's belief that commuters forced to crawl along in Northern Virginia's unbearable traffic on $4 gasoline, are undertaxed.

The facts prove otherwise. Ron Utt of the Heritage Foundation calculated that Virginians get back only 89.5 cents for every federal gas tax dollar they pay into the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which is then returned to the states. Richmond takes another big bite out of the 17.5 cents per gallon state gas tax Northern Virginians pay, ultimately leaving the region with far less highway money than its residents have paid.

Culipher supports proposals by Del. Jim LeMunyon, R-Fairfax, that would prioritize road construction based on congestion and change the state funding formula to benefit Northern Virginians. Petersen would make local drivers continue to pay more for less.

The opinion column needs a more accurate headline, something like "Automobile drivers have clear choice to keep their minds and eyes closed in Virginia Senate race."

While road construction projects do need to be prioritized, and typically states prioritize rural highway projects at the expense of urbanized areas, the concept of "induced demand" means that road-centric transportation projects are a losing game--congestion can't be eased all that much because the more that more distant trips are enabled, the more people drive.

That's why Arlington County's master transportation plan prioritizes tighter links between land use and transportation, to reduce the need to travel overall and to reduce the distance of trips, and by focusing on total throughput of people overall rather than motor vehicles.

I can't comment on the Utt study referenced in the article because I haven't read it, but it's not necessarily the case that states should expect dollar for dollar returns on federal gasoline tax revenues, given that this supports the entire roadway network, which supports the entire nation, including trips that originate elsewhere but support Virginia residents and Virginia commerce.

If Virginia did increase its state excise tax it would increase the costs to residents, but would also generate a great deal of revenue from through travelers in the I-95 and I-81 corridors. Such money could also support the rest areas that the state wanted to close down etc.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Unless you own your own supplies of oil.

New Mayor for Miami-Dade County (Florida) after a recall

The City of Miami has a mayor separate from Miami-Dade County, where the top elected official is called mayor also (usually county chief elected officials are titled County Executives or Chairman/Chairwoman).

A recall of the Mayor elected in 2010 led to a two-stage special election including a run-off, which was yesterday and was won by Carlos Gimenez. See "Gimenez elected Miami-Dade mayor: Carlos Gimenez pulled off a narrow victory over rival Julio Robaina, the former mayor of Hialeah" from the Miami Herald.

In the article "For new mayor, now comes the hard part," I thought this was useful advice for any politician, and apt for DC (especially given that there are rumblings about a recall effort, because so many locally elected officials are under a cloud, ethically speaking), where the general level of civic discourse feels weak to me:

So what’s a new mayor to do?

Luckily, there’s no shortage of experts offering advice on how to navigate those initial months of leadership. Among them is Robert Hargrove, author of Your First 100 Days in a New Executive Job, who has created guidelines specifically for public officials, many of which have relevance for our new mayor.

They include:

• Engage in plenty of dialogue. Resolving some of Miami-Dade’s most pressing problems will require that our diverse communities come together. For the new mayor, success will come in not only listening to those communities, but in getting them to listen to each other.

• Set big goals. Tweaks just won’t do when it comes to major challenges such as reforming local government and sparking economic development. These challenges require long-term solutions, and it’s not realistic to expect results in the first 100 days. However, it is realistic to expect the new mayor to clearly state his goals and outline a plan in that time period.

• Build political capital by securing early wins. Upcoming budget battles and employee contract negotiations will provide the new mayor with an opportunity to set a new course in county government’s financial future. Compromises will almost certainly be required on all sides. The trick for the mayor will be in preventing compromise on his part from being viewed as weakness.

• Allow disagreements to turn into understanding that brings new ideas. Conflict brings change; it also serves as a catalyst for fresh approaches, which is what we’ll need to resolve issues ranging from the county’s mass transit system to charter reform.

• Reset your mindset from “I won the election” to “what can we create together?” Given the tone of the campaign that just ended, this could be the most relevant advice of all.

Sprawl promoting economists choose to ignore key economic principles when it suits them

Optimal
Definition: Best, by whatever criterion decisions are being made; thus yielding the highest level of utility, profit, economic welfare, or whatever objective is being pursued.

(This is from an e-list so it repeats some thinking from an earlier blog entry.)

Sam Staley, the Reason Foundation economist whose work isn't all bad, had a not very good op-ed in the weekend Washington Post calling for market pricing of transit use of the region's subway specifically, but failed to address any of the subsidies provided to automobile use. See "How Metro expansion might make sense."

But the thing about Sam that gets me is that as an economist he ought to be concerned foremost about optimality, which in the case of transportation is mobility throughput (and could also take into consideration the maximization of throughput at the least cost).

Mobility efficiency of various modes, one hour's travel. (From the 1977 study, Central Washington Transportation and Civic Design Study.)


Any basic analysis of mobility can't help but come to the conclusion that automobiles aren't very efficient collectively in terms of moving large numbers of people, especially during short periods of time such as during rush periods.

E.g., on two of DC's major bus routes (X bus lines on H Street-Benning Road, 70s bus lines on Georgia Avenue NW), more than 1/3 of the people moving through the corridor do so on buses--about 300 buses in a 22 hour day, a mix of 40 foot and 60 foot vehicles. The rest move through the respective corridors in about 20,000 to 25,000 motor vehicles (although this includes truck traffic).

Think of the space consumed by the buses vs. the other motor vehicle vehicles, and the number of people transported and it's obvious what type of movement should be prioritized. Of course, this is even more pronounced for underground (or aboveground) rail transit services.

Having been in NYC a couple weekends ago, staying in Astoria, Queens which is something like 5 subway stops to Manhattan, I kept thinking about how NYC would be totally incapable of existing the way it does if it didn't have the subway system--imagine all that movement attempted instead by car?

Obviously, the places where this type of system works, like NYC particularly and DC somewhat, are outliers, but only because they have the right conditions to demonstrate how a mobility system more focused on optimality works. They are called outliers, but they aren't outliers in terms of behavior so much as the land use and transportation development paradigm.

Funny that economists promoting sprawl focus on "choice" and attitude rather than the normal type of economic thinking they employ in their other work.

Mapping Home-Value Drops by Zip Code for the DC metroplitan area

This article from the Wall Street Journal is based on Zillow data for six major markets -- Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago (see maps).

Declines vary by region. In the DC area, severest declines are outside of the urban core. From the article:

The drops were calculated using the Zillow Home Value Index, which is the median value of all homes and does not include foreclosures or foreclosure resales. Peaks are measured for each market, compared with current values as of April.

Mr. Humphries said several key factors are at work: For one, lower-priced neighborhoods were ground zero for subprime loans, fueling the collapse in those markets. “Everyone has been hit hard by this housing recession,” Mr. Humphries said recently. “But there are big differences in the amount of pain that has been felt by the different price tiers.” This means that the forest-green clusters likely show wealthier areas that held their value better during the downturn. A separate analysis by Zillow split the housing market into three value tiers, showing that the top tier dropped 28% in value from the peak, but the bottom tier dropped 38%.

Other factors were also at work: Excess supply from the boom drove prices down further during the downturn. And certain closer-in suburbs or city neighborhoods now have more cachet as McMansions lose their luster, undermined by changing buyer appetites and rising gas prices. (Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a smart-growth developer, has argued this point explains much of this price-drop differential.)

Throw the bums out

The guy who lives at the corner of Blair Road and Whittier Street NW posts a variety of political signs. He's basically "a nut" but because about 1/3 of what he believes about corruption is true, there is more than a kernel of truth to his blather.

Last night, when I spoke out of order at the ANC meeting, but then he wasn't recognized, he claimed it was because I am white and therefore more privileged.

ANC4B meetings have 5-7 people like this, which makes very difficult civility, discourse and the ability to work on issues in an ordered fashion.

This banner is typically of the level of consideration of "process redesign" in the city. Pretty short term thinking, not very deep in terms of analysis.

Walmart as the neverending story #2: jobs and business closure

While the report that the ANC4B Large Tract Review Subcommittee submitted didn't do a full blown economic impact study because we didn't have the resources to do so, we did do a literature review and some imputation, and we recommended that the Office of Planning conduct or commission an independent economic analysis, as "mitigating negative neighborhood impacts" is one of the purposes of the Large Tract Review process.

-- Large Tract Review Committee Final Report and Summary Recommendations

We listed but didn't discuss the major finding that for every 2 jobs that Walmart creates, 3 jobs are lost.

Obviously then, 4 stores at 300 jobs = 1,200 "new jobs" at the cost of 1,800 jobs for a net loss of 600 jobs.

However, one can argue that the increased purchasing power brought on by lower prices from Walmart is a benefit that can be quantified, etc.

But the big thing that the elected officials have been pushing is "jobs." See "The elephant on the doorstep: What Wal-Mart’s arrival will mean to D.C." from the Capital Business section of the Washington Post.

Last week's Gazette reports in "Wegmans, Walmart shaking up Prince George’s grocery industry" about how the jobs at these businesses do come at a cost. From the article:

Safeway has announced the closure of three stores since May. Stores at 50 Watkins Park Drive in Upper Marlboro and 2346 Iverson St. in Temple Hills are scheduled to close July 9 and July 16, respectively, according to Craig M. Muckle, a spokesman for the Pleasanton, Calif., company. Safeway closed its store on Silver Hill in District Heights in May. The 125 displaced employees from the closing stores have been offered work at other Safeway locations, Muckle said.

Other Safeway stores, such as the one immediately next to the Walmart in Landover Hills have already closed. I think at least one Giant Food supermarket too.

The report we submitted opined that some Safeway stoers could close in Ward 4, or not open at all. For example there are two Safeway stores within a couple miles of the Walmart store, plus they have announced plans to open a store in the Riggs Road shopping center scheduled for construction at Fort Totten. I have also been told that their lease isn't being renewed for the Connecticut Avenue store in Chevy Chase, DC--but this is rumor and something I can't confirm.

There are tradeoffs and it will be interesting to see whether or not these tradeoffs will be recognized in the coming years.

Walmart as the neverending story #1

Last night's ANC4B meeting to consider "recommendations" and a resolution on the Walmart in Ward 4 issue was a zoo. As I have said repeatedly, because there is so much animus about Walmart in general, it's almost impossible to deal with the issue, especially because most all of DC's elected officials had been lined up in advance to support Walmart's entry into DC.

This was reflected in the audience, and amongst the Commissioners. Obviously, the people in the area immediately affected who were attending the meeting don't want a Walmart, don't want mixed use, don't want much of anything to happen on the site. There is no question that they will experience a loss in quality of life, even though people elsewhere in the Ward, the ANC, and the city will benefit from more intensive development (particularly mixed use) on that site.

Not a Walmart probably, but imagine a better project than that. However, a better project couldn't be obtained, because of the anti-position on better development previously expressed by residents and the ANC before.

Some of the audience was absolutely enraged. Some of the ANC Commissoners specialize in being obstructive all the time, and many were inconsistent. Still, I felt like the Commissioners, including the Chair, trying to do the right thing are 'saints" for putting themselves out there and being Commisioners in the first place.

1. There was a long resolution with recommendations, without taking a yes/no stand about Walmart.

2. Most people in the audience wanted a "no" vote. They couldn't deal with there not being a yes/no stand.

3. The project is for a site where the zoning classification allows a store like Walmart "as a matter of right" so there is no way that the developer/store cannot be approved by the city. (And it ought to be obvious that Walmart was very much strategic in the sites that they chose, to minimize the ability for their entry to be opposed in terms of zoning laws and regulations. They chose sites that allowed their entry.)

4. Most people don't seem to understand what matter of right means or how the zoning process works.

5. The Large Tract Review process isn't about yes or no, except in extraordinary situations which don't apply in this case. It's about "yes, but also do X." Like that book titled Getting to Yes about negotiating.

(It is possible to change the zoning of a tract under the LTR process, but the zoning has to be found in error as a result of the review process. There is no way such a result could obtain in this situation.) The Large Tract Review process is about providing another level of review, not super detailed or extraordinary, focused on making sure major issues aren't missed.

6. In a real way, this process sets up ANCs like 4B for massive failure, because they are made out to be the last hope/good guy/bad guy about "Walmart" while Mayor Gray, Council Chairman Kwame Brown, and Councilmembers like Harry Thomas and Muriel Bowser get a pass.

Mayor Gray should have been up there taking the hits. Instead, it was our neighbors, as Commissioners, getting bruised.

7. When a project like this gets put on the table, ANCs and the community need a massive amount of assistance as a type of community organizing, in order to be able to deal.

Such assistance isn't really available from or provided by the Office of Planning, the Mayor's Office, the City Council generally, individual Councilmembers specifically, or other agencies.

They all just focus on the legal aspects of the process. And it's pretty disjoint. Most of the interaction with developers and government agencies happens in private meetings. Since the key elected officials are in the Walmart camp already, for the most part agencies find their "hands tied" and they can't be too demanding or creative, because they don't have the support of the Mayor.

8. And the various public meetings with citizens groups and the developer/tenant aren't so well organized that they can deal substantively with the issues in the depth that is required.

E.g., there should have been an all weekend "charrette", with professional facilitators, etc., a long time ago, instead of the continuous somewhat substance-less public dog and pony show.

9. I'm not saying that ANC4B did everything right last night. But they needed help that they maybe didn't see that they needed. Plus they should have had another public hearing or two before this vote, although it probably wouldn't have mattered in terms of the audience last night.

They told you so: transportation edition

Chris Carney, a member of the Sierra Club, protests the proposed route for the Inter-County Connector. (Baltimore Sun photo by Elizabeth Malby). Jul 11, 2005

In blog entries in 2005 and 2006, I wrote about the campaign against the Inter County Connector toll road in Montgomery County. See "What's Driving the Intercounty Connector?" from 2006 or "Maryland Matters" from 2005.

Advocates made the point that the cost of the road would require a disproportionate amount of Maryland's total funding for transportation infrastructure.

And the Baltimore Sun, more focused to be true on Baltimore but also the entire state of Maryland, had a negative position on the freeway, as opposed to the Washington Post, which was very much in favor. See "Interesting difference of opinion between the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post on the Inter County Connector."

Now, Maryland is on the brink of raising toll fees across the various state facilities where they are charged, and Michael Dresser, in today's Baltimore Sun writes that the environmentalists were right, although he faults their approach. See "Getting There: Myths abound when officials talk toll increases; Democrats, Republicans both put us in this position."

From the article:

The opposition was underwhelming. The public, accustomed to thinking of tolls as relatively painless trifles, hardly raised a fuss. Business leaders were thrilled. Journalists, including myself, were distracted by the sexy issue of slots and barely paid attention when tolls were raised on the Harbor and Susquehanna River crossings in 2003.

Yes, the environmentalists tried to warn us that the ICC tolls would be high. And they were proved right. But I don't recall them ever talking about the tolls on the Fort McHenry Tunnel and Key Bridge. Had they successfully tapped into concerns about regional equity, they might have been more effective.

When the Ehrlich administration came up with its debt-heavy financing package for the ICC and the I-95 Express Toll Lanes, legislators forced some tweaks but basically gave it their blessing. A few far-out liberals raised a fuss, but the Democratic leadership and Republican minority were all for it.

More than eight years later, we're getting the bill for those decisions. The Maryland Transportation Authority has proposed a sweeping set of toll increases, the most in the state's history. And unhappy motorists are looking for someone to blame.

... We put Maryland in this position collectively. We wanted to avoid higher gas taxes, but we wanted new highways, too. Our elected officials, with few exceptions, signed on the dotted line. As a state, we pawned the revenue from all our toll facilities — not just the new ones. And we got some great interest rates in the process.

The tension in urban sidewalk design between privatized space, public space, and suburbanizing spaces

Sidewalk design schematic. Federal Highway Administration.

SIDEWALK WIDTH (from page 339 of the PEDSAFE: Pedestrian Safety Guide and Countermeasure Selection System)

The width of a sidewalk depends primarily on the number of pedestrians who are expected to use the sidewalk at a given time — high-use sidewalks should be wider than low-use sidewalks. "Street furniture" and sidewalk cafes require extra width, too. A sidewalk width of 1.5 m (5 ft) is needed for two adult pedestrians to comfortably walk side-by-side, and all sidewalks should be constructed to be at least this width. The minimum sidewalk widths for cities large and small are:

Local or collector streets ---- 1.5 m (5 ft)
Arterial or major streets ---- 1.8 to 2.4 m (6 to 8 ft)
CBD areas ---- 2.4 to 3.7 m (8 to 12 ft)*
Along parks, schools, and other major pedestrian generators ---- 2.4 to 3.0 m (8 to 10 ft)

*2.4-m (8-ft) minimum in commercial areas with a planter strip, 3.7-m (12-ft) minimum in commercial areas with no planter strip.
--------------------------------

1. We have to be careful with sustainable sidewalk initiatives in center cities because there is a fine line between suburbanizing the city through setbacks and greening and more traditional urban design.

A way to think about this is to use the transect concept from New Urbanism. In the densest zones, T5 and T6 zones especially, suburban-style treatments should be avoided.

Transect diagram by Topografis PC.

In the city, I expect that sustainable stormwater and related initiatives to come at the expense of street space, not sidewalks, especially in those areas where pedestrian activity is expected to be high.

2. The 400 block of K Street NENW is a place where greenspace has been provided at the expense of the quality of pedestrian movement.

Is a tradeoff between the ability to move versus seeing greenspace (and the development of sustainable stormwater runoff systems) acceptable?

Sidewalk at CityVista, 400 block of K Street NENW, east side of the street, west side of the block.

400 block of K Street NENW, east side of the street, east side of the block.


The difference in width in what the Project for Public Spaces calls the public zone in the CityVista part of the block is more pronounced in this photograph, as this pedestrian transitions from the east side of the block to the west.


3. At CityVista, the semi-private zone, the sidewalk immediately abutting the CityVista building, space which also supports commercial activity, has been prioritized at the expense of the "through" sidewalk immediately abutting the street.

Project for Public Spaces diagram.

4. Partly this is a problem of K Street, which has extraordinarily wide setbacks, because L'Enfant planned for K Street to be a main entranceway into the core of the city.

But in the core of the city, sidewalks should be 8 to 12 feet wide at a minimum, to support comfortably the normal amount of pedestrian activity on the street.

There are few if any justifications, in general, or on a project-site basis, for deviations from these minimums.

5. Resources from Project for Public Spaces:

- An Idea Book for Placemaking: Public Zone
- An Idea Book for Placemaking: Semi Public Zone
- An Idea Book for Placemaking: Semi-Private Zone

Graffiti flower on the base of a streetlight, North Capitol Street NE

Graffiti flower on the base of a streetlight, North Capitol Street NE, a photo by rllayman on Flickr.

Pop up on North Capitol Street NW, near Florida Avenue

Pop up on North Capitol Street NW, near Florida Avenue, a photo by rllayman on Flickr.

Flawed* planning and/or thinking: transportation edition

* Only because it obviously needs repeating: flawed is the other f word

1. Greater Greater Washington has a nice piece on the various proposals by WMATA for expansion. See "Metro planners contemplate system's second generation."

2. GGW's Eric Fidler has a follow on piece criticizing many of the proposals for promoting polycentric transit as opposed to monocentric transit, based on the concepts laid out by Steve Belmont in Cities in Full. It's nice to know that my mentioning this book so often means that some people are actually reading it. See ""Metro sprawl" misses better opportunities in the core."

Many of the WMATA ideas are flawed, but that is because they serve multiple often conflicting agendas pushed by outer suburban vs. center city vs. inner suburban interests.

3. MoCo Councilman George Levanthal says something pretty unknowledgeable (I wanted to say stupid) in this article in the Examiner, "Takoma-Langley Crossroads to get a makeover." From the article:

Officials in both counties say they want to improve the quality of life in the community when the Purple Line is built, but they are worried about what some say is the inevitable displacement of the largely low- and middle-income, Hispanic community there now.

The redevelopment plans center around the intersection of New Hampshire Avenue and University Boulevard, the planned site for a Purple Line station, although officials expect the light rail connecting Bethesda to New Carrollton probably won't exist for at least 10 years.

The development plans describe a pedestrian-friendly environment with a bike lane, an off-road cycling path and a 14-foot-wide sidewalk.

Prince George's County's plan also mentions a public market and new library.

But Montgomery County Council members are questioning the feasibility of the plans and the potential pitfalls of redevelopment. Councilman George Leventhal, D-Takoma Park, reminded the committee that the Purple Line station might not bring the anticipated economic opportunities.

"In Glenmont, nothing's happened, and there's been a Metro station there for a long, long time," he said. "The fact that there may be a Purple Line station in Langley Park doesn't change the fact that it's Langley Park, and the people who live there live there."

In fairness to Councilman Levanthal, clearly we haven't, regionally, assessed what works and what doesn't in terms of transit-assisted development. Clearly, if we have done this kind of assessment, the findings haven't trickled down to the Councilpeople in places like DC, Montgomery County, and Prince George's County in particular.

I have written about this extensively as have others. The basic point is that stations in dense "mixed use" areas do better than outlying stations, that endpoint stations don't do that well, that if you want to leverage transit access changing the zoning to allow for more intense development can be a way to more quickly yield return on investment (Arlington County) but even so it takes 10 to 30 years to reap significantly the benefits, and it takes even longer for stations not as well placed as the stations in the core.

Glenmont is like the other endpoints of the system. Langley Park is nothing like Glenmont, Greenbelt, Vienna, etc. It will be in the heart of the light rail line, in an area that already has high levels of investment and activity which will only be enhanced by significantly improved transit access.

This is partly Belmont's argument, and is also made in the research findings by the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota.

4. STATION PLANNING IS KEY. Doing it right is even more key. Fortunately many of DC's station plans were ignored for the WMATA system. Good thing, since they were done during the urban renewal era and likely wouldn't have been as successful as the more organic process that has has resulted.

5. Similarly, PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY HAS AN INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY TO REPOSITION THEIR DEVELOPMENT AGENDA AND PARADIGM AROUND TRANSIT, given that they are being given a second chance at transit nirvana through the creation of the Purple Line Light rail system, which will connect two of their subway end points circumferentially, and connect them to both the west and east sections of the red line in Montgomery County, and provide up to 10 additional high quality transit stations.

They haven't figured out yet that they have this opportunity.

Hopefully they will do so within the next couple years.

Washington Post graphic.

6. Even though I find Sam Staley, the transportation program director for the Reason Foundation, to be reasonable some of the time, I don't think his op-ed in today's Post has much of anything interesting to offer. He focuses on market-based pricing for transit to ease congestion on the system in "A smarter transit system ,"but I think this point is a distraction.

The higher the fares, the more people are discouraged from using transit. There needs to be a balance between the cost of fares and the desire to move people more efficiently on transit, to reduce road congestion and to achieve other benefits. Adding even higher fares to system expansion goals defeats the purpose of system expansion.

7. Today's Post has a scary as s*** article, "How to set traffic priorities," about how various suburban business organizations are pushing their road-centric "congestion reduction agenda."

The agenda was based on interviews with various "experts" which the organization then compiled and used to shape their findings. From the article:

The new report was done by two business groups, the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance and the Maryland Suburban Transportation Alliance, for a regional association called the 2030 Group. The two alliances say they picked 45 transportation professionals — traffic engineers, transportation administrators, civil engineers, designers and urban planners — for interviews, and then used the results to fashion their report.

Downside: The survey aspect of the report is difficult to assess. The interviewees were selected by the business groups, the interviews were confidential and the resulting recommendations are very much in the mainstream of what business leaders have endorsed in recent years.

Upside: Just because the transportation recommendations emerge from business groups doesn’t mean the ideas are bad or unworthy of discussion. The region has taken very seriously the ideas on Metro governance put forward last year by the Greater Washington Board of Trade. The key things to take from the new report are its insistence that we need to develop a short list of projects that will have a big impact on congestion within the lifetime of today’s commuters, as well as a proposal on priorities to discuss.

WHAT BEARS REPEATING IS THAT EVEN EXPERT PLANS ARE IMPROVED THROUGH PUBLIC INPUT AND A BROADER, MORE CREATIVE PROCESS. I have never seen a plan that couldn't be improved through additional involvement, review, critical analysis, and criticism by citizens and stakeholders.

Plus, the business groups are particularly interested in how new roads, like an Outer Beltway, enable sprawl, I mean "new development" which makes me question their findings (which of course I have to read).

8. I guess I should be happy with the business groups, although they should have interviewed me too, because according to the article:

The report challenges us to define what we mean when we say we have a transportation problem and then focus on the most effective ways to address it.

“The prioritization process should focus heavily on highway and transit investments that do the most to reduce travel times/delays, reduce congestion, and improve transportation network safety and reliability,” the report concludes. And the process for making choices must be “more regional and professional and less parochial, political and ideologically driven.”

That of course is the point I make in the presentation Metropolitan Mass Transit Planning: Towards a Hierarchical and Conceptual Framework. These are the basic points:

a. we have to define the metropolitan transportation network (this includes roads and highways as well as bikeways, not just transit) at four levels--regionally (between metropolitan areas); at the metropolitan scale; and at the suburban and center city scales;

b. that the networks interconnect but that the right modes should be specified for the various networks, rather than focusing on particular modes, disconnected from a consideration of the best way to meet the need;

c. that definition of the transportation network depth and breadth, and level of service metrics should be made at the metropolitan scale, separate from the transit operator--by default the transit operator becomes the main transportation planner, and this process is constrained by many factors that satisfice the transit system in deleterious ways.

The presentation only discusses transit, not roads and highways and bikeways, and it neglects to discuss an on-street prioritized system of streets/lanes for the high frequency surface transportation network.

Otherwise, it makes important points that seem to be neglected in transportation planning within the Washington metropolitan area.

Which of course is how I came up with the framework.

Also see the 2009 blog entry, "St. Louis regional transit planning process as a model for what needs to be done in the DC Metropolitan region."

That entry makes the point that the DC region needs to update and reassess and rebuild a regional consensus on transportation planning and a plan, especially after the significant service failures experienced by WMATA over the past two years.

All of the points above reiterate the desperate need for such a process.

Speaking of schools #3: school reform in DC is mostly flawed*

* flawed = "the other f word"

1. The cover story of this week's Washington City Paper is about Diane Ravitch, the once liberal, then conservative, now progressive again education researcher, based on the recent publication of her book Death and Life of the Great American School System, which is critical of the teacher bashing, anti-union, pro-charter school, pro-privatization "education reform" agenda pushed by big foundations, conservatives, and the very wealthy. See "Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Rhee Michelle Rhee went from DCPS to national crusader. Along the way, a 72-year old historian became her top critic."

When I saw the cover, I was hopeful, thinking about how in New York City for many years, the Village Voice, that city's alternative newsweekly, was known for hard-hitting dcoverage of the city's schools, by award-winning reporter LynNell Hancock.

The article was decent but I wanted more. The City Paper isn't ready to step into the fray the way that Village Voice once did in NYC. From the article:

Once a vocal proponent of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, vouchers, and merit pay for teachers, Ravitch decided sometime around 2006 that there was actually no evidence that any of those policies improved American education. She now believes that the “corporatist agenda” of school choice, teacher layoffs, and standardized testing has undermined public respect for one of the nation’s most vital institutions, the neighborhood school, and for one of society’s most crucial professions: teaching.

The best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing. ...

If her late emergence as a liberal hero strikes progressives as ironic, it infuriates the Rhee fans who dominate both the Obama administration and the GOP. Critics call Ravitch a self-promoter, an opportunist, and a scholar who picks evidence to support her conclusions, rather than vice versa—in other words, a lot of the same things Rhee’s critics say about her.

“The problem with ‘I was wrong about everything’ as the prelude to an argument is that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the repudiator’s judgment,” Kevin Carey of the think tank Education Sector complained in The New Republic. “[Ravitch] simply trades one pre-defined agenda for another: the collected talking points of the reactionary education establishment. It is a philosophy of resentment and futility, grounded in the conviction that public schools—and the adults within them—can’t really be expected to do better than they currently are.” ...

But a review of Ravitch’s career, which actually began on the left, suggests a more complex narrative. A lifelong political liberal who has always wrestled with a sort of innate personal conservatism, Ravitch—like Jane Jacobs, the urbanist whose book she referenced—has been constant in her deep attraction to institutions that have survived the test of time, and her aversion to intellectual fads. “It’s the fierce urgency of no,” Ravitch says of her worldview. “I like institutions, in part because I like to rebel against them, but also because I think society needs them and needs to continually reshape them, not blow them up.”

2. Since I function pretty similarly in terms of "liking institutions" but believing that they need to be continually shaped and improved, you can see why I like Diane Ravitch (or Jane Jacobs). In fact, on this note, but on the economy, the Post Business section article on Sweden is particularly apt on education reform and most any sector of society facing pressure to change. From "The rock star of the recovery":

ome of the reasons for the Swedish success are as unique to the nation as its citizens’ predilection for Abba, pickled herring and minimalist furniture. But there are plenty of lessons for other countries as they struggle to find a pathway toward prosperity.

The overarching lesson the Swedes offer is this: When you have a financial crisis, and Sweden had a nasty one in the early 1990s, learn from it. Don’t simply muddle through and hope that growth will eventually return. Rather, address the underlying causes of the crisis to create an economic and financial system that will be more resilient when bad times return.

It's incredible how most change efforts in the U.S. are more about muddling through rather than a focus on strengthening institutions and organizational processes so that preferred outcomes are generated as a matter of course.

3. So with that in mind, the Post story today about the resignation of a young, highly effective DC elementary school principal is quite damning. From "Why one D.C. principal is leaving":

Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.

He grew to love its students, teachers and — for the most part — its parents. “If I could lift that school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect,” he said.

Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out. ...

He said he is quitting a system that evaluates teachers but doesn’t support their growth, that knuckles under to unreasonable demands from parents, and that focuses excessively on recruiting neighborhood families to a school where most students come from outside the attendance zone. ...

Kerlina signed on just as Rhee was rolling out the IMPACT evaluation system, which called for five classroom observations to assess criteria such as clarity of presentation, content knowledge and ability to teach children with varying skill levels. Some teachers would be held accountable for student growth on standardized tests. Those with poor evaluations were subject to dismissal.

It was a major change.Kerlina said he was surprised when he heard it would not be tried on a pilot basis, which was standard practice in Montgomery. He said he came to believe that the initiative offered virtually no provisions to help teachers improve.

“The reform, in my opinion, is getting rid of people,” he said.

My criticism all along of DC's "education reform" agenda under Mayor Fenty is that it wasn't system/organizationally focused, it was based on a belief that the teachers in the current system didn't care, and that if you got young, energetic teachers, all would be well.

The sad thing is that the DC region has two highly performing school districts in Arlington County and Montgomery County that have a lot of similar characteristics with some of their schools, and MoCo in particular has developed a system to support schools, principals, teachers, students, and parents at schools that serve predominately low-income students that is a national best practice example. (Fairfax County is also high performing but has significantly different characteristics from DC.)

And the Post, which jumped on the Rhee bandwagon, could have been a countervailing force for improvement, instead of Chancellor Rhee's biggest cheerleader.

4. Of course, local civil society could have done a better job organizing a response also. It never did do so, despite examples from elsewhere, such as the Catalyst Chicago program, a spinoff from the Chicago Reporter organization.

Speaking of which, Tuesday night at 6pm Busboys & Poets on 14th Street NW, there is a presentation by Soo Hong, author of A Cord of Three Strands A New Approach to Parent Engagement in Schools.

There will also be a screening of the short film, "Parent Power". How can low-income, non-English-speaking parents become advocates, leaders, and role models in their children’s schools? The book provides a close study of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, a grassroots organization on the northwest side of Chicago, whose work on parent engagement has drawn national attention.

I'm going to try to go, and to get a review copy of the book.

Speaking of schools #2: pupil transportation

The Henrico County Public Schools district (outside Richmond, VA) has been running ads in The Express for a director of pupil transportation. The job description posted mentions nothing about walking and biking to school as a task area and responsibility within the position. It's a pretty good job, paying $100,000+ year to manage pupil transportation for the 48,000 student system.

Do an advanced google search of the National Association of Pupil Transportation website and you will get zero hits of the term "safe routes to school." Although that is partly a function of how b adly the website is designed. The 2010 conference did have one session on the topic.

When I worked in Baltimore County on a walking and biking planning project last fiscal year, I realized after looking at the "safe routes to school" issue for only a couple of weeks that the major issue is that most states do not require school districts to do what we might call "balanced transportation planning" for pupil transportation.

Most regulations focus on transportation by bus.

It happens that Baltimore County has a national best practice example of a walk to school program at Stoneleigh Elementary School, and I spent a few hours there on International Walk to School Day in 2009 (and had further interactions with the involved parents who created the program and the principal).

I realized after that experience, and after learning that the State of Maryland Dept. of Transportation was doing a review of walk to school initiatives at the school district level, that the most fundamental issue was changing the requirements at the state level by requiring school districts to do balanced transportation planning, incorporating walking and biking into the planning regimen.

Obviously, by doing that, where practical and appropriate, more children would be walking and biking to school. Yet that idea wasn't even in the scope of work of the Maryland study (and final report)!!!!!!!!! (I pointed that out in Oct. or November 2009, but the study scope was never changed.)

Given that as much as 25% of local traffic in neighborhoods during school opening and closing hours is due to taking kinds to and from school by car, this is an important issue.

The State of Washington has some balanced transportation requirements for school districts, requiring that all elementary schools be provided with walk to school maps, providing money to school districts for transportation improvements that affect the walking and biking environment, and recommending that school districts have a school traffic safety committee to consider transportation issues more broadly.

The City of Minneapolis has a city-wide walk to school plan. And the Boulder Valley School District covering the City of Boulder in Colorado does balanced transportation planning, providing support to schools for walking and biking, through the school district's central administration structure--it's not left up to the schools on an ad-hoc and individual basis.

Missing the most important point about Clifton School closure in Fairfax County

The Post's Robert McCartney writes today, in "Board member punished for trying to do the right thing in Fairfax school dispute," about how Fairfax County School Board member Liz Bradsher is stepping down, and frames the story in terms of loss of civility and making hard decisions.

Ms. Bradsher voted to close the Clifton Elementary School, which is the anchor of its rural community, because "after studying the costs and enrollment forecasts, she concluded that it made more sense for the county to spend scarce renovation dollars elsewhere."

In response, many anonymous web writers excoriated her.

While we should understand and support the use of "cost-benefit" analytical tools to make this decision, and while we should not support the decline in civic discourse and engagement, to my way of thinking McCartney's column misses the most important point, a point that is more important than the loss of civility.

Schools are fundamental anchors which build and maintain quality neighborhoods and communities. Therefore to maintain communities we need to maintain the schools located within them.

This ought to be obvious.

It's why houses in high-performing school districts and school zones (e.g., a house in the Walt Whitman or Richard Montgomery High School enrollment zones in Montgomery County) cost a lot more comparaed to equivalent houses located in areas with schools that aren't "as good."

There is an article in the Boston Globe real estate section about potentially gentrifying communities in the Boston region, "Gentrification in the suburbs: Who's next?" The person quoted makes the point that there are four characteristics that must be in place for a community to be able change. One is schools:

1) They have decent schools ... good enough so that people don't freak out about it and feel like with some effort and personal attention, they can be "just as good" as some of the towns with excelling systems baked in.

(The other three points are high quality transit access; a variety of types of high quality housing; and personality (authenticity).)

Because schools are such important anchors for neighborhoods and communities, the reality is that the decisions about school maintenance and closure are too important to solely be left to school systems, which don't normally consider neighborhood maintenance and improvement to be part of their mission and therefore don't consider this issue as a normal part of the decision-making calculus on school closure.

And yes, it's just as easy to bend too far in this direction, but it should be considered a basic principle of community planning that most neighborhoods should be served by or have access to close by excellent schools. Therefore, community planning processes need to be structured so that this principle is a preferred outcome.

Therefore, school closure decisions should be subject to planning approval. If more money is required to improve or maintain a school than would normally be seen as justifiable from a school system budget, then money could and should be obtained from the general funds of the jurisdiction to do so, if it is decided that maintaining the neighborhood and its quality of life is a priority.

Sadly, these issues aren't discussed in planning circles very much.

It's clear to me that the very basics of how local planning processes are organized and coordinated have to change.

Even though the Clifton Elementary School closure in Fairfax County is a rural issue, it's in fact an example fully relevant to us in the urban setting.

Consolidation pressures within school districts has been a multi-decade phenomenon which first had significant impact on rural areas (and the closure, for example, of one room schools) and now has equally important impact on urban and inner ring suburb neighborhoods, especially in communities and regions that are shrinking/in weak real estate markets.

Related is the walk/bus to school issue, which is generated in part by how accreditation standards favor large sprawling campus-based schools over more compact multi-story schools.

See the Community-Centered Schools webpage from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for more resources on this topic.

What is function without beauty?

Last weekend, the "Shaping the City" column in the Washington Post was entitled "What is beauty without function?" To me, such a column feels like a straw man argument, and the column implies that a focus on beauty comes at the expense of function.

I don't think that's the case the majority of the time that we get beauty or quality at the expense of function. Value engineering put a stop to beauty a long time ago.

As a result, too often buildings (function) come to us without beauty, or a sense that how the building looks and fits into the area/landscape outside of the confines of the site (context) even matters.

A 6/2/2011 article in the Northwest Current, "Work will restore front entrance for Roosevelt [High School]," tells us that the attractive entrance of the building has been closed to students for decades, that they have to enter the building from the rear "amid parked cars and Dumpsters."

What does that tell the students about how much they are valued?

The story is about how involved students campaigned to get their access to the entrance restored, and also how a campaign to get the school re-integrated into the community around the school. The campaign is called "Roosevelt Rises."

Pardigm change and setting goals for mode split for biking (and transit)

One of the biggest problems in pushing either bicycling or transit as legitimate and substantive modes for mobility is that because people are so accustomed to thinking and believing that you can only get around by automobile, that they can't take the "idea" of other modes very seriously.

Since something like only 4% of the U.S. population gets around by transit, of course people think that transit is mostly just something for people who can't afford to buy cars.

However, transit can work very well in many cities, provided that there are relatively tight connections between housing and employment and activity centers, such as in cities like New York or Boston or Chicago or DC.

For biking, most people think that it's for recreation only, a toy either for children or for weekend cycle warriors.

But in the right spatial conditions, biking can be a real and substantive means for getting around. In the Netherlands and Denmark, some cities have close to 40% of all daily trips being performed by bike.

I think that in our bicycle plans (and transit plans) we need to set substantive mode split goals. Given that 51% of all household trips in the US are 3 miles or less, and that trips of these distances are easily accomplished by bike--if the proper infrastructure is present--I think it's reasonable to set the following mode split goals:

-- for center cities, 25% mode split for bicycling
-- for suburbs, 15% mode split for bicycling

In cities, especially when a grid pattern is present and there is adequate density, many more trips can be captured by bicycling than currently.

In the suburbs it's harder, because uses are separated by greater distances, and the road network is skewed to traffic engorged arterials and high speeds, and there isn't a good set of parallel roadways which would be better situated for bicycling. Plus, many communities are dis-connected from each other, because there aren't road connections between subdivisions.

That's why I think in the intermediate term, it's reasonable to set a lower mode split goal, even though in some areas in most suburban counties, there are areas with similar spatial conditions to center cities, and therefore these areas are capable of achieving higher mode split numbers than 15%.

Notions Capital sends us a link to this video of bike and transit rush hour in the Netherlands. Imagine if rush hours in the US functioned more like this... But note the movement of articulated buses and trams as well as the large number of bicyclists.

If you don't engage people, they don't know and they don't care

1. I thought that the Open House on the Metropolitan Branch Trail on Wednesday, organized by Stephen Miller (he works for Rails to Trails Conservancy but did it on his own), with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the participation of the Metropolitan Police Department turned out well.

And there were a fair number of bicyclists on the trail throughout.

2. Brad Green of Takoma talked with me about the need to create a trails "friends" organization. I had suggested a city-wide one, but he's more focused on the MBT.

One of the problems with creating friends groups is the legal structure, if you create a "real" organization, the need to maintain it, etc.

I was thinking that maybe WABA could help foster the creation of such groups through the creation of "special interest group" categories of a kind of "add-on" to the standard membership, e.g., for the MBT, the Anacostia River Trail, and other initiatives.

3. The Washington Post reported in "A day of outdoors: Dominion Trail Mix comes to Northern Virginia" that there will be an event-festival-open house on Labor Day September 3rd on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail in Northern Virginia, although mostly the activities will be in Loudoun County. There will be a bike-walk-run, a clean up, and a festival at one of the schools.

-- Dominion Trail Mix website

Like with the MBT Open House, I think these kinds of events and activities are essential in introducing people to trails and to biking.

4. Chickens. Henside: the inside the beltway tour d' coop" tour of urban chicken coops has already occurred in Raleigh-Wake County North Carolina, but other communities have these kinds of events as well.

What better way to help people get their heads around this aspect of urban agriculture than to allow them to see it in action?

5. As always, neighborhood house and/or garden tours are a great way to learn about communities, get ideas, and to get a better appreciation for historic preservation. But I am not sure we're taking this opportunity to market historic preservation "generally" as much as we should be doing.

6. In Los Angeles, guided "Canoe, kayak trips planned along stretch of L.A. River" according to the Los Angeles Times, in part as a way to build greater appreciation and understanding of the River inside the city.

Kayakers make their way down a stretch of the Los Angeles River last year after it was declared a traditional navigable waterway. The water was so shallow in some areas, however, that they needed to pull their kayaks. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / July 23, 2010)

DC needs to do more of this kind of stuff with regard to the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, although it's possible to go on a boat ride on the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia, from the Bladensburg Waterfront Park in Prince George's County.

Note that rivers can be quite dangerous. See "The River Wild : While the city renews its love affair with the James, there's something you should know: It wants to kill you" from Richmond's Style Weekly and this piece from the Post, "Park Service, paddlers bridge gap for river safety."

Promoting walking, New York City street banner

I wish that we would use street banners and other means to promote urban design and active transportation and transit in DC. E.g., in the past I've suggested that the city should develop and erect interpretation signs about the L'Enfant Plan and urban design of the city and neighborhoods.

Why I think design guidelines and historic preservation protections are important

Because so much of the time, when people operate without guidelines, they do boneheaded things...

On the 300 block of Quackenbos St. NW, a one story bungalow, pretty simple, is being expanded by building a room onto the front of the house.

The house next door is similar to what the changing house used to looked like before.


This is what's happening to the house.


While I understand why people want to change, expand, and modify their houses, what they do and how they do it impacts the quality of life and property values of other residents, albeit to variable effect, depending on the proximity to the buildings that change.

Pressing need to refine and define what "Buying Local" means

I keep having a debate in the context of Eastern Market, serving on the Community Advisory Committee, where one of the inside merchants argues adamantly that the market building needs to be positioned for marketing purposes in terms of "buying local" because after all, all the inside businesses are locally owned, operated by independent business operators. I counter that in the context of food marketing, buying local is about local sourcing--selling food items produced in a 100 to 150 mile "foodshed" in the Chesapeake region.

The Gazette newspapers have a massive ad from National Harbor, touting how this outdoor shopping mall managed by a locally owned firm (Peterson Companies) anchored by a national business (Gaylord Entertainment), focused on selling a sanitized Washington experience through proximity to the actual urban experience that is Washington, DC proper is "buying local."


Who owns a store and how "local" it is does matter in terms of what is called the economic multiplier effect. A locally owned business sources more products and services locally, thereby further contributing to the local economy. A nationally owned business sources few products and services locally, and repatriates profits to the corporate headquarters community, thereby contributing less to the local economy per dollar of transaction, compared to the locally owned business.

What a store sells product-wise and how the products are merchandised matters as well.

Probably other people have created a typology for how to evaluate "buy local" claims. Here's a first pass by me:

Ownership of the business
- local
- nonlocal

Scale of the business
- single store
- chainlet
- regional chain (includes franchised locations)
- national chain (includes franchised locations)

Product mix
- mass merchandise items (Scott toilet paper, Levis jeans, etc.)
- specialty merchandise (e.g., boutique lines not commonly found in mass merchandise stores, such as the clothing lines sold at the Need Company men's clothing store in Carytown, Richmond, or the new Trohv housewares and furniture store in Takoma DC)

Source of products
- locally sourced items (sausages produced locally from locally grown family farm, designer clothing items produced locally sold at a store in NYC, etc.)
- nationally sourced

How products are presented to the customer
- personally
- impersonally

General authenticity factors
- e.g., if you market your business as "Washington" does that mean Washington, DC proper or the Washington Metropolitan region, which includes cities and suburbs in Maryland and Virginia (and some counties in West Virginia and Pennsylvania too).

These are the various dimensions on which claims of localness and uniqueness should be judged.

There is no question that a butcher in Eastern Market selling meat products is locally owned, and employs people in the regional economy (it happens that most of the vendors don't live in DC anymore), and how it provides items to its customers (someone, even the owner, waits on each customer individually) is different from how a supermarket does it, but in terms of how the locavore movement is developing, because most of the inside vendors sell products that come from the same sources that supply supermarket chains, the food items that they sell can't be considered local.

On the other hand (and most other public markets do this), they could work to source more local products, thereby supporting the local economy more intricately than they do now. That's what many restaurants do. For example, the article "COMMUNITY FEED: Cafés get local by sourcing regional ingredients" from the November 2009 issue of the coffee trade magazine Fresh Cup starts with this paragraph:

The eggs that are used to cook waffles and fluffy egg dishes at the Guerilla Cafe in Berkeley, California are bought from farmer Art Davis' stand at an outdoor farm market up the street. Cherries grown four hours north of Milwaukee, in an area called Door County, are baked into scones and put into pastry cases at Alterra Coffee Roasters' nine Milwaukee-area stores. And at Wildflower Cafe & Coffeehouse in Mason, Ohio, the Farmers Market Salad is full of whatever is available at the week's market...

I've wondered about this idea for awhile why restaurants (and the ice cream shop) in Takoma Park don't feature ingredients sourced from the Sunday Farmer's Market in Old Town Takoma. That's the kind of initiative frequently mentioned in association with farmers markets in NYC, San Francisco, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles.

Austin 360, a website associated with the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, has a story about apparel stores doing "private label" development in association with exclusive clothing lines. See "Austin stores are turning to private label and exclusive garments to keep their inventory fresh."

The Market NYC, also known as the Young Designer's Market, is a flea market for small crafts producers. Somewhere in NYC there is a store that sells items only produced by small designers located in Greater New York City. There are arts/crafts stores that do this too, located in various places.

When it comes to authenticity and the economic multiplier effect, National Harbor in Prince George's County is a tricky question. First, every place is authentic. But the issue isn't that places exist, it's how they are organized in terms of their business concept, focus, and what they provide.

While on the water, National Harbor is basically an outdoor shopping center and "resort." It's not designed to be any different than other shopping destinations, other than the fact that it is on the Potomac River. Most of the stores and restaurant concepts have no connection to the Washington region (Mayorga Coffee and Art Whino are exceptions) and won't ever. But the center is unique, because they have a Peeps/Mike&Ike store...

Gaylord Corporation, the main hotel and convention center operator there, is a "national" corporation with interests in Nashville, Florida, and elsewhere. As they develop relationships with national firms as clients, they cross-sell their use of other Gaylord properties.

People go to National Harbor to be near to DC, but not in DC. While I understand their "Go Local" program to promote the existence of their conference facility for meetings, I find it incredibly laughable that they actively market staying at National Harbor to see "Washington, DC's" fireworks for the Fourth of July. Washington, DC is the national capital, National Harbor is not.

The issue is complicated by the fact that as a community, Prince George's County lacks its own community center. No one town functions for the County such as how Alexandria functions within Northern Virginia, or how Bethesda and Silver Spring function within Montgomery County as places to go, be, play, and walk, as opposed to other areas within Montgomery County that are automobile-centric, e.g., Lakeforest Mall or Montgomery Mall.

In any case, people need to be more sophisticated in terms of their expectations of what "Buy Local" means, and businesses need to be held to higher standards when it comes to marketing the "localness" of their businesses.

Defining deviance down vs. defining deviance up

Dog owning miscreants, photo by District Curmudgeon.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an essay, now very famous, called Defining Deviance Down, which made the point that as various types of deviance became more widespread, the definition of deviance in terms of various infractions becomes looser, because communities have limited resources in terms of its ability to "sanction" offenders, either through the maintenance of social codes of order through norms, socialization, and public opprobrium, or through what I call the exercise of the "coercive power" of the state.

In the UK, under the previous Labour Government, the state fought back against deviance through the "anti-social behavior orders" and various initiatives focused on ridding communities of people who were proven to be persistent, habitual nuisances and offenders, out of the recognition that negative behaviors of some people can lead to a significant reduction in the quality of life for other residents in a community. The current government is scrapping ASBOs for more traditional problem-oriented policing approaches. See "Asbos to be scrapped following review" from the Daily Telegraph.

In the U.S. we soldier on.

Somehow I missed the entry in District Curmudgeon about a couple who let their dog s*** in a treebox without cleaning it up.

Apparently I missed the thread about it in Greater Greater Washington, where someone was spiritedly defending the miscreants, and accusing the Curmudgeon of stalking.

Fred Siegel's The Future Once Happened Here is a book from the late 1990s about the decline of cities, and its major thrust is the point of how defining deviance down supported a significant decline in social order and the quality of life in cities, and that until certain mayors in certain cities took a stand against bad behavior in the public sphere, ranging from quality of life offenses like littering to transit turnstile jumping and crime, in an application of the "Fixing Broken Windows" ideas of Kelling and Wilson (1982 article from The Atlantic. (Also see the article "Making Neighborhoods Safe" from 1989.)

In 2005, I wrote about the cause celebre in Korea, when a woman let her dog s*** on the subway and didn't pick it up. People took photos and through the power of social media, social opprobrium was laid thick on the woman and she ended up quitting her job. See the 2005 Post column titled "Subway Fracas Escalates Into Test Of the Internet's Power to Shame."

AWESOME.

At the time, I speculated that in the U.S., something like this is unlikely, happen, because we don't have much of a culture of responsibility. Plus, the digital divide would make it hard to shame people who aren't online.

When people demand better won't we get it?

While about "art," I think today's Frazz comic strip is relevant to this discussion. It's really tomorrow's Frazz, because the paper doesn't always print them in order, so I can't insert the image here.

In the 3rd frame of the 4 panel strip, Frazz tells Coach Hacker that "you don't adjust art down to your expectations."

People who don't behave and act properly don't need other people to defend them, we as society need people to admonish them, so that they will do better the next time.

By demanding the best of ourselves and others, we can have a functioning society.

(Also see the "communitarian" ideas by Amitai Etzioni.)

When you cost so little to begin with, raising issues of ethics is almost beside the point

DC has a couple of ethics bills pending but to my thinking, they don't address the main problems because the legislation fails to address in substance those categories of government that tend to trigger ethics problems:

- government contracts generally
- legislation that favors particular actors (such as the proposed taxi medallion legislation)
- personal service contracts within offices
- earmarks for organizations
- land use deals (although this is more an issue in Prince George's County in some respects) and financial support for campaigns
- tax abatement requests
- appointments to commissions.

In regards to my line that the great thing about DC for developers is that we sell ourselves for so little (sometimes I call it "green love"), today's Post reports how great Walmart is because they are giving $25 million to support youth programs across the U.S., with $665,000 to programs in DC. See "Wal-Mart to help fund D.C. youth programs ."

All the more reason to roll over on the building permit applications for their proposed stores in DC...

I have to add a new keyword to the set of index terms I use, co-optation, which is a term from political science (via Wikipedia):

co-opting or less frequently co-optation most commonly refers to action performed in a number of fields whereby an opponent is nullified or neutralized by absorption but there are other distinct senses as well.

It's an old concept, but still has a lot of staying power in DC. The social justice/equity vs. quality of place divide within the city (see Between Justice and Beauty by Gillette) makes elected officials and civic organizations susceptible to being bought off.

I've witnessed this ever since I came to the city in 1987, such as with the proposed deposit law on beverage containers. The beverage industry "bought off" the black churches and it was all over for that initiative... See "Bottle Feud Taps Churches;Bill Opponents Said to Buy Off Congregations" from 1987 and this op-ed, "The Ethics Of Recycling; "We need to grow up with the idea." by Rev. Ernest Gibson, then the executive director of the Council of Churches of Greater Washington, from the Washington Post.

Only the special interests change, the process remains the same.

Washington Examiner owner seeking exceptions from California environmental rules for a stadium in Los Angeles?

Of course, the editorial pages of the Washington Examiner bug me because they are so hard right. But I am often struck by the hypocrisy of the editorials, given the economic interests and actions of the owner of the paper in terms of how his other interests are managed, particularly the Anshutz Entertainment Group, which owns and operates Staples Center in Los Angeles, and has received hundreds of millions of dollars of public investment and incentives--yet the Examiner is quick to editorialize against local government officials and projects involving tax incentives.

Today's Los Angeles Times reports that negotiations with AEG to build a football stadium in Los Angeles are tinged by fears that the company will seek a special state law making illegal legal challenges from citizens in response to the eventual environmental assessment report. See "Los Angeles official opposes easing environmental rules for downtown stadium: Los Angeles' top policy advocate supports a resolution to fight legislation that would subvert state law for developer of proposed facility."

Although, I guess that would be consistent with the Examiner editorial policy, which is unlikely to support environmental regulation as well as civic involvement in local affairs.

NOTE: I am referring to the editorial pages, not the news pages and the day to day reporting therein.

It's time for a new "city beautiful" movement in DC

Flickr photo by NCinDC of the Georgetown Waterfront Park, which in its most recent previous incarnation was parking lots.

Pocket "park" on 14th Street NW in Columbia Heights

Despite the fact that livability issues (dog parks, community gardens, bike paths) were made out to be a whitey plot in the last election, there are many livability ideas and projects percolating in various places in the city, ranging from city initiatives like the "Yards Park" on the Southeast waterfront, the Georgetown Waterfront Park, or a number of really lousy terribly done pocket park initiatives such as the re-doing of the pocket park on 14th Street NW at Oak Street in Columbia Heights to a variety of ground up citizen-generated ideas.

In the late 1990s, when DC's Department of Transportation initiated the first streetscape redesign programs for Georgetown and Barracks Row (8th Street SE) and for Thomas Circle, to take back travel lanes that had been cut through the circle and to restore the park, and in the early 2000s, with initial planning for streetcars, and the creation of a public realm framework in Columbia Heights and for the Anacostia Waterfront, DC was on the cutting edge of placemaking planning for large cities.

Even though DC has a Public Realm Design Manual (another place where an earlier kind of version was produced as an appendix to the Brookland Streetscape and Transportation Plan, on pages 140-153), it's not clear that the process for considering streetscape improvement initiatives is very bold.

Now it's more of a tool kit process about curbs, bulbouts, and streetlights, but not so much about improving places in paradigm busting ways. And it's complicated by the fact that while the placemaking movement has continued to advance, DC's streetscape and placemaking planning initiatives have not moved forward at the same pace. For example, it's taking DC 10 years to get its first streetcar line, while it took Seattle 5 years.

In NYC, the way that spaces formerly given over to the car are being remade over for pedestrians and bicyclists is a national story. See "City Has Transformed Broadway" from the New York Times.



New York Times graphic on Broadway's changes.

Similarly, San Francisco has a wide-ranging livable streets program, which has brought into one program a variety of efforts which in other cities (except maybe for New York City) are typically spread across different agencies or different departments within a single agency but the programs aren't coordinated.

The SF program starts off with a BHAG--a big, hairy audacious goal--making San Francisco not only the best city for walking in the US, but in the world--and incorporates pedestrian programs, streetscape improvements, traffic calming, bicycle planning, and safe routes to school planning into one overarching program.

-- San Francisco Sustainable Mobility and Climate Action Strategy

In DC, while these programs exist, they are not internally integrated and while the Department of Transportation has a new livability planning initiative, thus far we see missed opportunities for coordinated improvements--although the livability planning paradigm offers us a lot of hope. From the DDOT Rock Creek West II Livability Study Final Report:

Livability is a term that refers to community quality of life as experienced by the people who live, work, and recreate there. Livability recognizes that strong communities rely on the interplay among transportation, public health, housing, cultural resources, and the natural environment.

Transportation, in particular, is central to livability. Travel choices govern our ability to get around; the operations of our transportation facilities impact safety and comfort; and the designs of our public spaces directly affect the prosperity and enjoyment of the city.

DDOT’s Livability program includes transportation studies for various neighborhoods of the District. The studies take a “big picture” look at the street network and identify concrete actions that adhere to the principles outlined in the DDOT Action Agenda. The goals of this study are to:

• Ensure safe passages for all users of the street network. This involves special attention to the most vulnerable users of the system (pedestrians, bicyclists, children, and the elderly); and taming traffic while maintaining overall mobility.

• Prioritize sustainable living in DC communities. This means providing a robust set of transportation choices and designing streets to encourage physical activity. It also means designing streets in ways that help preserve, protect, and/or restore ecological systems.

• Foster prosperous places by building and operating streets as unique urban places that support retail and employment districts. Enhancing prosperous places also may entail the expansion of civic open spaces within or along streets.

. But as far as improvements are concerned, thinking outside of the box is nowhere to be seen.

Somehow these ideas need to be truly embraced as the primary planning paradigm for the city, and integrate this approach systematically into the planning processes for the Office of Planning, the Department of Small and Local Business Development, and the Department of Parks and Recreation, and schools planning (public and charter schools), not just for the Department of Transportation.

These efforts are made more difficult by not having a master transportation plan or a Parks Master Plan.

And the issue is made more complicated by the fact that the city is not fully in control of the street and parks resources in the city--some of which are controlled by the federal government, and in particular, the National Park Service.

A couple weeks ago M.V. Jantzen wrote a series of posts in Greater Greater Washington about rethinking Dupont Circle which I think ought to be seen as a call to arms for re-thinking the city's park and placemaking agenda--for having one...

Image: Wymer Collection, Historical Society of Washington, D.C. This photograph from the 1940s show the original sidewalk, about 20 years before it was destroyed. Above: The corner of Connecticut and Ordway, currently home to Dino Restaurant, Suntrust Bank, and Brookville Market.

Similarly, in Cleveland Park, Herb Caudill and others are calling for re-widening the sidewalk "plaza" on the 3300 block of Connecticut Avenue, by removing the service drive and parking lane, and restoring the wide plaza.

They have a petition campaign running on their website, I wish this was a sidewalk and just had a long post in Greater Greater Washington, "Restore the sidewalk in Cleveland Park," explaining the various options that they see for restoring the wide sidewalk there on the in Cleveland Park.



There are other posts out there about restoring Truxton Circle ("Before and after: Truxton Circle)" and and creating "Scott Square," or pedestrianizing streets (for certain reasons I tend to not favor this, but that's an argument for another day).

I wrote about these issues on New Years Day, in a couple entries:

-- New Years post #3: How about more community self-help (Peter Riehle and Eastern Market Metro Plaza)

-- New years post #5: DC City Council Committees and striving to be a world class city (frankly, this post is so good, I'll reprint it tomorrow...)

and here, "What a "Complete Places" land use and transportation planning philosophy would mean in practice" and "Complete Places are more than Complete Streets."

Making every block of the city great, in terms of how DDOT terms the livability agenda as creating and maintaining safe, sustainable and prosperous places, is probably the best unifying agenda the city could create.