Twelve years after Congressional approval and with over $80 million raised, the foundation spearheading a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall has entered the final phase before construction: selecting materials, choosing an artist for the King sculpture, and winning approval of a final design from picky federal officials. On this Martin Luther King Day find out why the stone and sculptor selected are Chinese, and what late-breaking design changes have irked the U.S. Fine Arts Commission.
D.C.’s Metrorail Fares in Context
After completing my recent analysis of WMATA’s Metrorail fare increase, I decided to do some more research to better put the fares in a national context, finding D.C. Metro riders pay some of the highest subway fares in the nation. I then did a side-by-side comparison with San Francisco’s BART, considered a sister system to the D.C. Metro. The analysis of BART fares from a downtown San Francisco station shows that Bay-area suburban commuters enjoy even cheaper per-mile fares than their D.C. counterparts.
Shaw Library Demolition, Reconstruction Under Way
After years of inaction, the process of reconstructing the D.C. Public Library’s Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Branch seems on-track. A new temporary library hums with activity, demolition of the old building is well underway, and a meeting is scheduled later this month to reveal a preliminary design for the new building.
Top Urban Planning and Development Websites
Planetizen has asked me for nominations for their annual list of the web’s top planning and development websites. Winners in 2007 included architecture blog BldgBlog, Arlington County’s Commuter Page, and the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy’s Visualizing Density tool. The criteria simply request sites that are a service to the planning community. What sites should […]
Metro’s Fares Analyzed
With the D.C. Metrorail’s fares set to increase on Sunday, it piqued my interest in precisely how the system determines charges and the nature of the changes. I decided to take a look at exactly what pattern the famously unpredictable fares took. While most news reports have reported suburban riders would experience the largest absolute increases, my analysis shows they continue to enjoying the lowest cost per mile of all riders, well below the cost of automobile use.
AHA Conference Schedule
I’m attending the American Historical Association Conference this weekend, held in the Woodley Park hotels here in Washington, D.C. A list of the sessions I’m thinking of attending is below.
Planning a Fake City
Our novels, films, and urban planning textbooks are filled with imaginary cities. Whether utopias or dystopias, most of these fictional cities imagine what a city could be at its best — or worst. However, few describe an average city, let alone map out a typical yet entirely fake 1,011 square mile American city in excruciating detail, complete with a named streets and an imaginary history. That’s precisely what my friend Neil Greenberg set out to do with his Fake Omaha project. Read more to find out how he keeps track of 11,000 street names and how imaginary transit systems and mayors transform the fake backwards city into a fake dynamic metropolis, and what we in the real world can learn from it.