Photo by Shaun Bell.
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Could DC use a pedestrian mall, and could that mall be M St.?
- Stables of Georgetown sold.
The Morning Metropolitan
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Photo by Shaun Bell.
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
Filed under Uncategorized
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
Two part question was asked…
Could DC use a pedestrian mall, and could that mall be M St.?
To the first part, maybe. Use is sort of a strange word as it is more of a judgement. DC could have a pedestrian mall…then again we have one called, get this…The Mall and run by the National Park Service. Actually, we have another one that was stolen from the city in the middle of the night by the federal government and shutting down a very good cross town artery in front of some big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
As to the second part, could that be on M Street…well despite the continuing war against auto traffic on the streets of Georgetown being waged by GM, the answer would be NO. Why, simple, where exactly would the traffic coming off the Key Bridge go? Would you make all the lanes turn left…good luck getting the various neighborhoods on board with that. Would you put in the futuristic ramp that would bring traffic down to a redesigned K Street with a removed Whitehurst…oh wait that was already shot down for a new park. Would you force people onto the Whitehurst…how about just making Georgetown completely unreachable? Interestingly, if you were to effectively make the Key Bridge have no place to send traffic or get traffic from then you could turn the Bridge into a pedestrian mall. 😉
It has become increasingly clear that the best alternative for GM would be the systematic removal of the Key Bridge. It would effectively make Georgetown traffic much lighter since there would be no river crossing…and by making it far harder of an area to reach there would not be the tourists and others coming to the area supporting businesses. Of course that would basically kill the current business model that exists and send the entire neighborhood into an almost total collapse. Then again, we could rise on the back side of that with a new sustainable model of small stores geared at serving the local population. Granted the loss of a bridge would be difficult to justify, but maybe we could just move it or build a replacement at Three Sisters (those plans have to be lying around somewhere) and extend I-66 on into the city dumping out in Foxhall or some such area…there take that neighbors. If you want to live in a Disney run city…let me recommend Celebration, Florida.
RNM
For some reason the link to the pedestrian mall story isn’t working?