Category Archives: Transportation

Photo by jrodmanjr.

Yesterday, GM introduced the Georgetown 2028 report and discussed its most pressing goal: getting Metro to Georgetown. But the bulk of the plan’s 75 recommendations address what changes can be made to the transportation network before we get Metro. And GM would like to discuss some of the highlights of this group today.

Clang Clang Clang Goes the Trolley

The District government is planning on building a 37 mile streetcar network. The first line is currently being constructed on H St. (in fact a car was just brought to the tracks the other day to begin testing). This line will ultimately snake through downtown and terminate in Georgetown.

The city considered different routes, but appears to have settled on having the streetcar come in to Georgetown on K St. The plan calls for the streetcar to travel on a new transit-only lane down K St. between Mt. Vernon Square to Washington Circle. Unfortunately the current plan calls for the streetcar to return to mixed traffic between Washington Circle and Georgetown.

The Georgetown 2028 transportation working group decided that this would cause unacceptable delays. Thus they concluded that the streetcar should continue to have its own lane west of Washington Circle. This would ensure that the streetcar offered fast and reliable service to and from Georgetown.

Georgetown University has also expressed an interest in the alignment of this line. They would like the line to ultimately connect to the campus. But if it comes in on K St., that goal will be tough to achieve without the demolition of the Whitehurst and the construction of a ramp from Canal down to Water St.

Alternatively, the streetcar could come in on the Whitehurst itself. Pedestrian access could be created via ramps or elevators. Then the streetcar could more easily continue on to the campus.

Either way, the recommendation from the report is just to make sure that the streetcar is fast and reliable all the way to Georgetown.

Clang Clang Clang Goes the Gondola?

As GM floated last February, the BID report is recommending the exploration of constructing an aerial gondola from Rosslyn to Georgetown. It would connect the Metro to M St. and the university.

The benefit of this admittedly unusual idea is that it is supposedly is a lot cheaper and quicker to build than Metro. It would provide a system similar to what you see at ski mountains. The cars would arrive constantly and it would guarantee a five minute ride from the Rosslyn metro to M St. and the university.

There are obviously a ton of hurdles such a project would have to clear, but it could be up an running in far less time than it will take to get a Metro here. Continue reading →

Last week, the board of the Georgetown BID approved the final report of the Georgetown 2028 task force. GM was on the task force in his capacity as a CAG board member, so he was restricted in talking very much about the details here. Now that the report is finalized, he’s free to walk you through all the great things that are in it. He’ll spend the next several days doing so.

Today he’s going to talk big picture, and the big picturest item in the report is just one word: Metro.

Early on in the process, it became abundantly clear that when trying to plan for the future of Georgetown, the elephant in the room is Metro. Transportation is such a critical challenge for Georgetown, and there is no solution more dramatic and effective than Metro.

The long term planners for WMATA have floated plans for at least one Georgetown but the time frame is 2040. Meetings with the planners revealed that that time frame was not due to logistics but rather politics. If the politics were changed, the time frame could be changed too. Continue reading →

In a lot of DC neighborhoods, from March to October residents with cars are obliged to weekly move their cars to accommodate street sweeping. For whatever reason, Georgetown is exempt from this burden (GM has heard it was due to the narrow streets where parking is only on one side, but who knows if that’s true). Yet the streets don’t seem so bad, do they? Continue reading →

Photo by Jason Pier.

GM walked by the Wisconsin Ave. CVS last night and noticed that there was a no parking sign up along O St. The sign indicated that the reason for the restriction was “Bikeshare” and the date was April 24th, today.

This location was one of the locations identified by DDOT for the next round of stations. This will go a long way towards filling the need for residents to have better access to bikeshare stations. There are, of course, already four stations in Georgetown, but they’re on the periphery of the residential sections of the neighborhood. This one will bring the service all that much closer to many residents’ front doors. Continue reading →

Photo courtesy of BYT.

Last weekend was the phenomenal French Market on Book Hill. It was the event’s tenth anniversary and was the best one yet. With luck, an innovation from this year will point the way towards more street fairs in Georgetown: wider sidewalks.

If there’s one thing most people agree on it’s that Georgetown’s sidewalks on M and Wisconsin are far too narrow. GM would love a permanent fix whereby most, if not all, parking on M is taken away to widen the brick sidewalks. But that would be a huge and expensive project, possible someday perhaps but not anytime soon.

The French Market demonstrated, however, how we can temporarily widen the sidewalks with fantastic results. As you can see above, the city removed parking on Wisconsin Ave. and set up fences between the pedestrians and the traffic. Thus essentially doubling the width of the sidewalk.

Crowding was always a problem with the French Market, but extra space substantially reduced that. Continue reading →

Last week the BID experimented with adding traffic control officers at the intersection of Wisconsin and M. The officers were there directing traffic and preventing gridlock. When GM stopped by on Friday, there were four officers in the intersection.

The effort was only from April 8-13th, but the hope is that it will become a permanent addition. This is part of the BID’s newly invigorated focus on transportation thanks to its new transportation director, Jonathon Kass. In the BID’s press release, Kass stated “We are hoping that intersection management will improve conditions for everyone, including bus riders on the two DC Circulator Routes and five Metrobus routes that traverse this spot.”

Any discussion of officers directing traffic at that intersection is bound to bring up memories of the late, great Joe Pozell. For those unfamiliar with the sad story: Pozell was the manager at Oak Hill Cemetery, where he lived with his family in the caretaker’s house. On the weekends, he volunteered as a police officer directing traffic at M and Wisconsin. Continue reading →