The Banality of Traffic Violence
You may have stopped to look through the shop window. Or maybe you just received a text and stood to read it. Or maybe your child kneeled to tie her shoe. These things surely happened countless times on Saturday just minutes before 1:00 pm.
But if they just happened to occur at exactly 1:00 pm it would have been deadly.
That’s because at that moment a driver slammed his car into two parked cars hard enough to propel them across the sidewalk into shop window.
And the driver? He has ten unpaid speeding tickets dating back to 2019.
The driver owes DC over $2,500 in speeding fines. But like many Maryland and Virginia drivers, this one likely realizes that there is no reason to pay DC camera-issued tickets if you’re not a DC resident. There is no reciprocity. Maryland and Virginia refuses to enforce the tickets against their own residents.
The DC Council passed a bill requiring the Mayor to seek a new reciprocity agreement with Maryland and Virginia to account for camera-issued tickets. The mayor claimed the two states rebuffed the requests, but then it turned out that Bowser never even formally asked. Mayor Bowser has never shown that she cares particularly much about lawless drivers and her failure to even asked Maryland or Virginia to help out is par for the course with her.
So Maryland and Virginia drivers only need to pay camera-issued DC tickets out of the kindness of their hearts.
And the reckless drivers know it.
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The Morning Metropolitan
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Driver plows another car into a nail salon. (More on this later).
- Is it time to allow swimming in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers?
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Get Ready to Water Your Street Trees
Photo by Jon Hayes Photography.
Spring is here. And while most trees haven’t started to leaf out for the season, they will sooner than you think. And once they do, it is critical for residents to water our street trees. So now is the time to make plans for it, especially if you have a young tree on the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment. This is especially true if it was newly planted this year. The basic goal you should have is to water young trees at least once a week, so long as you get a good 20-25 gallons of water. If you can’t water the new trees, try to find a neighbor who can.
The preferred watering device is the ooze tube (the bags that go around the bottom of the trees). You can differentiate them from the not-preferred gator bags because the gator bags have zippers. (They’re not preferred because they can create an unhealthy environment around the trunk and you have to remove them after each use.) With the ooze tube you can just fill it up and let it go.
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The Morning Metropolitan
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Great old shot from when car dealerships were on M St.
- Speaking of great old shots of M St., here’s another view of it in the 1950s.
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Where the Streets Still Have Old Names: Bank Alley
This week for Where the Streets Had Old Names, GM is mixing it up a bit to explore the inspiration for an old street name that still is in use: Bank Alley.
As GM has written about a bunch in the past, when Georgetown was an independent city, it had a different street naming system from that used in the rest of the District of Columbia. But the independent municipality of Georgetown (and the city of Washington) came to an end in 1871. By the 1890s, Congress forced Georgetown to change most of its street names to comport with the DC system. So most of the old names went away.
But some streets didn’t fit in with the DC system and were left as is. These include Dumbarton, Olive, Prospect, etc. On this list included Bank St. (GM will get to the street versus alley question below).
So we’ve still got Bank Alley/Street. But where did the name come from?
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ICYMI: Know Your Trees Bradford Pears
You may have noticed puffy white flowers on trees around the neighborhood. But these trees are not the beloved cherries; they are the dreaded bradford pear. GM wrote about them as part of his Know Your Trees series and here is that article again:
Today on Know Your Trees, GM explores a tree even worse than the ginkgo: the bradford pear.
Badford pear trees are trees that often get confused for cherry trees since they bloom with poofy white flowers around the same time that cherries do. But they are not cherries, and their flowers are not quite as attractive. They lack the subtle shade of pink and have small green leaves:
Once you realize how to distinguish a bradford pear from a cherry, you realize they are everywhere. Where once you thought you saw street after street lined with cherries, you now see pears.
And if the only distinguishing factor was that the flowers are not quite as attractive as cherries, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But that’s not the case.
Bradford pears are invasive. They were introduced in the 1960s as a sterile ornamental tree. But they turned out not to be sterile. And they started to spread like wildfire.
And the worst thing about bradford pears is that they grow so fast that their limbs are extremely weak and fragile. There was a lovely row of them on GM’s block a while ago, but after every slightly serious storm, the street would be littered with broken boughs. And the trees only have a lifespan of 20-25 years, which is extremely short for large trees.
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The Morning Metropolitan
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Two students running for ANC this fall.
- Speaking of GU, the campus goes to mask-optional today.
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New High School Plan Moves Forward
Yesterday, Mayor Muriel Bowser submitted her draft budget for 2023. In it was funding to move ahead with the proposal to build a new high school in Ward Three. If the project comes to fruition, it will be the in boundary high school for Georgetown students.
The location for the proposal is the former Georgetown Day School lower school on MacArthur Blvd, just west of Foxhall Rd. The private school consolidated its campuses together on Wisconsin Ave. in Tenleytown, so it put the MacArthur Blvd. property on the market. In 2020 the city stepped forward to buy it. Since then various proposals have floated for how to actually use the property. Last year, for instance, the idea of using it as a middle school while converting Hardy to a new high school was discussed.
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The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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