The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority will adjust several D.C. bus routes as of Sunday, June 24, and one more a week later on July 1. These changes, some of which will make life harder for Metrobus riders, reflect one longstanding Metro bias and two relatively new wrinkles in the agency’s muddled approach to bus planning.

The June 24 shifts affect slightly such major lines as the 42 and the 50s; the most significant cutbacks will be on the S and 90 lines. One route, the X6 shuttle to the National Arboretum, will be eliminated. The July 1 adjustment is that the 98, which links Adams Morgan and the U Street Metro during party hours, will get 50 percent more service.

It’s hard to argue against the X6 cut. I’m one of the few Washingtonians who’s ever taken a Metrobus to the Arboretum, and even I have never been on an X6. But the 90 and S changes are another matter. They will increase waiting and travel times, as well as crowding, on two heavily used lines.

The S cutback is modest in scale, but devastating in effect: During evening rush hour, the northbound S4 will leave from 13th and I Streets NW, not 10th and Pennsylvania. (The S2 will continue to run the entire route.) This means riders on the line’s southern section face a 50 percent service cut—and at rush hour, no less.

The reduction reflects a decades-old Metro penchant for removing bus service to downtown. On the theory that such lines duplicated Metrorail, many bus routes that once served the F Street corridor or the Federal Triangle have been cut back or routed away from the area. Most infamous of these changes was the 1995 retrenchment of the 42, once one of Metrobus’ busiest routes. The line used to run from Mount Pleasant to Stadium-Armory via F Street and Union Station—a true downtown “Circulator.” The eastern part of the route was erased, and the F Street section moved to K Street, a change that was expected to suppress ridership, and did.

The 90-line changes are an example of one of Metro’s newer obsessions: truncating routes in order to improve on-time statistics. As of June 24, all 90, 92, and 93s will end at the Duke Ellington Bridge rather than McLean Gardens. The 96, which begins at Capitol Heights Metro, will be extended to McLean Gardens; it will be the only 90-line bus to go there. Statistics may improve, but service will decline.

Meanwhile, the little-used nighttime 98, whose route is duplicated by the other 90s, will run every 10 minutes, instead of every 15. A three-month test of the expansion, pushed by the Adams Morgan Partnership, will be subsidized by $70,000 in D.C. money.

Thus the “privatization” of city bus planning, but not funding, continues. Heavily used routes are trimmed, while little-ridden shuttles devised by business groups are increased. (The prime example of this is, of course, the underperforming Circulator, routed by the Downtown and Georgetown Business Improvement Districts but largely bankrolled by D.C. taxpayers.) If you want better bus service in your neighborhood, it seems, don’t call your councilmember—organize a BID.

Photo courtesy of WMATA

Red platform lights, which were installed on the upper level of the Gallery Place Metro Station in March, have now arrived at L’Enfant Plaza as well. Metro has announced that Fort Totten, Metro Center, Smithsonian, Union Station, Stadium-Armory, and Eisenhower Avenue will get the LEDs (light emitting diodes) soon.

The effect is not subtle. When at half power, the red lamps give the station vault a horror-flick vibe. And when a train enters and the lights begin blinking at full power, the place feels like a nuclear power plant’s control room as a meltdown looms.

There are two arguments for the lights. They will save money, because they use less electricity and need to replaced less frequently. And, believes Metro General Manager John Catoe, they will improve safety.

Writing in the Examiner, “Sprawl and Crawl” columnist Steve Eldridge complains that the lights “make everything look cheap,” but accepts them because they will cut Metro’s expenses.

In fact, the red LEDs do cost less than white ones: $63 apiece as opposed to $108, according to a Metro press release. But the cost of the bulbs is a minor part of the savings, most of which comes from reduced electricity use and decreased labor costs.

As for safety, the argument is even thinner. “When they see the red lights, I’ve observed that customers stop, and keep a safer distance from the edge of the platform,” Catoe has said.

In other words, no study has been done on the lights’ role in increasing safety. It just happens that the general manager, who was already inclined toward red platform lights, thinks they might change riders’ behavior. Even if this is true, the red LEDs are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist: Metro trains don’t hit people standing on platforms. In the 31 years that Metro has operated, the only recurring cause of trains’ colliding with riders is attempted suicide. (The stations’ bloody new ambiance might even encourage that.)

Metro is Washington’s most significant work of postwar architecture, deftly combining aesthetic and safety concerns. Designed at a time when most Americans associated subways with New York’s system, and New York’s system with danger, Metro was meant to both appear and be safe. Such features as the open station design, platforms that subtly slant away from the tracks, the granite edge with blinking lights, and overhangs under the platform to provide refuge to anyone who fell on the tracks all make Metro the safest transit built at the time. Yet architect Harry Weese and his team were careful to also make the system elegant, and not a scary-looking industrial site with barriers and warning signs—or blinking red lights.

The addition of the red LEDs indicates how profoundly Metro’s current management doesn’t understand the system’s design. And that probably means that more assaults on it are to come.

One of the favored myths of D.C. officials is that the Frank D. Reeves Center, which opened at 14th and U Streets NW in 1986, resuscitated the area. According to this fantasy, it was the government office building—not the 1991 arrival of the Green Line, nor the expanding gentrification of the Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and Adams Morgan neighborhoods—that brought clubs, restaurants, and other businesses to the U Street corridor.

The Reeves Center legend is so popular, in fact, that it’s used to justify moving other government offices to ever more remote locations. Following his predecessor’s lead, Mayor Adrian Fenty has even proposed forcing Metro, a regional agency, to relocate its Judiciary Square headquarters to the vicinity of the Anacostia Metro station.

Yet even as the Reeves fable is used to justify further decentralization, the city’s Office of Property Management is seeking to redeem the fairy-tale building. On Tuesday evening, OPM Director Lars Etzkorn convened a public meeting to discuss ways to save the structure that supposedly saved U Street. “Finally, I can actually do something about this building,” Etzkorn announced.

Actually, the parley was called only to discuss the building’s first floor, a retail graveyard that currently holds a convenience store, a gallery, a bank, a D.C. Lottery redemption center, and lots of unleased space. Other problems, such as the perennially leaking roof, were not on the agenda.

Etzkorn was followed by consultants, two retail and one architectural, and then a OPM staffer who led an “audience participation exercise.” Unlike most such drills organized by D.C. government agencies, this one was not structured to drive people toward a preordained decision. The discussion was so free-form that the approximately 15 attendees, most of them from the neighborhood, were free to offer ideas that were largely detached from reality.

They proposed adding a supermarket, a “food hall,” or an Apple Store. People suggested that the revamped Reeves should resemble Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market or Seattle’s Pike Place Market—both of which are much bigger than the center’s first floor, and in far more heavily trafficked and architecturally attractive locations.

A “food hall” would be possible in Reeves only if, at considerable expense, the entire first floor were converted to retail and the entrance and security-clearance functions for the offices above were somehow moved to the second floor. Much simpler, and just as a beneficial to the adjacent streets, would be to reconfigure the existing retail space so that it’s more conspicuous and appealing, and make all of it accessible from the street. That, plus a cafe or other outdoor business on the U Street side, would be enough to fix what local resident Scott Pomeroy called “the major dead zone” the building creates.

Ironically, though, the Reeves Center shows more urbanistic promise than the other government centers planned to disperse city functions to far-flung locations. But more on that later.

Orange flags arrived in Chevy Chase to great media fanfare in 2005. Inspired by a similar program in Salt Lake City, area residents had lobbied the city for buckets of the flags at two intersections on Connecticut Avenue NW to help pedestrians safely cross from Safeway to Child’s Play or the American City Diner.

For two years, people pranced and danced and twirled their flags in the face of oncoming cars, and the traffic mostly slowed down for them (except for one poor soul who was hit during a blizzard while carrying the flag). But when the flags disappeared this year from the intersection of Connecticut and Morrison Streets NW, no one called a press conference. Indeed, even some longtime Chevy Chase residents apparently didn’t notice that in March, the city replaced the flags with a bona fide streetlight equipped with a pedestrian call button.

George Branyan, the pedestrian program coordinator for the District Department of Transportation, says he’s seen several people just walk out into traffic, oblivious to the new signal.

On the other hand, a vocal minority of Chevy Chase folks has complained to his office that the light is causing backups and forcing cars onto side streets. But Branyan won’t be bringing back the flags. Instead, the city will work out the hiccups with the light in the coming months.

“I personally am not a big fan of the flags,” Branyan says. “I just don’t think you should have to wave a flag to cross a street.” Those who preferred the flags with their street crossings can still find them two blocks north, at Connecticut and Northampton Streets, at least for now.

—Stephanie Mencimer

Until recently, activists have carefully watched the assemblage of private property in their neighborhoods, anticipating the next major bid for a midrise office or condo building. That’s still prudent, but lately much of the redevelopment action has involved city-owned land. Anyone scouting for the next major development would be well-advised to pay close attention to schools, libraries, firehouses, and police stations.

A new scheme by Eastbanc, a Georgetown-based developer, would involve three of those four institutions. The project would replace the police department’s Special Operations building at 23rd and L, the West End Library directly to the west (both are on Square 37), and the fire station nearby at 23rd and M (on Square 50). A new firehouse and library would be built as part of two structures that would also include residential and possibly retail space; the police facility will leave the area permanently.

The plans, which Eastbanc has been presenting at a series of small meetings with neighborhood residents, are still tentative. At a Monday evening briefing at the West End library, about 20 people learned of the proposal from Eastbanc vice presidents Joe Sternlieb (a former employee of the city and the Downtown Business Improvement District) and Mary E. Mottershead. The drawings they displayed showed only basic massing, not full design.

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After a series of well-publicized pedestrian deaths, walkers’ safety is a hot local topic. So the fact that only about 40 people attended Thursday evening’s public meeting on the citywide pedestrian plan probably reflects inadequate publicity for the event, not a lack of interest. Still, there was a significant gap between the planners and the walkers.

Part of the misunderstanding stemmed from the consultants’ reliance on jargon. Representing the Toole Design Group, Colleen Mitchell referred to “sidewalk deficiencies” (that means there aren’t any), “work zones” (construction sites), and “deliverables” (whatever the consultants get paid to produce). But the fundamental issue was that the pedestrian plan, whose final version should be ready in October, emphasizes engineering fixes, while the citizens’ priority was enforcement of existing traffic laws.

Called at the new Columbia Heights Recreation Center, the meeting began about a half-hour late, with Adrian Fenty’s arrival. The mayor read a few “talking points” he admitted to not having seen before delivering them, demanded applause for new Transportation Department Director Emeka Moneme, and then headed for the door. It was left to three consultants and a few DOT employees to explain further.

Essentially, the meeting presented some survey data and four citywide maps. The latter depicted those sidewalk deficiencies, recent vehicle-pedestrian collisions, about 25 “pedestrian study areas,” and dangerous sites where large numbers of walkers regularly encounter “high deficiency roadways.” The last map’s top six problem areas, depicted in bruise-colored purple: Maine Avenue SW, Washington Circle NW, Florida Avenue NW near North Capitol Street, East Capitol Street near Benning Road, and two sections of Minnesota Avenue, one near the Metro station of the same name and the other near Howard Road.

When the subject was opened to questions, the planning vernacular vanished. People just wanted to talk about how hard it is to cross the street, which a online survey done by the city had already indicated as pedestrians’ top concern. As if on cue, Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham arrived to say that the D.C. Council plans to transfer 43 traffic control officers from the police department to the transportation department, add another 20, and give them all the power to ticket traffic violations. This may not change anything—how will people on foot catch errant motorists?—but it drew more applause than Moneme.

In the ongoing rewrite of downtown Washington’s recent history, the Town Theater just got an upgrade.

An April 22 Washington Post piece on the National Museum of Women in the Arts, written by Ann Hornaday, described the building’s former tenant as a “kung fu movie house.” That’s not exactly true, but it’s closer to fact than the usual putdown, which is that the theater (always unnamed) was a porno dive.

In fact, during its final years the Town was an “urban house,” which means it showed films of interest to African-American audiences. Those included some kung fu, a lot of horror, and a pinch of by-then-shopworn blaxploitation. But the theater also featured lots of mainstream Hollywood stuff. The Town was by no means one of those grotty “grindhouses” that exist so vividly in Quentin Tarantino’s imagination (and maybe nowhere else).

The Town closed in January 1984, the last downtown cinema to be swept away by the gentrification plotted by the city’s Redevelopment Land Agency and the federal Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation. The 1984 date alone is significant, since it’s often claimed that the last downtown movie house closed in the 1960s. (If the fabulist is on a roll, he or she will note that the cinemas were displaced by “the riots,” which actually didn’t touch downtown D.C.)

The last movie I saw at the Town was Doctor Detroit, a largely forgotten 1983 Dan Aykroyd comedy. In its final six months, the theater also ran such standard suburban-multiplex fare as Superman III, Sudden Impact, and Escape from New York. And while the bookings did include “grindhouse” titles like Death Mask of the Ninja and Bloodsucking Freaks, even most of the horror offering were widely distributed stuff, such as the Stephen King adaptations Cujo and Christine. The Town may have shown trash, but it was middle-of-the-road trash. (Where did I find the Town’s 1983-84 schedule? Back issues of the Washington Post, of course.)

Most commentators who dismiss or condemn downtown Washington, circa 1960-1990, don’t mean anything by it. But there is an agenda here, even for people who haven’t realized they’re following it: Downtown’s redevelopment was something of a botch, so describing the area’s previous incarnation as a wasteland of porn houses and other gamy spots retroactively justifies what was done.

It’s just not that simple. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is a beautifully renovated and adapted building. But the Town Theater was kind of cool, too.

“The Old Convention Center Site Redevelopment represents an over 30-year effort to create an exciting ‘living downtown’ in Washington D.C.,” explains a brochure that was distributed at yesterday’s public meeting on the project, sponsored by the development team of Hines/Archstone-Smith and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Well, that’s the official spin. But the proposal for the 10-acre site—between 9th, 11, and H Streets and New York Avenue NW—also represents a last-ditch attempt to establish a sliver of vitality after the failure of the city’s half-hearted 30-year plan for a “living downtown.”

That phrase has been evoked at least since the early 1980s, during Marion Barry’s first term as mayor. The idea was to redevelop the area between 7th and 15th Streets and Pennsylvania and New York Avenues NW—then a lively but not predominantly upscale shopping district, with some offices and a few apartments—as a vibrant mix of commercial and residential.

Whenever there was conflict over this vision, however, city officials sided with office developers. The downtown retail and residential components required by the Zoning Commission in 1990—already too late in the redevelopment process—were quickly undermined by the D.C. Council.

The Old Convention Center site offers a last, if inadequate, opportunity to compensate for the city’s failure of nerve. The property is owned by D.C., and is a blank slate, since all its historic structures were demolished in the late 1970s for the old center (which opened in 1983 and quickly proved obsolete). That may be why there’s little apparent opposition to the plan, which includes 450,000 square feet of office space but also 665 residential units—both condo and rental, some of them “affordable”—and up to 300,000 square feet of retail.

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Georgia Avenue’s rush-hour express buses have finally arrived, six months late and with a different name, but otherwise as promised. When announced in June 2006, the service was called “Rapid Bus” and was slated to begin that September. It actually started running on Monday, dubbed “Metro Extra.” The important thing, though, is that the line does indeed cut traveling time on Georgia Avenue, whose 70/71 Metrobus route may well be the slowest major one in D.C.

Where the 70/71 can make up to 54 stops per trip, Metro Extra serves only 15 between the National Archives and Silver Spring Metro. (Wisely, the planners ultimately decided against terminating the line at Eastern Avenue, which would have stranded passengers short of a major transfer point.) This express schedule was projected to cut nine minutes from a trip from one terminus to the other. To judge by a ride I took on Wednesday, it does better than that.

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D.C.’s underperforming Circulator bus service has found a way to increase ridership: Swallow the competition. As of March 26, the Georgetown Metro Connection “Blue Buses” that run from Foggy Bottom to upper Georgetown will cease operation, and passengers will be directed to a rerouted Union Station-to-Georgetown Circulator route.

This is officially a “six-month pilot project,” but don’t expect the blue (or sometimes white) buses to return to that line, regardless of the experiment’s outcome. Georgetown Metro Connection’s Dupont Circle to Rosslyn route will continue, at least for now.

The Circulator revamp offers one enhancement but several drawbacks. The bus will not stop directly at the Foggy Bottom Metro stop—Metro passengers are advised to catch it at Farragut Square—and will no longer use K Street to enter Georgetown. Since buses will now travel on congested Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, and then up Wisconsin Avenue as far as the Georgetown Safeway, the trip will be longer and slower. (More vehicles will be added in an attempt to maintain 10-minute headways.)

The principal improvement is that service will no longer end at 9 p.m. Buses from Georgetown will run to Farragut Square until midnight on weeknights and 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The after-9 buses will not continue to Union Station.

The blue buses are underwritten by the Georgetown Business Improvement District, which also contributes a small subsidy to the Circulator. Other BIDs also fund the Circulator, but most of the money comes from D.C. and federal funds.

According to Erik Linden, spokesperson for the city’s transportation department, the Circulator’s east-west route is averaging about 5,000 riders per day. Total ridership for the entire three-route system in February was 142,000, which means 5,071 a day. That number indicates that the Union Station-Georgetown line is providing the bulk of Circulator riders, and yet the buses traversing K Street are rarely even half-full.

Passenger levels should increase on the Mall loop with warmer weather, but the 7th Street line is irredeemable; it would be approximately as useful to halt the buses and just burn the taxpayer cash it takes to run them.

In a e-mail providing the ridership numbers, Linden wrote that, “We are thrilled with the response to the Circulator thus far” and that “We think the ridership numbers are growing at a healthy rate.” Yet the number of passengers doesn’t seem to be growing at all.

February is a slow month, but at its peak Circulator ridership isn’t much higher than 5,071 daily. In April 2006, during prime tourist season, the Circulator carried an average of 6,062 people a day, a number that dipped to 5,899 in May.

In fall 2005, Circulator planner Joe Sternlieb predicted that daily riders on the first two routes would reach 10,000 to 11,000 by the end of 2008. It will take a lot more than sidelining a few blue buses to hit that number.

For several years now, the Gallery Place Station has been Metro’s equivalent of the Devil’s playground. But now it really looks the part.

Recently, Metro began a six-month test of new lights along the platform edge. The latest models use light-emitting diodes, which draw substantially less electricity than the original yellowish-white incandescent bulbs and are supposed to last about 40 times as long. This will save money and be less disruptive, since the LEDs shouldn’t have to be replaced nearly so often.

So far, so good. But the lights along the lower platform, which serves the Yellow and Green Lines, are a garish yellow-orange that clashes with Metro’s trademark earth tones. And the ones on the upper platform, where Red Line trains arrive and depart, are a vivid red that gives the station a house-of- blood vibe. (Too bad Metro is so reluctant to let filmmakers shoot in the system; horror-flick directors would love this new look.)

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Jan. 1, 2057—The nation’s capital got a new name today, when the city of Washington was redesignated “Penn Quarter.” The term, which originally applied to a mere 20-square-block area, became so popular that local residents stopped using “D.C.,” “the District,” and “Washington” altogether.

“I’m thrilled at the change,” said Mayor Christopher Barry. “It’s great to give our city a name that was chosen the American way—by a marketing group—rather than by our Congressional overseers. Now if we could only get a vote in the House of Representatives, our long march to self-determination will be complete.”

That change is not gonna come, of course. It’s not likely that the citizens of Georgetown, Anacostia, and other storied neighborhoods will accept a whole new city name. Yet the Penn Quarter tag has partially swallowed “Downtown,” and largely consumed “Chinatown.” What hope do weak formulations like “East End” and “NoMa” have against such a juggernaut?

The confusion actually began in the 1960s, when a new office district fleshed out the spines of K Street and Connecticut Avenue northwest of Lafayette Square. Before then, everyone knew where Downtown was: between 15th and 6th Streets and Pennsylvania and New York Avenues. To some, this area became the “Old Downtown,” as opposed to the “New Downtown.” The latter also became known as “Midtown,” on the Manhattan model.

Both areas have been in a continual state of redevelopment since the late ’70s, and real-estate-industry terms came to apply: The new downtown was called the “Golden Triangle,” a crass nomenclature now enshrined in the name of the precinct’s business improvement district (BID). And the original downtown was dubbed the “East End,” implying that the city’s center was to the west.

Despite the heroic myths of late-20th-century Washington development, very few of the changes to downtown happened organically. That brings us to “Pennsylvania Quarter,” which was devised by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation (PADC), a federally chartered agency, and five developers the PADC solicited to create a mixed-use community around the intersection of 7th and Pennsylvania. The developers “were every skittish about developing housing” there, recalls Jo-Ann Neuhaus, then the PADC’s director of project development, and wanted to redefine the area.

To support the new instant ’hood, the Pennsylvania Quarter Neighborhood Association (PQNA) was founded by PADC and the developers of such buildings as Market Square and the Lansburgh. Neuhaus became PQNA’s executive director, a part-time position she retains today. The new district’s original boundaries, she says, were 5th, 10th, and G Streets and—oddly—Constitution Avenue.

The precinct’s new moniker was ultimately (if not officially) abbreviated to Penn Quarter, and even found its way onto the name of the Archives/Navy Memorial Metro station. When the PADC perished in 1996, Neuhaus became a consultant to the National Capital Planning Commission, a federal oversight group with offices in, of course, Penn Quarter.

Today, the PQNA defines its turf as stretching all the way from the Center Leg Freeway tunnel west to 15th Street, and north to a jagged line defined by Massachusetts and New York Avenues. The growth wasn’t the result of an expansionist vision, says Neuhaus, but of acknowledging new members outside the original borders, and of adoption of the Penn Quarter tag by developers far from 7th and Pennsylvania.

“I kept seeing what people were calling Penn Quarter,” she says. “If people are buying apartments in what they think is Penn Quarter, then it’s Penn Quarter. We weren’t a leader in that. We were just following.”

They’ve followed so far that Penn Quarter’s footprint has become virtually identical to that of the area native Washingtonians still call “downtown.” But, Neuhaus notes, the BID that covers the area stretches to the southeast corner of 16th & K Streets, several blocks beyond Penn Quarter’s reach—at least for now.

The burgeoning Penn Quarter may someday colonize that block, and beyond, but for longtimers there’s some consolation in what the BID covering the southeast corner of 16th and K calls its territory: Downtown.

The Metro fare increases floated on Thursday will not be instigated, at least not in their entirety. Some of the $116 million budget gap the hikes are designed to close will be eliminated by cost-cutting, and the most onerous provisions will yield to public outrage. Still, the proposal reveals the mindset of Metro’s current management: Riders are pests, and the more they use Metro the bigger nuisance they are.

To recap Metro’s proposal: It would penalize riders for using any form of payment other than SmarTrip, the embedded-chip card introduced in 1999. Rush-hour rail riders would pay from 50 cents to $1.30 extra for using a paper farecard, while bus riders would be docked 75 cents for paying in cash. In addition, riders using any of 19 stations in central D.C. and Arlington (even some that are never busy) would pay a 35-cent tariff for their effrontery.

Metro is unusual, if not unique, in maintaining a fare system that punishes riders for Metro’s own route structure. In particular, people who switch from bus to rail must pay two full fares. While passengers who use either rail or bus regularly benefit from passes that allow unlimited ridership, passes for those who use both were eliminated several years ago.

Essentially, Metro’s fares establish a class structure. Currently, people who accept that they are proles and promise to use only the bus can have unlimited rides for $11 a month. Rail-only passengers can ride as much as they like for $32.50 weekly, or restrict themselves to unlimited short trips during peak hours for $22 weekly. Those who use both bus and rail—as if Metro were a transportation system or something—can’t get a break.

Ironically, the answer to this inequity is right there in the chip that makes SmarTrip cards work. Metro was the second major transit system (after Hong Kong) to introduce a smartcard for fare payments, but it has yet to take full advantage of its technology.

London, for example, inaugurated its Oystercard in May 2003; by February 2005, it had programmed the card so it can function as a long-term or daily pass that rewards rather than deters frequent ridership. If someone uses a Oystercard repeatedly in a 24-hour period, the system will deduct only the cost of a paper one-day Travelcard or bus pass, minus 50 pence. Meanwhile, Metro’s SmarTrip still can’t offer a bus-to-rail transfer. But then London is trying to encourage transit use, while Metro just wants those pesky riders to go away.

That’s particularly clear from the idea of the 35-cent “congestion charge,” designed to depress Metro ridership in the area where it makes the most sense: downtown D.C. and a sliver of nearby Arlington. London also has a congestion charge, but it applies to private cars, the least efficient mode of travel, especially in urban areas. Incredibly, Metro’s scheme would encourage people to drive downtown. (As such, it is clearly an affront to the Clean Air Act and could be vulnerable to a lawsuit on those grounds.)

Although some passengers grouse, Metrorail is not that crowded for that long every rush hour. (Metro’s peak hours are a breeze compared to those of transit systems in any major Asian or European city.) The stations are quite roomy and much of the difficulty in boarding and debarking is the result of riders who block the doors. Besides, the fixes for peak-hour congestion—eight-car trains, a new crosstown line—were proposed years ago. It’s not the riders’ fault that the Metro board and the agency’s management failed to plan for increased patronage.

Perhaps the “congestion fare” proposal is just another example of the M.B.A. worldview, which sees everything in terms of “yield management” and other such formulations that exclude human nature and common sense. Washington’s planners have labored for years to create more office and condo buildings in the central city, where traveling by foot, bus, and rail is an attractive option. Now Metro wants to fine the people who took the city seriously and committed to downtown. Silly commuters—get back in your cars! It turns out that Metro isn’t running a transit system, just a fare-collection operation that happens to operate buses and trains on the side.

An irregular feature pitching urban ideas big and small

II: The Great Dupont Cover-Up

On a clear day, the Q Street portal to the Dupont Circle Metro station is the most dramatic in the system. The circular opening offers a vast, beckoning slice of blue sky. But Washington isn’t San Diego, and the sky isn’t always blue. It rains and snows here, and winds whip down that wide opening and straight through the unguarded tube of the Dupont station. And all that weather is tough on machinery, which is a principal reason the Q Street Metro escalators are so often out of order.

As fall turns to winter, this is an apt time to consider covering the Q Street entrance. Fortunately, the portal’s unique shape precludes one of the tackily modernistic canopies that have been retrofitted elsewhere in the system. The circular opening requires a different sort of lid, one that can be integrated into a larger structure. Which is fine, since that building could fix several other problems on that block.

Back at end of the 1980s, when Jack Evans was on the Dupont Circle advisory neighborhood commission and still a defender of neighborhoods, Riggs Bank had plans to build an out-of-scale office structure on the parking lot that covers about half that block. (The “square,” which is actually a trapezium, is bounded by Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues NW and 20th and Q Streets.) Then-Mayor Marion Barry came to Dupont and walked, with Evans and other neighborhood residents, on a tour of several sites that were targeted for development. Barry agreed that the development plans were excessive, and the Riggs plan died.

Instead, the bank evicted the shops and restaurants on the 1500 block of Connecticut and converted the space to offices. Dupont activists had prevented a large new office structure but at a cost to street-level vitality. (A retail frontage requirement for major streets in the city would have prevented that misfortune, but the D.C. Council, then as now, is too timid to impose such a provision.)

Riggs is defunct now, and Pittsburgh’s PNC, which took over the bank, probably doesn’t need all that office space. The storefronts should be restored to retail uses, with a bonus to PNC: A new building on the parking lot that would contain any office space the bank needs, as probably leave some additional square footage that PNC could rent. There’s just one problem: That parking lot has to stay.

Parking lots in urban areas are, to put it mildly, an abomination. They’re an inefficient use of space and a breach in visual and actual continuity. But this one is transformed every Sunday into a farmer’s market that’s become an essential swatch of Dupont’s urban fabric. And there doesn’t seem to be any other open space in the neighborhood that could accommodate these market, at least in its full-blown incarnation. (Only a few merchants use the site during wintertime.)

The answer is a complicated structure that requires design and construction finesse, as well as an architectural style that suits both the pre-modernist buildings that neighbor the site and a contemporary function. Or, rather, functions: The new building, cantilevered over the parking lot, would incorporate office space and a mezzanine leading from the entrance on the Massachusetts Avenue side to the northwest corner. There, a transparent cover would overhang the station entrance, protruding like a magnifying glass extended from its leather case. A walkway could lead from the mezzanine to a pathway around the circular cap. (Actually, the cover could be constructed so that people could walk on it, but that might be a little too eerie, for people both on and below the projection.)

Nearby, elevators and escalators (sheltered from the elements, of course) would carry people from Mass Ave. into the new office block, much as they do at the building erected over the Friendship Heights terminal. A direct internal entrance into the new structure could also be constructed from the existing PNC (ex-Riggs) building at the intersection of Dupont Circle and Massachusetts Avenue.

Technical difficulties aside—and I concede that aspects of the proposal as sketched here may simply be unbuildable—the PNC/office/market/Metro project would be expensive. But it doesn’t involve abuse of eminent domain, evicting small businesses, or any of the other demerits of the city’s most aggressive redevelopment schemes. It would shelter the Metro escalators, preserve the farmers’ market, restore retail to that block of Connecticut, and add to the tax base. Plus, it would retain the view from the upward Metro escalators, and create an architectural landmark that might even draw tourist dollars.

Those seem like a sufficient number of benefits to justify bestowing some of the various subsidies the city dispenses to all sorts of dubious projects. And perhaps—given a sufficiently brilliant design—the neighbors might even allow to the new building to rise as high as the Riggs proposal that was spurned almost 20 years ago.

Immodest Proposal I: Putting China Back into Chinatown

On July 13, the anniversary of the D.C. Circulator’s first run, the D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT) issued a press release labeling the bus service the “Coolest Ride in Town” and calling it an “ongoing success.” But what’s the definition of success? Well, there isn’t one, which is why boosters of the shuttle-bus operation can claim to have achieved their goals.

The original consultants’ report that endorsed the Circulator concept projected 40,000 daily riders on four lines. But in an interview last fall, Circulator godfathers Dan Tangherlini and Joe Sternlieb explained that those numbers were obsolete—and had not been replaced by any new ones. (At the time Tangherlini was the director of DDOT, which provides most of the Circulator’s $6 million annual budget, and Sternlieb was deputy director of the Downtown Business Improvement district, one of four private organizations that kick in a total of $600,000 a year. Tangherlini has since become acting director of Metro, and Sternlieb has gone to work for local developer EastBanc.)

Currently, the system is said to be carrying 7,000 riders daily on three lines, with a goal of 11,000 daily by the end of 2008. But the claim of 7,000 riders a day appears to be overstated. While detailed ridership numbers are available only through the end of May, those statistics indicate that in its best month, April, the Circulator attracted an average of 7,176 passengers per weekday. Overall, daily ridership was only 6,062, a number that declined slightly to 5,899 in May.

In addition, according to DDOT spokesperson Karyn LeBlanc, the ridership studies do not address how many Circulator riders have switched from Metrorail or other Metrobus routes. It’s possible that much of the Circulator’s paltry ridership is being diverted from other services—and thus decreasing Metro revenue. Some unmeasurable, but perhaps significant, percentage of the Circulator’s funding is simply increasing Metro’s need for subsidy.

One aspect of the D.C. Circulator has been an unqualified success: the public relations campaign. Aside from my skeptical feature on the service in City Paper last fall and a July 24 article in the Common Denominator, the local press has greeted the bus service mostly with puff pieces. The Washington Post has been particularly flattering, perhaps because—as Sternlieb testified at a June 7 roundtable before the D.C. Council’s Committee on Public Works and the Environment—”so many Circulator riders were not bus riders until they were attracted to the new service.” In other words, the Circulator has snob appeal.

Only one person testified against the shuttle bus service at the lightly publicized June 7 roundtable (which was supposed to be a public hearing, but had to be downgraded because insufficient notice was given for it to be a legal hearing). Kerry Stowell, who lives near a K Street Circulator stop, argued that “the numbers just do not work.” Noting that she had never seen more than five riders per bus, she calculated that based on fuel costs alone the Circulator costs “$42,336 per passenger per month.”

The estimate of five riders per bus is a little low, at least on the Union Station to Georgetown route, which is the most popular of the three. But even the Circulator’s supporters admit that the buses are nowhere near full. The Post’s new Dr. Gridlock, Robert Thomson, inadvertently damned the buses while offering much more than faint praise. On Aug. 13, he wrote that he had tried the service and found it “a model” with a “distinctive” look that offered “a swell trip.” He rode for the first time on July 28, when the Circulator offered free rides all day to commemorate (a little late) its first anniversary. Thomson noted that he later took several more Circulator journeys, on all three lines, and reported happily that “it’s never been crowded.”

And that’s the story. Not that the Circulator is innovative, cool, or swell. It’s that ridership is low, well below projections, and—to judge from the latest available numbers—no longer growing. The 7,000 daily ridership that the transportation department touted in July shows no increase over April.

Of course, different lines are performing differently. In May, the Union Station to Georgetown route carried 128,599 passengers, while the 7th Street line carried only 42,049. (Ridership on the Mall loop was a mere 12,222, but that service had just been introduced in March.)

Sooner or later, the ridership figures will sink in, and much or perhaps all of the service will be cancelled. For the 7th Street route, that can’t happen soon enough. Almost entirely redundant with the 70/71 Metrobus line, the 7th Street Circulator is an unmitigated flop. It’s a favorite of the BIDs, because it’s supposed to move Convention Center visitors to other parts of town, but it is clearly not doing that.

Logically, the Circulator “brand” would be redefined for tourist areas that have little transit service. Thus the Mall loop should survive, and perhaps be expanded. (Currently, it goes only as far west as 17th Street NW.) Maybe the proposed fourth line, the White House–Capitol Hill loop, should be given a tryout, although it would cover areas that already have substantial Metrorail and Metrobus service.

And what about the 5,899 (as of May) daily riders on the Union Station–Georgetown line? They can be accommodated with some juggling of Metrobus service, which would likely produce higher ridership overall. The D2 and D6 lines could be rerouted to run the Circulator’s more direct route: from Union Station via Massachusetts Avenue and K Street to Wisconsin and K, then up Wisconsin and onto to Q Street to complete their current routes to Glover Park and Sibley Hospital. Of course, the new routes would have to be adequately publicized and marked, but that’s an enduring problem with all Metrobus routes. And there’s no reason that the buses’ electronic signs can’t provide more information: “Glover Park via G’town and K Street,” say.

The re-routing leaves parts of the D2 and D6 lines unserved, but that can be fixed by expanding two lines that were cut back years ago, principally for budgetary reasons. Frequencies should increase on P Street’s G2, offering better service from Dupont and Shaw to Georgetown, and compensating for moving the D2 and D6 off Q street east of Wisconsin Avenue. And the 42 should be restored to Stadium-Armory either via its old route through downtown and across Capitol Hill, or via the roughly D6 parallel route.

Would these changes be as cool as the Circulator? Perhaps not, but they would carry more riders, which is one reasonable definition of success.