Former ANC 5B-10 commissioner Kathy Henderson tends to draw strong reactions from the people she encounters. She’s a scrapper, known for throwing all her energy into filing complaints, writing letters and putting politicians on the spot. When she relinquished her seat last year to run for city council, she had her teenage daughter, India, run in her place (Henderson told me she “told” her daughter to run). And ever since India won the seat, her mom has exhibited masterful control over the young comish, marching her out of one meeting so a quorum wouldn’t be met. Henderson has also been a vocal supporter of those controversial police checkpoints and a vocal opponent of bars and loitering kids.

Like her or not, you can’t deny Henderson has had particularly bad luck with her car, a 1991 blue Mercury Capri. First someone torched it, then, last November Henderson got a ticket for parking it in the median of Pennsylvania Avenue to attend a police oversight hearing–even though she’d put her “official business” placard on the dashboard. Now her well-known car is the object of what Henderson sees as vengeful slander. When a poster on the Fifth police district listserv ranted about the reckless driver behind the wheel of vehicle that fit the description of Henderson’s car (“blue capri with howard univ stickers in back window and dents on the back left…dc license of ‘anc 5b__ __’.”), Henderson fired right back: “I find your timing suspect and wonder why you did not immediately call the police? I suspect that your true motive is some ridiculous attempt to embarrass me in a public forum.”

Henderson hasn’t responded to my email so far.

Via the increasingly indispensible Streetsblog, this story about how Philadelphia is planning to paint optical illusions on streets around town to slow down drivers. They’re cheaper than speedbumps, apparently, and they have the added benefit of scaring the bejesus out of drivers who suddenly see three triangles floating in front of them. Why stop with triangles? Imagine how effective trompe l’oeil dragons, or maybe a realistic portal to hell would be?

If you own a fruit stand in Philadelphia or are engaged in the business of moving large panes of glass across the street, this may be cause for concern.

LL was hanging out outside the office a few minutes ago when another City Paper employee passed and said, “Marion Barry blocked me in.”

Indeed, Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry is currently appearing on WPFW-FM, with whom we share our Adams Morgan building, speaking about his personal health issues and issues in the African-American community on the Heal DC program.

Behold his champagne Mercedes E320, complete with Ward 8 councilmember plates, on the City Paper’s cramped parking deck:

After the employee went down to the radio offices to complain, an aide came out to move the car into a proper space.

Oh, and here’s a tidbit from the interview: “I don’t ever want to be mayor again. I don’t even want to hear that word,” he said. “I just want to be mayor-for-life.”

UPDATE, 1:45 P.M.: Here’s some detail from the rear bumper, which shows some damage, which may or may not be related to the whole bus run-in thing.

Friday night I drove to Chincoteague, Va. It was an opportunity not just to try out the GPS unit my wife just bought but also to try Mike DeBonis’ Best Crosstown Shortcut. These opportunities were soon at war.

“Recalculating…recalculating” said the GPS’ voice over and over as we brazenly ignored its attempts to get us to New York Avenue NE. After about 10 minutes, my oldest son was holding his ears and asking us to turn down the “robot lady,” who finally succumbed to DeBonis’ shortcut four blocks before South Dakota Avenue NE. Too bad for it, because the route was AMAZING. I couldn’t have crossed the District more quickly if I was a freaked-out Spotsylvania dentist hauling ass from the convention center.

Is there any way to program shortcuts into these units? Or are you stuck with the bog-standard routes, all of which seem to favor staying in traffic for a long, long time? I liked having the GPS when I was traveling, but I ended up muting it on the way home.

That would be Delegate and Republican senatorial candidate Bob Marshall of Prince William County. Today, on WTOP’s Politics Program With Mark Plotkin, Marshall was a guest, and Plotkin asked what he, as the junior senator from Virginia, could do to help Virginia’s notorious transportation problems.

Volunteered Marshall, I’d build I-95 through D.C.

Let’s set aside for a moment that Marshall is proposing building a potentially six-or-more lane freeway through a jurisdiction he would not have been elected to represent. And let’s ignore the billions of dollars it would cost. Maybe even we can forget that such a road would, if not destroy their homes and parkland, disrupt the lives of hundreds of District and Maryland residents for years. And we’ll even forget this would have unproven effects of Virginia traffic. How ’bout the fact the people stopped this more than three decades ago and no credible proposal for an inner-city highway has been proposed in D.C.—or virtually anywhere else in America—since.

The way portrayed it, Marshall said it would simply be a matter of dusting off plans prepared in the early 1970s, and in fact proposed doing so to former Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening and former Mayor Marion Barry some years ago. The excellent Web site Roads to the Future describes what those plans entailed:

If I-95 had been completed according to the original plans, it would have continued from the Center Leg to north of New York Avenue, and it would have junctioned the North Leg of the Inner Loop, turned east, and followed the North Leg, which would have paralleled the New York Avenue corridor, about a block to the north of it. At the B&O Railroad corridor (today’s CSX Transportation), I-95 would have turned northward as the North Central Freeway, following the railroad corridor to beyond the Brookland area, being tunneled (cut and cover) for 3/4 mile from south of Rhode Island Avenue to north of Michigan Avenue, then leaving the railroad corridor at Fort Totten Park, heading northeast into Maryland as the Northeast Freeway, passing west of Hyattsville and College Park before junctioning I-495 at the I-95/I-495 interchange that was completed in 1971. I-95 would have had 10 lanes on the North Leg and North Central Freeway, and 8 lanes on the Northeast Freeway.

Plotkin seemed as taken aback at the idea as LL, and he asked Marshall to confirm that he was in fact proposing pushing a freeway through the middle of residential Washington.

Marshall confirmed he was, “along with a corridor for light rail, correct,” he said.

Oh, light rail (along a corridor already served by Metro’s Red and Green lines)—it’s all good, then, Bob.

Richard McCann, author and creative-writing professor at American University, recently worked on a novel about a car. It’s called In the Belly of the Beast, and you can read it at the Web site for Lexus Magazine. Lexus, like the car.

Earlier this week Galleycat and a handful of other literary blogs took notice of Belly, in which nine well-known writers were commissioned to write an Exquisite Corpse-style novel about an East-to-West road trip in a spanking new IS F. The prose leans toward the puffy, shading close to outright shilling. Consider this line from Arthur Phillips‘ first chapter: “You cannot be more officially grown-up than accepting a wedding proposal and a job offer in the same week and then buying yourself a sweet Lexus sedan with your own money.”

McCann was invited to write about that sweet Lexus last fall. “[The editor was] looking for writers who could give him geographic coverage across the country,” he says. So McCann, a D.C. guy, got to write Chapter 2 of the trip, in which the road-tripping couple heads down to the District. (Jane Smiley, author of the L.A.-set novel Ten Days in the Hills, gets the final chapter, as yet unpublished.)

McCann didn’t discuss specific dollar figures, but he said that writing the 983-word chapter constituted “a great payday.” But he’s not hearing the argument that doing so might constitute some kind of a sellout—a criticism that Fay Weldon absorbed in 2001 when she was paid by high-end jeweler Bulgari to mention the brand name a dozen times in her novel The Bulgari Connection. “It’s a very lavish, extremely beautifully made lifestyle magazine,” he says. “And I was moved by the assumption that it’s readership would want to read stories. A lot of magazines have stopped publishing short stories.”

Also, while the novel inevitably is meant to boost the profile of the IS F, Lexus didn’t give him any strict guidelines about how to write about the car.

“The only rule was that the car could not break down,” McCann says.

Metro Transit Police charged a 20-year-old Alexandria man with stealing three Zipcars from the parking lots of Braddock Road, King Street, and Franconia-Springfield stations. Brian Senia was out on bond awaiting trial on a previous charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in the city of Alexandria at the time of his arrest. He allegedly went joyriding with friends before abandoning the cars. According to Metro, other police departments have been alerted to the thefts, and Senia is under investigation for possible thefts of other cars throughout the area. —Jule Banville

There’s nothing funny about traffic fatalities. I’d just like to get that out there at the start. Still, looking at the bus and bus-stop ads for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s Governments’ “StreetSmart” program, I can’t help but notice what sort of person they’ve chosen to illustrate the hazards of crossing streets.

Look at this man being hit by a car. His stripy sweater, artfully distressed jeans, overdesigned shoes, and flying cup of Starbucks—they all scream “oblivious, over-consuming hipster.” I guess the question here, then, is: How effective are ads that portray the horrors of a scenario that I suspect many people secretly fantasize about?

Slow-moving automobiles are making their way eastward in this great city of ours.

The Neighborhood Pace Car Program, sponsored by the D.C. Department of Transportation in partnership with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA), has already taken root in Ward 3 and is currently creeping (at 30 mph or so) into Ward 6.

The safety program asks neighborhood motorists “to take responsibility for the impact of their own driving while setting the ‘pace’ for safer streets and neighborhoods.” It also asks them to place the special pace car decal in a prominent spot on their automobiles, so that other motorists don’t just assume that the driver is (a) trolling for a parking space; or (b) a longtime subscriber to AARP The Magazine.

Eve DeCoursey, a spokesperson for WABA, says the pace car idea originated in Australia. “Instead of just involving the engineers to FORCE the speed limit,” she writes, “or just involving the police to ENFORCE the speed limit, it also involves the drivers themselves(!) encouraging them to take responsibility for the impact that the velocity of their vehicles have on our neighborhood and community streets.”

DeCoursey goes on to say that the “risk and danger that a driver introduces to the street scape when driving 10-15mph beyond the speed limit is significant.”

Pat Munoz, who signed up to be a pace car driver in Northwest, says it hasn’t been an enormous part of her life because she doesn’t drive that much. But when she does drive, the sticker helps remind her to slow down and pay attention.

“Zooming around in your car isn’t conducive to having a nice neighborhood,” Munoz says. Munoz also says she hasn’t noticed if cleaving to the speed limit has convinced other drivers to slow down. “Maybe the people behind me…”

—Rend Smith

An enduring mystery of District life, at least for me, a non-District resident: Why is the Exxon at the corner of Virginia Avenue NW and Rock Creek Parkway so bloody expensive? Today a gallon of regular will set you back $3.69 at that station. That’s 20 cents more than the next most expensive station in D.C. , according to Gasbuddy.com. I pass by this station every day and am always surprised by how much it costs to gas up there.

I’ve heard predictions that gas will hit $4 a gallon by this summer; that station is on course to hit that price point by next month! And I just don’t understand why the invisible hand isn’t working in this case. Do Watergate residents enjoy the station’s quaint exterior so much that they don’t mind paying such a premium? Is the service amazing? How about the coffee? Why is this place still in business?

Artwork by unclejerry

At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown’s gotten a fair amount of attention for his campaign conveyance, a huge blue conversion van plastered with Kwame Brown-in-’08 decals.

Sorry, Kwame, you no longer are king of campaign transpo. Ward 7 Councilmember Yvette Alexander has you beat.

This monster was parked outside the Washington Senior Wellness Center this afternoon in advance of the mayor’s State of the District speech.

What the Yvettemobile lacks in sign dimensions is more than made up for by the sheer mass of its conveyance. Alexander’s campaign manager, Darryl Rose, says the pickup—made by semi-tractor manufacturer International—is all his. “It won’t be showing up on any campaign finance reports,” he says. The Alexander sign is magnetic and can easily attached and removed for campaign functions.

Rose showed off the remote-start function, and then LL climbed up—way up—into the cockpit to sample the truck’s leather seating and premium audio system (sample CD: Bobby Brown’s The Definitive Collection).

LL did not peek under the hood, but Rose vouches for the horsepower. “It’s got a tractor-trailer motor,” he says. “A big ole motor.”

“We’re just using it to help re-elect” Alexander, Rose says. “It gets a lot of attention.”

Marc Fisher gives driving to the ballpark the Dr. Gridlock treatment. I drove to the ballpark during rush hour this morning, using the following route from the mid-city area: 9th Street NW/SW to Maine Avenue SW to M Street SW to First Street SW. Parked on the unit block of Q Street SW; crossed South Capitol Street at Potomac Avenue and strolled right in. Door-to-door time? 20 minutes. —Mike DeBonis

Well, I decided to fight those phantom tickets.

Headed down to 301 C Street at about 3:15, walked into the hearing registration room, waited about 10 minutes, was sent to a hearing room, waited another 15 minutes for a half-dozen other folks, then got my hearing, which took all of about five minutes.

The skinny: Within an hour, I got all my late fees knocked off! And one of the duplicate tickets was dismissed!

Instead of $365, I now owe a mere $190. Only bad parts: The credit-card system was down, so I couldn’t actually pay the bill, and the examiner wouldn’t waive the $50 boot fee, seeing as I still had two boot-eligible tickets—even though those were tickets I would have paid promptly had I known about them.

Here’s to you, Hearing Examiner Stephen Reichert: You are the very picture of judicial wisdom and reasoned insight.

Sonuvabitch! Just walked past my car on the way to the office and I’ve been booted.

I got an expired-meter ticket about two weeks ago which I haven’t paid just yet, but I’m thinking, That sure as hell isn’t enough to get me the boot!

So I logged on to the city’s online ticketing system and punched in my plate. This is what I got:

The following tickets issued to this vehicle plate are due:

Ticket Number Issue Date Violation Location Amount
370199314 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
370709931 10/24/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK E ST NW SOUTH SIDE $50.00
370728256 10/22/2007 P173 2300 BLOCK 15TH ST NW EAST SIDE $60.00
371249830 11/19/2007 P173 1400 BLOCK BELMONT ST NW NORTH SIDE $60.00
372899295 11/27/2007 P173 1300 BLOCK W ST NW SOUTH SIDE $60.00
373726404 12/14/2007 P039 0500 BLOCK 11TH ST NW EAST SIDE $25.00

GODDAMMIT! OK, I remember the last one. But swear to God I never saw any of those other five tickets. One or two tickets I could see getting blown away by the wind or stolen by some asshole, but FIVE? Plus, one of those seems to be a duplicate—can I really get ticketed on the same day on the same block. And I know which block that is! The east side of the 2300 block of 15th doesn’t have street sweeping restrictions! It’s on the goddamned hill next to Meridian Hill Park!!!

Christ!

Anyway, now I gotta decide whether I wanna spend almost $400 paying for tickets and late fees I never knew I had or going down to C Street and hoping the line for hearings isn’t too ridiculous.

Your input is appreciated.

My brother’s in town from Chicago, and last night I was driving him to his hotel room. We went down Wythe Street in Old Town, not far from where our parents used to live, on North Columbus, and we were remarking on how odd it was to see white people walking their dogs on Wythe Street in Old Town at 11:20 p.m. We got to his hotel, realized he’d left his bag at our place, and went back home, back up Wythe. A block before the Metro stop, I heard a THUNK against the rear gate of my Toyota, then saw some kids running away. I got out and saw I’d been egged! On the way back to the hotel, my brother and I drove slowly down the block, looking to jump out and try to scare the behayzeus out of the kids. He rolled up—this is so embarrassing—the current issue of the City Paper, Jason Bourne–like, to resemble a weapon. We rolled past the low-rises, but it was all getting a bit Herc and Carver, and anyway, lucky for us, we never found ‘em. I’m pretty sure if we ran at those kids they’d just laugh at the old guys wielding newspapers. Our bluff called, we’d be forced to retreat to the omeletmobile.

It was a real pain to scrub the egg off the back. That stuff dries quickly.