It sure is a beautiful vision: For years now, District officials have regaled citizens with tales of light rail from other coasts and countries. They’ve commissioned studies that depict streetcars as economic-development fairy dust, brightening every community that they touch. And now that the city has completed roadwork on H Street NE, the newly track-inlaid [...]

Transportation Nation was first with the news that former DDOT director Gabe Klein is off to head Rahm Emanuel's Department of Transportation in Chicago. Seems to resemble a certain former mayor of D.C....
Here's what Klein says about it:
I am excited to announce that I will be joining Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration in Chicago on [...]

It’s 6:30 in the morning, and Juan Botero’s workday has already started. His boxy gray van sits idling on New Jersey Avenue next to the Navy Yard Metrorail station. I lock my bike and rush over to hop in, already late.
“It’s a little bit colder today, so hopefully we don’t get killed,” Botero says, as [...]

The mayor's transition team has come out with its suite of reports on what to do with the government, and in those that fall within Housing Complex's world, the Transportation and Infrastructure document is more interesting than most: While giving good marks to agencies like the Department of Public Works, it excoriates Gabe Klein's Department [...]

This morning was D.C.'s first press conference to address a snowstorm of epic proportions. When they scheduled it yesterday–"Fenty Administration to Announce Snow Team Mobilization", the release trumpeted–between six and ten inches were expected, so I thought I'd stop by on my last bike ride before drifts of whitish crud made two-wheeled travel impossible for [...]

If anybody wants more of the DDOT director before he rides off into the sunset, here are the key bits from his sit-down with reporters this morning.
(Note on one of the subtitles: The change to the Unified Fund doesn't technically take effect until the budget is finally passed, which will happen on December 21.)

Last night, District Department of Transportation Director Gabe Klein got a letter delivered to his office at the Reeves Center on U Street. The contents weren't entirely unexpected: He had been getting "inklings" over the last few months that he wouldn't be asked to stay on in the administration of mayor-elect Vince Gray.
Actually, the two [...]

District Department of Transportation director Gabe Klein is scheduled to give a statement at the Reeves Center at 10:15 this morning. The Post's Mike DeBonis is tweeting that several agency heads were booted yesterday, but he doesn't know whether Klein was among them (Neibauer hears that DCRA's Linda Argo and OCTO's Brian Sivak got pink [...]

When the Committee of 100's "Fire Klein/Tregoning" letter dropped into my inbox this morning, I didn't spend too much time parsing its points, figuring that David Alpert would get to it sooner or later. Sure enough, the rebuttal showed up earlier this afternoon, along with a petition you can sign in support of the pair, [...]

Well now, the Committee of 100 has gotten a bee in its bonnet: President George Clark blasted off a letter to incoming Mayor Vince Gray this week calling for the replacement of Department of Transportation director Gabe Klein and Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning.
The letter cites a litany of complaints, most centering around what [...]