There are a lot of Union Stations in America—that's just what they were called when a bunch of railroads pooled their efforts in a central train depot. And D.C.'s own Union Station isn't the only one undergoing a master planning process, as cities look to their transit hubs for an alternative center of gravity within the urban core. In fact, a couple others may be doing it better.

Consider our own Union Station Redevelopment Corporation. Since Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton pitched a fit a few years ago over the fact that there was nothing in writing to guide the Station's expansion, the USRC has tried to at least put all its projects in one place. Its draft master plan, issued in June 2010, is basically a list of improvements, how much they'll cost, and who's in charge of implementing them. USRC promises that another, fuller plan is on the way.

But with the exception of the participation of select citizen groups in the process of renovating the Main Hall—which is required by law for historic federal properties—there's been pretty much no public input on USRC's overall master plan. Just internal negotiation between "stakeholder groups" (i.e. Amtrak, WMATA, the District Department of Transportation, Akridge, and Ashkenazy, which manages the station's retail), which tends to limit the vision of what people need and what Union Station could become.

It doesn't have to be that way. As Richard Layman points out this morning, Chicago has put serious ideas on the table and is opening them up for public comment before issuing a final master plan next year. Importantly, it's not separate from Amtrak's master plan, as USRC's is, but rather an overall vision for all the transit services in and around the station.

Los Angeles recently bought its Union Station, and is embarking on an even larger master planning process, bringing in an Urban Land Institute panel to generate some big ideas for the station and 500 acres that surround it (initial presentation here). They're inviting bids from the nation's best planning firms, and are also inviting public comment from the get-go with a website that offers real information, not just scattershot planning documents.

That's what D.C.'s Union Station master planning process could have looked like. Instead, you won't know much about it until it's all said and done.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Unpleasant, but maybe necessary.

I wrote a cover story this week about Union Station: How much more it could be than it is, if all its component parts could work together more cohesively (and if hundreds of millions of dollars become available over the next five years). One of the pieces that's getting pushed out as others expand is tour buses, which have long been able to park in garage while their charges eat lunch in the station, allowing the driver to get lunch as well. Come spring, as I've mentioned before, they'll have to go to another parking lot, which looks more and more likely to be the one around the old Crummell School on New York Avenue.

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton thinks that's how things should be. "Charter buses should go somewhere else. This is not a parking lot," she said, with characteristic indignation. "It’s a disgrace that a building like this was made a parking lot for charter buses...There’s no such thing as taking prime land in the District of Columbia and converting it into a parking lot." (There totally is, but whatever).

But this is just one more inconvenience thrown at the feet of charter bus companies, which have felt squeezed over the last year by new curbside parking regulations and fees for permits to come into the city. They're no longer allowed to park on Ohio Drive on Hains Point. Eventually, one tour bus company says, it might not be worth their while to come at all.

"They’re really doing all they can to keep coaches out of the city, but they still want those dollars," says Rob Teweles, director of sightseeing for Worldstrides, which plans on bringing 85,000 kids through Union Station this spring. "It’s going to come to a head at some point...Ultimately their plan is to sort of ban motorcoaches from the city at all."

The silly thing is that Worldstrides isn't so bus-dependent in other cities. Center City Philadelphia and Manhattan, Teweles says, are dense enough with attractions that they can tour kids around without having to pick up and drop off using buses. But in D.C., he says, things are spread out enough that motorcoaches are the only way to get kids around fast enough. "D.C. is not walkable," he says. Even taking kids in on the Metro wouldn't be cost- and time-efficient. "That just doesn’t fit our business model," he says. "We can’t pay a driver to sit at the Vienna Metro for nine hours."

At some point, though, that's probably the direction in which educational tours should go—or as many of them as possible. Things like Segways, bikes, pedicabs, and a newly-imagined Tourmobile-esque service could absorb lots of the folks that now ride around in gigantic buses, and experience the city in a more authentic way in the mean time (there are few things more disorienting than taking a bus tour of monuments, which leaves you with no sense of direction or scale).

It's easier to do that, of course, when the density of attractions increases to the point where moving at a walk or bike's pace is worth your while. D.C. may not be built for that, though, and when a company's marketing strategy is predicated on packing as much into a tour as humanly possible, a bus is the only way to go.

UPDATE, 11:11 a.m. – By the way: Tour guide Tim Krepp explained the difficulty of walking and Metro-ing kids around D.C. last fall.

Photo by Flickr user izik under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Depiction of the potential car barn training facility at 26th and Benning Road NE.

Back in August, we learned what was under consideration for the H Street trolley's temporary connection to Union Station (after the initial idea, going through an underpass, fell through). Now, the District Department of Transportation has issued some sketches of their own, and they're a little different: The alternatives have narrowed to two, with stopping at F Street and going to the top of the H Street Bridge still in contention, while going up to the New York Avenue Metro stop is off the table. Above is what's being contemplated for the Eastern end.

There's an update meeting next Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. at the Atlas Theater. Diagrams after the jump.

Alternative #1 for the temporary connection to Union Station.

Detail of Alternative #1.

Alternative #2.

Chaos!

Union Station is a maze. It's worse than a maze—it's three dimensional. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten lost trying to find the ladies room, not to mention catch a train; pity the tourist coming there for the first time.

Part of the problem has been a lack of coherent signage. Right now, there are provisional plastic signs pointing every which way, made even more makeshift by the repair operation for the main hall's earthquake-damaged roof.

Well, help is finally on the way. The Union Station Redevelopment Corporation has hired Lance Wyman, who's also working on a new Metro map, to design a more cohesive wayfinding system for the complex.

It's not an easy assignment. Aside from the historic nature of the building, which prevents signs from just being stuck on walls, Wyman will also have to contend with a bunch of stakeholders—Amtrak, Akridge, Ashkenazy, MARC, VRE, WMATA, Greyhound, tour buses—who are all making changes to their domains under the Union Station umbrella. So yeah, it'll take a while.

(Incidentally, I'm working on a longer story about the challenges of coordinating all these folks. Drop me a line if you've got info.)

UPDATE, 6:00 p.m.: Wyman is also working with Roger Whitehouse, who runs another design firm based in New York.

Photo by thisisbossi, who has a good rant about the lack of wayfinding.

Where are they all going to go? The Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, which manages station operations, isn't quite sure. "This information is still under study including travel time, travel route, amenities available and neighborhood concerns," writes USRC director David Ball. "All these items will be weighed in making a decision."

Well, it's getting close to scheduling for the spring already, and tour bus operators are still in the dark. According to tour guide Tim Krepp of D.C. Like a Local, all they know is that they'll have to relocate, and that parking at a satellite location will be more than twice as expensive.

According to the D.C. Department of Planning and Economic Development, two sites are under consideration: The parking lot at RFK Stadium and the empty lot around the decaying Crummell School behind the Hechts Bulding off New York Avenue. RFK is problematic because it's further away and buses would likely have to go through residential neighborhoods, since the Capitol Police won't allow them on Independence and Constitution. And the Crummell School lot is supposed to get redeveloped soon, so parking buses there wouldn't be a great signal to the neighborhood (although the recently-issued request for offers received no responses from charter schools—zero—so it may be sitting around for a long while yet anyway as the District figures out what to do with it).

Then there's the question of whether the buses would even go to those faraway locations at all, or if they'd prefer to just drive around the city streets, spewing fumes into the neighborhood. Solve one problem, create another!

The tunnel—accessible through a roll-down door in the stone wall on 1st Street NE at G Street—runs the width of Union Station underneath Amtrak's tracks and the Hopscotch Bridge. I didn't have a flash bright enough to illuminate the tunnel's more shadowy recesses, but perhaps this gives you a sense of the scale that we're talking about.

Part of the reason it took so long for Amtrak and the District to kill the streetcar-in-the-underpass idea is that nobody's quite sure who owns it; Ball thinks that the District originally did, and Amtrak may have obtained some rights through a lease agreement. But it's all apocryphal, and USRC is only now undertaking a study to figure out who's entitled to what.

In the short term, Amtrak wants the space as a staging ground for redoing the train platforms above—currently, they're not wide enough to be loaded on both sides. That may require moving around some of the steel pillars that hold up the tracks, but they can't move the  concrete columns that support the entire station, because they're huge.

A Czech-made D.C. streetcar, currently cooling its heels in Greenbelt. (DDOT)

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 roadway and shiny streetcar stops sure look like those cosmopolitan locales.

There’s just one thing missing: actual streetcars.

Those are still far in the future. The District Department of Transportation keeps revising their arrival date, most recently from mid-2012 to the end of 2013. The list of tasks yet to complete is long: DDOT only just put out a call for contractors who’ll bid to design and build the needed power substations, maintenance facility, and overhead wires, not to mention the beginning and end of the line. That last part is responsible for a large chunk of the delay, and may prompt DDOT to run the streetcar only to 3rd and H Streets NE until a final connection to Union Station can be established—which, by forcing passengers to hoof it blocks to the Metro, would undercut one of the line’s big selling points.

Meanwhile, the streetcar’s biggest champions have moved on. Mayor Vince Gray swapped out hard-charging DDOT Director Gabe Klein for his more mild-mannered deputy, Terry Bellamy. D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown relieved Councilmember Tommy Wells—whose ward stands to gain most from the first phase of the streetcar plan—of his command of the transportation committee. And the guy who ran streetcar planning for the past few years, Scott Kubly, followed Klein to another new mayor’s administration in Chicago.

All of that has made streetcar boosters more than a little long-faced. “It’s definitely a challenge to get people excited about something that’s getting more and more distant,” says Jason Broehm, who heads up the local Sierra Club chapter’s transportation committee. “What we need is some strong leadership.”

Streetcars will get done eventually; the District has already invested $48 million dollars (and committed $100 million more to the project over the next five years), and pulling the plug now would just mean that money will have been wasted. But things are definitely slowing down. In the first phase, using the city’s own cash, planners could throw down tracks before knowing where they’d end and figure out the details later—which may have been the right approach at the time. Councilmember Mary Cheh, who now oversees transportation, thinks that initial blitz was necessary to “put stakes in the ground.”

“I’ve been thinking about Julius Caesar lately, and there is a tide in the affairs of men. And if you take things at the flood, you’re better off,” she says, paraphrasing Brutus. “There could have been some better planning, but I don’t fault them ultimately for that, because sometimes it’s good to get a little bit of traction to get it started.”

Now, though, the District needs federal funding to finish the job. That comes with layer upon layer of new procedural steps—not to mention costs, because all equipment and materials have to come from U.S. sources. With the bumps in the road thus far, all the District can say is this: Trust us. Please.

“We would like to ask the community to bear with us,” says Bellamy. “This is the first time we’ve built a streetcar in our lifetime. It’s gonna take a lot of help from a lot of people.”

* * *

Why is the streetcar so behind schedule? Blame much of the delay on the very heart of the system: Union Station, a bureaucratic jigsaw puzzle composed of separate entities that sometimes don’t communicate as well as they should.

DDOT’s original plan had been elegantly simple. The streetcar would punch through the Hopscotch bridge along H Street and go through an underpass beneath Amtrak’s tracks, emerging on 1st Street NE. Pedestrians could take a tunnel that had been started but never completed; it needed only 60 more feet of excavation to become a useful route into the main station.

That would have been only a temporary solution, until Amtrak needed the space for the addition of new tracks for its very-far-in-the-future high-speed rail service. Meanwhile, DDOT would reinforce the Hopscotch bridge so it could handle the weight of the streetcar and eventually run the line over the top.

The District proposed this idea to Amtrak early last year, and Kubly was still confident that they’d be able to reach an agreement a year later. As the mayoral transition ground on, though, Amtrak wasn’t sure how much the Gray administration wanted the option that his predecessor’s DDOT director had pushed for, despite Kubly’s best efforts to reassure them. (On April 1, according to emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kubly wrote to an Amtrak representative that Gray’s $99.3 million commitment to streetcars should “alleviate any concerns on Amtrak’s side about the political will behind the project.”) Meanwhile, Amtrak had started its own master planning process. It decided to hold on to the cavernous area underneath the tracks for its own future use.

“Amtrak had certain rights they felt would be violated,” says David Ball, president of the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, which holds the lease to the federally owned parts of the station. “Both organizations saw a use for one piece of real estate, and if they were communicating, they weren’t understanding.”

Earlier this summer, DDOT officials admitted they had lost the struggle with Amtrak. So now they’re back to the drawing board, looking at three options (map here).

(1) Run the streetcar up on the Hopscotch bridge and stop there, forcing riders to walk through the garage and down into Union Station. Walking briskly, taking no wrong turns, it took me 4 minutes and 26 seconds to walk from the bridge to the Metro fare gate. A planned elevator could make the trip faster, though.

(2) Turn the line south on 2nd Street NE and stop at F Street NE. That puts you a block away from Union Station, which Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning thinks is the best option. On the wintriest of days, however, that three-minute walk could still prove daunting, especially for tourists who aren’t sure where they’re going.

And (3): Heading north on 3rd Street NE to stop at the New York Avenue Metro station, turn the streetcar west on M Street NE, and come down 1st Street NE to deposit passengers right outside the Union Station Metro entrance. This option has two direct connections to the Red Line and could be a great opportunity to integrate NoMa, but it would increase the time it takes to get from H Street to Union Station.

All of these options would make for a more complicated connection than the original plan of running the H Street line directly under Amtrak’s tracks. But it could be even worse: The District might pick none of the above and just end the line at 3rd and H Streets NE. That’s because to get federal funding for a second line, which is supposed to run from Union Station along K Street to Washington Circle, officials have to complete a formal environmental study that, by law, explores various options for that line without leaning toward any of them. Officials worry that study will eventually require them to choose a different Metro connection than they prefer now for the H Street line—so they might just stop the line short, instead.

But ending the line at 3rd and H would mean the streetcar is only barely connected to the Metro when it opens—and that’s the problem. Initial impressions are important. If riders don’t find their first experience with the streetcar to be particularly impressive, excitement for the rest of the 37-mile system could dissipate—which would undermine the political will for an enormous project that requires a lot of taxpayer dollars. That’s what worries David Tuchmann, who's managing Akridge’s gigantic mixed-use project planned to go over the tracks behind Union Station.

“We think it’s essential that the city’s first streetcar line include a smooth and convenient connection point to Metro and other modes and amenities at Union Station,” Tuchmann says in an email. “We are committed to the H Street line’s success, not only because of our investment in Burnham Place, but also because demonstrating this transit mode’s efficacy in its infancy will be crucial to building broad public support for its future phases.”

So the question could come down to this: Get streetcars moving faster, even if they stop at a bad location? Or build a temporary connection that might have to be ripped out later? Richard Bradley, who’s watched the streetcar planning process from his perch as head of the Downtown Business Improvement District since 1996, leans towards the latter.

“I just think that it has to be done right,” he says. “If this first segment doesn’t work, what’s at stake is the system. You’re talking about a $2 billion infrastructure investment. There’s a huge upside here. But there’s also a great risk.”

Photo via DDOT's Facebook page

Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6928.

What's that you say?

Upon second inspections, it appears that not only have spires fallen from the top of the National Cathedral, but a crack has appeared in the ceiling of Union Station, and the top of the Washington Monument has fractured as well. That means tectonic shifting has damaged icons of American religion, commerce, and government. What is God trying to tell us???

Photo by jimgrant via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0

The first option, on the left, would put a stop on top of the Hopscotch bridge, requiring passengers to walk through the bus garage and down escalators into Union Station. DDOT has determined that the bridge is structurally sound enough to handle the weight, but would still need to complete planned reinforcements; they don't know whether streetcar service could continue simultaneously. Since the trolley can run in both directions, it would not need to turn around in the garage, which will soon be full of intercity bus services anyway.

The second option, in the middle, would punch a hole through the Hopscotch bridge and then turn south on 2nd Street NE, putting a stop right around Ebenezers Coffee on F Street. You can see the station from there, but it's still a little bit of a walk to Metro.

The third option would turn north to connect to the red line at New York Avenue, jog west along M Street, and come back down First Street NE to end right around Union Station's Metro entrance. Creating a no-fare zone between New York Avenue and Union Station could be a great way to integrate NoMa, especially during seasons when the ten-minute walk in between them is less pleasant.

All of these will be evaluated by the four firms bidding on on the design/build contract. And there are more complications to how this will all play out, which you can read about here tomorrow.

Not how one should be greeted in a capital city. (Lydia DePillis)

It's fair to say that Columbus Plaza, the sprawling semi-circle in front of Union Station, is the city's most embarrassingly neglected public space. The asphalt has mountainous ruts, bricks are falling out of the pavement, hunks of concrete are still serving as security barriers, pedestrians have worn dirt paths in the grass where there should be sidewalks, and the whole thing is impossible to navigate for anyone other than the tour buses and taxis that careen around it.

The various parties in charge of Columbus Plaza—the National Park Service, Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, and District Department of Transportation—have been working on fixing it since 2004, when they entered into a cooperative agreement to plan and pay for renovations. It's taken seven years to hammer out the details, which you can read all about in the National Capital Planning Commission's review of the proposal from back in 2009. Basically, the interior access road and parking will be removed to create larger green spaces, bike lanes will be added to Massachusetts Avenue, traffic islands will be widened to serve as pedestrian refuges, and the whole thing will be garlanded with security bollards.

And it's all getting rolling right after Labor Day, according to USRC president David Ball, pending final permits from DDOT. An end to our national disgrace is nigh!

Here are some plan sketches:

The bollard design.