Opinion Posts
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Who rode it best? Transit group wins first Ride for the Region
What’s the opposite of an underdog? Staff at the American Public Transit Association (APTA) won first place in Ride for the Region, a competition in the Washington area to encourage employees to ride transit. Keep reading…
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Speed limiters for repeat offenders could have saved my daughter
Jamya was 20 years old when she was killed by a driver who ran a red light in downtown DC. The Council can fund a program to prevent others from experiencing similar tragedies. Keep reading…
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Car parked in the bike lane? Near-miss? WABA has a regional reporting tool for that
WABA, Howard University, and the Safe Routes Partnership collaborated to create a reporting and tracking tool for people in the Washington region to report near-misses, crashes, and road use violations. The goal is to make our roads safer. Keep reading…
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Walk more in your city. It could open up new horizons.
An urban writer proposes walking as a means of connecting with our cities and our souls. DC, thanks to its partially symbolic design, might be a particularly good proving-ground for the practice. Keep reading…
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What I talk about when I talk about “luxury housing”
Is a home “luxurious” if it’s described that way in marketing materials, or if it’s more expensive to live in? If you’re looking at cost, those “luxury apartments” are quite a bit less luxurious than the single family homes that represent the status quo in many neighborhoods. Keep reading…
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How do we have a national conversation about zoning reform?
YIMBY wins keep racking up across the United States. Yet any national conversation about the movement has to acknowledge some critical dilemmas that make it hard to offer a universal “solution” to how to run or win a pro-housing campaign. Keep reading…
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Low-cost, short-term strategies for boosting Metrorail ridership
Boost Metrorail ridership with these three (not easy, but powerful) tricks. Keep reading…
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Arenas don’t revitalize neighborhoods. People do
As the District prepares to subsidize Monumental’s staying-put in Chinatown, it’s worth contemplating whether developments like the Capital One arena revitalize neighborhoods, or make them more fragile. Keep reading…
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DC struggles to build affordable housing in wealthy neighborhoods. Here’s one reason why.
Building a new building is often a slow process, and affordable housing developers navigate it with an additional twist: when working through a competitive government funding process, it takes an especially long time to close on financing. Keep reading…
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How single-stair apartments can improve fire safety
A common objection to requiring only one staircase in new residential buildings is that it would roll back safety regulations to cut costs. But in fact, single-stair reforms have the potential to get more people into safer buildings. Keep reading…