congress guts our gun laws? how about we mess with utah?

i just wanted to pass this along, because i thought it was sneaky-brilliant.

from cary silverman (who ran against jack evans in last year's ward 2 race), a way to exact revenge if a certain senator from nevada insists on continuing to meddle in local affairs:

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton shows some chutzpah and introduces an amendment to the House version of the bill to repeal all of Utah's strict alcoholic beverage laws to show how ridiculous it is for Congress to meddle in local affairs.

i love it!

petition to get nextbus up and running

(short version of this post: sign the petition insisting that nextbus is implemented on the wmata bus lines!)

if you're not familiar with nextbus, let me give you some quick background. nextbus is a service employed by many transit systems in the united states that allows bus riders to know exactly when a bus is going to arrive at a location. now, you might be thinking, "that's what schedules are for," but anyone who rides the buses in DC knows that they very often do not stick to the posted schedules.

this is the beauty of nextbus, or at least it will be. when fully implemented, the service will allow anyone with a computer or a smart phone to pull up a bus line (like the g8), select a stop (like 1st and rhode island nw), and find out when the next bus will show up (5 minutes? 20 minutes? never??!?) instead of standing out on the corner forever (in the cold, or rain) waiting for a bus that never seems to be coming, you'll be able to time when you leave the house so you can show up at the stop just before the bus gets there, saving you time and headache.

wmata even started using the service on an experimental basis on the 90s buses back in 2007. they abruptly pulled the plug on the experiment when someone decided that the service wasn't accurate enough. it's too bad, because the service was actually accurate enough to be worth using. it was far better than relying on the schedules that were never followed.

some folks realized that the service was still available, though. you just had to go through a back-door on the nextbus website to find it. unfortunately, after some publicity on new columbia heights and dcist, wmata and nextbus shut down the back door.

before the day was out, another back door was discovered. this time, it was publicized earlier today by greater greater washington. within hours, that back door was plugged as well.

it's clear that wmata and nextbus do not want the public to have access to this service until they believe it's ready to be released. the problem is that the timeframe that wmata initially proposed has not been followed. we, the bus riders of the washington, dc area have been waiting a long time for this service, and it seems like it's never coming.

so, today, new columbia heights has started a petition asking wmata and nextbus to get nextbus up and running as soon as possible. you can sign the petition here, and i strongly encourage you to do so!

wmata and nextbus need to know that there is a real clamoring for this service, and they need to realize that its implementation will only lead to increased revenue for them (since the bottom line is clearly the most important thing here, right?!?), as it will make catching a bus an easier task, leading more people sitting on the fence to realize that it's easy and cheap to catch the bus to get around town.

so click on that link and sign the petition! what are you waiting for!?

mcmillan filtration site photo tour

since we haven't talked about the mcmillan site much lately, i just thought i'd keep it fresh in people's minds with a post that includes a few photos from a friend who was lucky enough to take one of the guided tours of the site a few years ago. i hope they'll be having another one of these sometime this year, and i actually get a chance to go!

here are the photos from jessica hanff on flickr.

a road that doesn't exist

many times on various DC blogs and listservs i have read about people having difficulties dealing with emergency dispatchers.

when calling about an emergency on ridge street NW (a one-block street between 4th and 5th streets and M and N streets), residents have complained that dispatchers are convinced that they're talking about either riggs road (a major artery in northeast DC near the fort totten metro station) or riggs street (a short street that runs from 13th to 19th streets NW, with gaps). clearly, dispatchers are either hearing things incorrectly or are not as familiar with DC geography as we might hope they would be.

that said, what happens if your road doesn't exist? now, i don't mean you're making the road up, of course. i mean, what if the district, for whatever reason, didn't have your road in their database. for all intents and purposes, you might as well be floating somewhere in space (or at least over the river in virginia). well, that exact scenario played out last november in the district's woodridge neighborhood. here's a note that was posted to the brookland listserv:

Hello, neighbors -

I just had a frustrating experience with 911. I'm on Monroe Street, next to the narrow Hoover Road that connects Monroe to Rhode Island. I witnessed a man punching a woman as they argued their way down Hoover, and immediately called 911, only to have the dispatcher tell me that Hoover Road did not exist. Well, there's a street sign and stretch of pavement that tells me it does, in fact, exist. She was extremely professional and as helpful as she could be, explaining that she couldn't dispatch to a location that isn't on their system. We managed to get directions worked out, and an officer dispatched, but by the time I got off the phone with the operator, the couple had moved out of my line of sight, I guess on to Rhode Island Avenue. No word on if the police ever made it to them, although I'm going to hope for the best.

This particular instance, as disturbing as it was, did shed light on the fact that this Hoover Road is invisible to emergency services. Does anybody have any idea of how to get it on their map? We get all sorts of activity on it, ranging from public intoxication to possible drug deals to prostitution activity. Don't even get me started on drive-through trash dumping. It would be nice to actually have it show up when the need to call 911 arises. Any ideas? ANC folks?

Regards,
Kyle (on Monroe)

here's the road that kyle's talking about (from google maps' street view):


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

hoover road is a short 2 blocks long, with rhode island avenue at its south and monroe street at its north end. it's basically an alley that has a name. unfortunately, that "alley" doesn't appear to have made it into the database that dispatchers use to send police, fire, and medical personnel to the scene of an emergency.

there was never any follow-up on the listserv to kyle's post. does 911 now have hoover road in their database? i don't know, but i'd like to find out, and i'd like to hope that they're doing a thorough review of their data to make sure it's flawless. in potential life-or-death situations, we can ask for nothing less.

hypocrisy in a government agency?

now, i made the title of this post a little controversial on purpose, because i thought that "parking at gage-eckington site" wouldn't elicit enough eyeballs.

seriously, though, for those who weren't aware, when gage-eckington elementary was closed down last year, the city proposed moving the district department of the environment into the closed building. in addition, there would be a senior center, and the 7th street garden group (now named common good city farm) would be using the space as well.

now, i'm sure that the DDOE needs space to park a few trucks or other vehicles that are necessary to carry equipment to certain places or projects, but you would think that if there was any division of the district's government that would be using mass transit instead of individual cars, it would be the DDOE, right? less pollution and all that.

well, in a letter posted to the bloomingdale listserv this weekend (sorry i'm late on this), deputy mayor neil albert had something to say about that to a local resident. here's an exerpt (emphasis mine):

EMAIL FROM Deputy Mayor Neil Albert
From: Albert, Neil (EOM) [mailto:Neil.Albert@dc.gov]
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2009 9:00 AM

Dear Jeff,

Thanks for your letter and email. I wanted to provide an update to you on a few matters related to the future of the Gage-Eckington School Site.

...

3. Currently, we are in a holding pattern as it pertains to the re-location of DDOE to the site. While working through the re-location logistics for the site, it was determined that we were running into some issues related to the availability of parking on-site and functionality of space for the agency. Additionally, we are studying the costs involved with re-configuring the space for agency use to determine how best to proceed. No final decision has been made, but we anticipate that we will have a better idea in approximately four weeks at which time we will share updated information with you.

...

Best,

Neil

now, i'm not knocking deputy mayor albert here, but i just wanted to point out that parking was one of the important criteria for the DDOE's relocation here. maybe that's unavoidable, i don't know. it just seems that, from 30,000 feet, this is one agency that should be using as little parking as possible.

please correct me if i'm wrong.

update on 2nd street ne street trees

thanks to commenter RobA, we learn that the trees that i wrote about here have won something of a repreive. eleanor holmes norton convinced the architect of the capitol to do all that they can to avoid killing the trees while placing security bollards along that street.

bravo, i say! though i question whether the trees will actually survive, it's wonderful to see that it's still possible for some people to sit down, reason, and reach a compromise, instead of blindly following regulations like "we need to have x number of bollards spaced x number of feet apart, everything else be damned!"

here's a quote from the congresswoman:

I admit that I wanted to hug these graceful trees. If the trees do not survive the bollards, there will be time enough to take them down. These trees may die in time, but so do people, and we don't kill them without exhausting all possibilities for life.

soldiers' home redevelopment not happening (for now)

the washington post has word today that the redevelopment of part of the land on the grounds of the armed forces retirement home has been put on hold due to the weakening economy. this was of special interest to a lot of people in bloomingdale because of the belief that it would lead to an enormous increase of traffic on 1st street nw, when combined with the redevelopment of the mcmillan sand filtration site.

certainly this will lead to discussion that any traffic analysis of the combined projects will need to be reassessed. it'll be interesting to see whether that leads to a delay on the mcmillan project.

nicknames for the area?

with this comment on dcist, a joke was born about how to abbreviate our neighborhood's name so it could conform with the hipster shorthand for other neighborhoods in dc ("admo" for adams morgan or "cohi" for columbia heights, for examples). i really think that "blomi" does a great job of poking fun at this form of linguistic construction.

anyway, in scott roberts' bloomingdale listserv post on saturday, i saw the lastest nickname for bloomingdale—a resident of the neighborhood from the 100 block thomas street nw said, "We are in South East of North West Washington..."

so, as far as northwest DC goes, we are in the southeast part of it. guess the connotation is meant to go along with the thought that "southeast" is often shorthand for the "rough" or even "dangerous" part of DC.

while bloomingdale's crime profile is certainly not as rosy as the palisades or normanstone terrace, i think we live in a pretty un-rough part of the district. i don't mean to call this person from thomas street out, i just thought it would an interesting thought to share.

new restaurant coming to 12th street in brookland

first saw this reported in the north capitol heartbeat newsletter, but it's a print-only publication (with a circulation of 5,033—pretty exacting, eh?)

kellys' ellis island restaurant, at 12th and quincy in downtown brookland, is being replced by a new location of san antonio bar & grill, a tex-mex restaurant with locations in alexandria and crystal city.

the restaurant was supposed to be open the first week of february, according to the newsletter. since that was last week, can anyone from brookland report if that's the case, or if they're still working on the switch-over?

what's up with the apartment building at 143 rhode island avenue nw?

this beautiful apartment building at 143 rhode island ave nw is partially boarded up and appears to be unoccupied. am i incorrect—are there people actually living here?

looking at the district's tax records, the building is owned by "BARRY HOMES LTD PARTNRSH GR WASHINGTON MUTUAL HOUSING", whose business address is listed as 1419 v street nw. that property is owned by "SAINT PAUL'S CATHOLIC CHURCH", though we know the church at that location as st. augustine's catholic church. turns out, if you read the parish's history, the parishes of saint paul and saint augustine merged in the 1960s, and in the 1970s the saint paul moniker was removed in favor of saint augustine. apparently, that hasn't happened on the level of the tax records.

regardless, this is a gorgeous building, located on the triangle formed by the corner of rhode island avenue and t street. it's a shame the building isn't cared for as well as it should be.