The Purple Line builders want out

[Anonymous]

NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

These NIMBYs in particular are loathsome - the county bought the old Georgetown Branch rail line specifically to add a rail line to it - this was well known and easily discoverable.

But despite that these privileged and clueless clowns bogged this project down with idiotic and baseless lawsuits about issue which their trail coalition was and is otherwise silent about.

[Anonymous]

Never should have been done in the first place, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Never should have been done in the first place, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

+1.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never should have been done in the first place, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

+1.

Absurd - this region has great transit usage and this line would have connected some of the densest parts of the region with some of the worst traffic as well as connecting to a slew of existing transit networks.

And everywhere in this region where rail has been built density follows which means lots of additional revenue for the jurisdiction something that has already happened with this project.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Never should have been done in the first place, but that is water under the bridge at this point.

You are an idiot beyond belief. The purple line would have drastically improved the metro by creating a spiderweb design.

Be honest.

You're a Bethesda clown show who's afraid all of those black people will be able enter your neck of the woods more easily.

[Anonymous]

NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

I do not subscribe to 100% NIMBY'ism. But they have their place.

Didn't the NIMBY's stop several highway from being bulldozed through DC several years ago? I was younger and not as into local politics then but I remember reading about it in the post.

Here is what the Post claimed was 'blocked' by the NIMBY's:
-Interstate 66 from the District border to the junction of the Whitehurst Freeway and the unbuilt tunnel under K Street NW
-The underground freeway under K Street NW from its junction with the Whitehurst Freeway east to its junction with Interstate 395
-Interstate 66 from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge along Ohio Drive SW to the Southwest Freeway near the 14th Street Bridge
-Interstate 266, an upgrade of Spout Run Parkway which would cross the Potomac River at a proposed Three Sisters Bridge, and down an expanded Canal Road NW to join the Whitehurst Freeway
-An interchange at the junction of the 11th Street Bridges and I-295/Anacostia Freeway to permit southbound and northbound traffic to directly access the interstate
-An extension of I-695 (the so-called "Barney Circle Freeway") from its current terminus through Anacostia Park, to cross Burnham Barrier and connect with the Anacostia Freeway
-An upgrade of New York Avenue from the proposed junction with I-395 to the junction of New York Avenue/U.S. Route 50 with I-295, known as the New York Industrial Freeway

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

I do not subscribe to 100% NIMBY'ism. But they have their place.

Didn't the NIMBY's stop several highway from being bulldozed through DC several years ago? I was younger and not as into local politics then but I remember reading about it in the post.

Here is what the Post claimed was 'blocked' by the NIMBY's:
-Interstate 66 from the District border to the junction of the Whitehurst Freeway and the unbuilt tunnel under K Street NW
-The underground freeway under K Street NW from its junction with the Whitehurst Freeway east to its junction with Interstate 395
-Interstate 66 from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge along Ohio Drive SW to the Southwest Freeway near the 14th Street Bridge
-Interstate 266, an upgrade of Spout Run Parkway which would cross the Potomac River at a proposed Three Sisters Bridge, and down an expanded Canal Road NW to join the Whitehurst Freeway
-An interchange at the junction of the 11th Street Bridges and I-295/Anacostia Freeway to permit southbound and northbound traffic to directly access the interstate
-An extension of I-695 (the so-called "Barney Circle Freeway") from its current terminus through Anacostia Park, to cross Burnham Barrier and connect with the Anacostia Freeway
-An upgrade of New York Avenue from the proposed junction with I-395 to the junction of New York Avenue/U.S. Route 50 with I-295, known as the New York Industrial Freeway

Why would these project have been bad? Seems like at least some of them would have significantly alleviated traffic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

I do not subscribe to 100% NIMBY'ism. But they have their place.

Didn't the NIMBY's stop several highway from being bulldozed through DC several years ago? I was younger and not as into local politics then but I remember reading about it in the post.

Here is what the Post claimed was 'blocked' by the NIMBY's:
-Interstate 66 from the District border to the junction of the Whitehurst Freeway and the unbuilt tunnel under K Street NW
-The underground freeway under K Street NW from its junction with the Whitehurst Freeway east to its junction with Interstate 395
-Interstate 66 from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge along Ohio Drive SW to the Southwest Freeway near the 14th Street Bridge
-Interstate 266, an upgrade of Spout Run Parkway which would cross the Potomac River at a proposed Three Sisters Bridge, and down an expanded Canal Road NW to join the Whitehurst Freeway
-An interchange at the junction of the 11th Street Bridges and I-295/Anacostia Freeway to permit southbound and northbound traffic to directly access the interstate
-An extension of I-695 (the so-called "Barney Circle Freeway") from its current terminus through Anacostia Park, to cross Burnham Barrier and connect with the Anacostia Freeway
-An upgrade of New York Avenue from the proposed junction with I-395 to the junction of New York Avenue/U.S. Route 50 with I-295, known as the New York Industrial Freeway

Why would these project have been bad? Seems like at least some of them would have significantly alleviated traffic.

Today, Washington has fewer miles of freeways within its borders than any other major city on the East Coast. More than 200,000 housing units were saved from destruction. So were more than 100 square miles of parkland around the metropolitan area. The city was spared from freeways bored under the Mall, freeways punched through stable middle-class black neighborhoods, freeways tunneled under K Street, freeways that would have obliterated the Georgetown waterfront and the Maryland bank of the Potomac.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/2000/11/26/end-of-the-roads/d0439352-e564-4920-b235-4e77497102b0/

I had no idea that there were people that are still willing to argue that the missed opportunity to pave DC was a bad thing. Pretty telling about where they really fall on the Density Bros fight. With the money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

NIMBYs need to be utterly destroyed, with prejudice.

We cannot allow public transport and improvements to public infrastructure to be blocked by moronic aholes with SFHs who already got theirs and don't want anyone else to have a better life.

F them.

I do not subscribe to 100% NIMBY'ism. But they have their place.

Didn't the NIMBY's stop several highway from being bulldozed through DC several years ago? I was younger and not as into local politics then but I remember reading about it in the post.

Here is what the Post claimed was 'blocked' by the NIMBY's:
-Interstate 66 from the District border to the junction of the Whitehurst Freeway and the unbuilt tunnel under K Street NW
-The underground freeway under K Street NW from its junction with the Whitehurst Freeway east to its junction with Interstate 395
-Interstate 66 from the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge along Ohio Drive SW to the Southwest Freeway near the 14th Street Bridge
-Interstate 266, an upgrade of Spout Run Parkway which would cross the Potomac River at a proposed Three Sisters Bridge, and down an expanded Canal Road NW to join the Whitehurst Freeway
-An interchange at the junction of the 11th Street Bridges and I-295/Anacostia Freeway to permit southbound and northbound traffic to directly access the interstate
-An extension of I-695 (the so-called "Barney Circle Freeway") from its current terminus through Anacostia Park, to cross Burnham Barrier and connect with the Anacostia Freeway
-An upgrade of New York Avenue from the proposed junction with I-395 to the junction of New York Avenue/U.S. Route 50 with I-295, known as the New York Industrial Freeway

Why would these project have been bad? Seems like at least some of them would have significantly alleviated traffic.

Today, Washington has fewer miles of freeways within its borders than any other major city on the East Coast. More than 200,000 housing units were saved from destruction. So were more than 100 square miles of parkland around the metropolitan area. The city was spared from freeways bored under the Mall, freeways punched through stable middle-class black neighborhoods, freeways tunneled under K Street, freeways that would have obliterated the Georgetown waterfront and the Maryland bank of the Potomac.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/2000/11/26/end-of-the-roads/d0439352-e564-4920-b235-4e77497102b0/

I had no idea that there were people that are still willing to argue that the missed opportunity to pave DC was a bad thing. Pretty telling about where they really fall on the Density Bros fight. With the money.

Fewer miles of freeway has downsides that are completely overlooked in that piece. The fact that all highway traffic must go around the city is a major contributing factor to the crushing traffic in the area, both for locals/commuters and for people traveling.

[Anonymous]

Fewer miles of freeway has downsides that are completely overlooked in that piece. The fact that all highway traffic must go around the city is a major contributing factor to the crushing traffic in the area, both for locals/commuters and for people traveling.

Valid point. There are always two sides to a discussion. There is nobody who argues in hindsight that building two more loops around DC within the beltway, razing 200,000 homes would have been a net positive for the region.

I am impressed that you read that article in five minutes though. Good work.

[Anonymous]

What was planned but never paved in Washington (NIMBY's prevented this)

The road-building plan Harland Bartholomew proposed for Washington in 1956 was nothing if not comprehensive. It called for not one, but three highways running circles around (or through) the District. Of those three, only one -- the Capital Beltway -- was ever built. Here are other projects from Bartholomew's plan that never made it off the drawing boards:

The Three Sisters Bridge would have carried a branch of Interstate 66 over the Potomac, from Spout Run in Arlington to Canal Road in Georgetown. The eight-lane bridge would have crossed the water where three large rocks (the "three sisters") sit huddled together in mid-river. One architect's sketch capped the bridge with a huge swooping arch that would have stretched 750 feet into the sky, similar to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

The Potomac Freeway would have channeled traffic from the Three Sisters Bridge along the Georgetown waterfront and onto a newly tunneled K Street. It would have been eight lanes wide, double the size of the existing Whitehurst Freeway.

The Palisades Parkway, four lanes wide, would have gone northwest from the Three Sisters Bridge to the Capital Beltway in Cabin John, along the Maryland side of the Potomac riverfront.

The K Street Freeway would have tunneled eight lanes of superhighway beneath this major downtown artery from Foggy Bottom to Seventh Street NW. The spaghetti of approach lanes and exit ramps that now sits near the Kennedy Center would have been the western terminus of this freeway.

The North Central Freeway would have linked Silver Spring and Capitol Hill, taking roughly the same route that Metro's Red Line follows today between Union Station and Silver Spring and then connecting with the Beltway just west of Georgia Avenue. The 10-lane North Central would have destroyed 4,000 homes, almost all of them belonging to low- and moderate-income black Washingtonians.

The Northeast Freeway would have allowed I-95 to continue through Prince George's County and into the District, where it would have joined the North Central near what is now the Fort Totten Metro station. The 10 lanes of the Northeast would have gone through well-settled portions of Langley Park and Takoma Park.

The North Leg of the East Section, or the Industrial Freeway, would have run in six lanes from I-395 just north of the Capitol to Kenilworth Avenue in Maryland, along the New York Avenue corridor.

The South Leg of the Inner Loop would have tunneled under the Mall, beginning beneath the Lincoln Memorial, running below the Tidal Basin and emerging between the 14th Street Bridge and the Jefferson Memorial (in one early rendering, it would have been trenched through the Mall, not tunneled). The "Inner Loop" would have been the innermost of Bartholomew's three circumferential highways -- a mini-Beltway that would have circled the District about half a mile north and south of the White House.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Fewer miles of freeway has downsides that are completely overlooked in that piece. The fact that all highway traffic must go around the city is a major contributing factor to the crushing traffic in the area, both for locals/commuters and for people traveling.

Valid point. There are always two sides to a discussion. There is nobody who argues in hindsight that building two more loops around DC within the beltway, razing 200,000 homes would have been a net positive for the region.

I am impressed that you read that article in five minutes though. Good work.

You think that no one believes two more beltway loops would be helpful? I’m guessing there are plenty of folks stuck in soul crushing traffic who would disagree.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Fewer miles of freeway has downsides that are completely overlooked in that piece. The fact that all highway traffic must go around the city is a major contributing factor to the crushing traffic in the area, both for locals/commuters and for people traveling.

Valid point. There are always two sides to a discussion. There is nobody who argues in hindsight that building two more loops around DC within the beltway, razing 200,000 homes would have been a net positive for the region.

I am impressed that you read that article in five minutes though. Good work.

You think that no one believes two more beltway loops would be helpful? I’m guessing there are plenty of folks stuck in soul crushing traffic who would disagree.

People here don't care. They just scream "move closer in!" and "public transit!!" at you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Fewer miles of freeway has downsides that are completely overlooked in that piece. The fact that all highway traffic must go around the city is a major contributing factor to the crushing traffic in the area, both for locals/commuters and for people traveling.

Valid point. There are always two sides to a discussion. There is nobody who argues in hindsight that building two more loops around DC within the beltway, razing 200,000 homes would have been a net positive for the region.

I am impressed that you read that article in five minutes though. Good work.

You think that no one believes two more beltway loops would be helpful? I’m guessing there are plenty of folks stuck in soul crushing traffic who would disagree.

People here don't care. They just scream "move closer in!" and "public transit!!" at you.

I think a public transit project like the Purple Line is important BECAUSE I can't afford to buy closer in. Having to travel to a central hub and back out on a spoke is a huge cost of time and money, right now you can't even commute between Silver Spring and College Park on the metro. I would say public transit is qualitatively distinct from just adding more highway lanes because it makes new travel routes possible and relieves car traffic.