It involves a deep-bore rail crossing across the harbor, which I think is a bit far-fetched, and some things are LRT that I’d make BRT (like the I-64 HOV lanes) and other things are BRT that I’d make automated LRT (like service from northern Suffolk to Little Creek via downtown Norfolk and Portsmouth), but most of the priority corridors and enhanced ferry offerings are there.

So I’m not sure whether it really means anything at all, honestly, but I’ve decided I’m kind of flattered.

Officials throughout southeastern Virginia are apparently shocked – shocked! – that public anger at the increasing privatization and tolling of nearly all routes connecting Norfolk and Virginia Beach to the rest of the region appears to be coming to a head.

Such anger is, as I see it, unsurprising. (The only thing that really surprises me here are toll rates that end in seven or seventeen cents, which is merely peculiar to those with credit cards or EZ Pass, but could amount to an exasperating inefficiency for commuters who do not.) But one thing much less surprising is the inevitability of this outcome. Frankly, Virginians are starting to see the chickens coming home to roost.

To some extent, the possibility of using toll revenue for de facto congestion pricing is not entirely inappropriate, if highly inequitable in the absence of good transit alternatives. But it should be apparent from this that VDOT is not only still fixated on road projects at the expense of transit, but unclear on which of these projects are actual priorities. Some – the Southeastern Parkway immediately comes to mind – are of dubious utility at best (in that particular case, serving few apparent transportation needs while enabling real estate speculation at the expense of Oceana Naval Air Station and its mission).

The growing sticker shock at the expense of various projects not only speaks to urban Virginian’s missteps in rejecting a 1% gas tax levy, but also to Richmond’s inability to come to terms with changes in transportation dynamics that are already underway. This appeared to be implicitly understood by many voters in rejecting those levies, given that over 95% of the billions of dollars to be raised in those proposals went to trophy road projects addressing priorities that are decades out of date.

But it appears to be slowly dawning on state officials how incredibly unserious Virginia’s approach to transportation has become, particularly in Bob McDonnell’s administration:

“I don’t think that the citizens of Virginia are ready yet to do what’s needed to solve the problem, and that’s raise revenue,” said Republican Del. Thomas Rust, whose Fairfax district is plagued by gridlock. “The citizens understand all that, but at the end of the day they say don’t you dare raise my taxes.”

Gov. Bob McDonnell had proposed privatizing the state’s liquor stores to generate funding for transportation, but Senate Democrats and even some in his own party have said that idea will never pass. McDonnell also had hoped to rely on drilling for oil and gas off Virginia’s coast to fund road and rail projects, but President Barack Obama recently announced a seven-year delay on such activity due to the BP oil spill.

With those seemingly off the table, Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple and some transportation officials said the gas tax was the best hope for new revenues.

In a perfect world, these growing rifts and dawning realizations would frighten some officials into thinking about whether the Oceana sprawlway and “Third Crossing” are actually worth it, and lead them to possibly consider a more sustainable and equitable transportation policy for the entire region.

If southeastern Virginians had better transit options – not even necessarily rail to begin with, just high-capacity, frequent bus and ferry service to start – starting in the denser nodes of the region and working from that foundation, they would be getting somewhere, faster and more reliably. Instead, VDOT continues a policy of planning more roads that do nothing to improve core capacity, exacerbate existing capacity problems, and threaten major elements of the regional environment and economic base.

This morning, I read the City Paper’s in-depth interview with Courtland Milloy, the Washington Post’s curmudgeon-type columnist who veritably exploded many of the thinly-shellacked issues of generation-gap ressentiment and racial animus in the District of Columbia after its September 2010 mayoral primary. This tendency is something he dances around, albeit inelegantly, in passages like this:

“Well, I don’t know why people think I have a problem with the influx itself,” he says. “Not to be deliberately provocative, but that is the white view, it’s white-centered. ‘Why are you opposed to us moving in?’ But nothing about, ‘Why are you concerned about the way black people are being kicked out?’ People are being displaced, and sometimes run over roughshod. To me, that’s the issue. But depending on who gets to frame the issue—who gets to pose the question, set the framework—it becomes, you know, what’s wrong with white people moving in?”

I know, at least on some rational level, that I should be checking my privilege here, that I’m skirting dangerously close to a number of “post-racial” white privilege tropes like “if you don’t educate me how can I learn” or “talking about race is divisive” or “you’re racist against whites” and tone arguments and what have ye. But I really would like to talk about his use of the word “myopic”.

“Myopic”, I would wager, is the idea that working- and middle-class whites in neighborhoods like Petworth and H Street NE should be the target of contempt, not for being “twits” (though some are indeed that, and some of those are definitely myopic) but for having the temerity to move into, and even attempt to materially improve, the squalid neighborhoods they can afford, if only because African-Americans are somehow inherently more deserving tenants.

“Myopic” would be the belief that the suburbs are necessarily better places for working- and middle-class whites, even though they are not actually good for wide swaths of people, because of social fictions about the nature of people who occupy them. (This is particularly galling coming from a resident of Prince George’s County, which has steadfastly refused to organize land use in a way that would allow its existing transit infrastructure to work in a self-sustaining fashion, in favor of cargo-cultic sprawl and totally atomized new-urbanist theme parks like National Harbor and Konterra.)

“Myopic” is the notion that the white influx is absurd, petty or inexplicable, even in light of the fact that many of those incoming whites, particularly on the lower end of the economic spectrum, are sexual minorities who not only face greater threats of retaliation in the suburbs – particularly Virginia localities we are exhorted to “move back” to even if we have never lived there – but are also increasingly exposed to violent retaliation for having the gall to live in neighborhoods that non-residents still patrol for any kind of unauthorized sexuality or gender expression. (Actually, rather than “myopic”, I would prefer to use either the word heterosexist, in case the possibility hadn’t even occurred to him, or homophobic, if he believes these concerns are not particularly meaningful or relevant.)

Even more “myopic” is the continuing description of the “influx” as monolithically white at all, when the demographic changes affecting neigborhoods like Columbia Heights have made those neighborhoods browner and more Latin@, many of whom are working-class or even destitute by Milloy’s standards. Do they deserve contempt, or is this again not particularly relevant to the critique?

I am trying very hard not to take a racist perspective on this diatribe, and probably failing. But none of this is meant to deny the reality that many African-Americans in greater Washington have been displaced by gentrification in a way that is genuinely oppressive, and resentment is understandable. At the same time, however, many members of the “white influx” – not nearly all of whom are white – have come to escape their own circumstances of oppression, the threat of physical violence, the inability to express their sexual or gender variance, or a lack of economic opportunity in peripheral regions. And this is the heart of what annoys me about Milloy’s rant: he appears to be conflating an aesthetic critique with socioeconomic realities. I hate hipsters as much as anyone, but I don’t resent them in the sense that they have less of a right to live here than any particular subset of “native” Washingtonians.

Being a dickhead might not be as cool as dickheads think, but it’s not what’s oppressing people. Poor and difficult decisions about how to use limited and highly restricted parcels of land (both in the District, with its height limits, and in Prince George’s, with its orthogonal transit non-orientation), combined with the lack of opportunities provided the urban and suburban poor trapped in sprawl, is a big part of the problem. The physical landscapes, language, and unspoken assumptions of an auto-centric society need to be undone as part and parcel with any urban system of social justice that seeks equity and hopes to uplift all oppressed parties.

Anything less than that is, well, myopic.

Douglas Murphy, one of my favorite architecture critics, has reposted a paper on his blog Entschwindet und vergeht about the rise and fall of Modernism in British housing design. It’s a long read, but draws important parallels near the end between nascent housing policy in the UK vs. that France:

The ConDem government’s proposals on capping housing benefit payments mean that there is a strong chance that the ongoing gentrification of central London will accelerate, leading to what you might describe as ‘Parisification’, and the effects further north in the cities that suffer from the UK’s ridiculous focus of wealth and work in London will most likely be allowed to decline yet further. Meades’ film ends with the statement that the long term meaning of urban regeneration is that there will be ‘no riots within the ring road’, while showing footage of the 2005 Paris riots. This is a very real and dangerous possibility.

The reference to the events of 2005 is salient; for all that those riots have been portrayed as purely Arab resistance to assimilation into French mainstream culture, it must also be said that French Arabs (and other groups marginalized into the exurban working poor) were geopolitically shut out, zoned for exclusion from an urban core that has historically been, and continues to be, heavily gentrified sites of strong urban primacy in terms of economic development. There is a palpable reason why rioters focused intensely on destroying cars, to which they were so often chained at the same time as it liberated them, at exorbitant prices, to seek whatever employment they could find at the margins of regions that were as alienating physically as they were alienated from French culture socially and linguistically. It is unsurprising that violence, particularly against cars, is so strongly correlated to banlieues that are simultaneously distant, poor, and transit-inaccessible.

Increasingly, as oil production is generally understood to have already peaked*, this is not only the likely direction of British housing markets but also that of our own in the United States. (China appears to be responding to the realization that it will need two Earths to consume like Anglospheric westerners by ramping up its industrial development to consume resources from space, but the feasibility of this can be the subject of an entirely different tirade.)

Even as post-Jacobean neoliberal urbanists (most notably Richard Florida) talk about reimagining the city as a haven for the “creative class”, the plight of the working class and low-income populations are somewhat swept under the rug. This needn’t necessarily be the case, but socio-cultural forces are conspiring with economic and class issues to make it so. Even (especially!) after the real-estate bubble exploded, many low wage-earners have internalized the logic of “drive until you qualify”, relocating to very distant, but technically affordable, exurbs and inner-ring suburbs poorly served by transit.

(Reinforcing this is an equal internalization of the cargo-cultic anti-transit attitudes of suburbanites, particularly and ironically among many affluent suburban African-American households, that the provision of necessary services will generate an “urban” atmosphere that attracts the various urban ills they have sought viscerally to escape. Thus, in a desire to avoid recreating that which is in any way like the urban core of Washington or Atlanta, the transit infrastructure of suburban Prince George’s or DeKalb counties often lies fallow, and perhaps will for another generation to come.)

Slowly, but with increasing urgency, developers are realizing that traditional modes of development are not going to sustain the future – not only in terms of greenfield development, but the redevelopment of existing automotive suburbs. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the pre-eminent New-Urbanist developer, admits a lack of necessary focus on transportation and pledges to redouble it. But will that eventual, gradual, and ongoing market shift to pedestrian forms and focus on active transportation for in-town property-owners be enough? Murphy concludes it might not be:

[Conservatives] pandered to the desire to be homeowners, and encouraged the worship of the house. A home is a fairly rudimentary object, but it is encrusted with symbolic detail, signifying deeply held desires. Although the means have been there for a long time, housing remains a technologically backward industry, reliant on ‘wet’ trades and bespoke construction. 1997 presented an opportunity to genuinely attempt a modernisation of the house-building industry, but it was missed by the myopic New Labour project, instead leaving us with vulgar monuments to vapid greed.

To sum up, because it is so inherently capital-intensive, change in architecture can only really come from the top-down. We cannot now, nor could we ever, trust developers and speculators to create the housing that we need, and we have been terribly let down by the last government. It seems unlikely that the housing situation will improve in the UK without a shift in ideology, and a resurrection of the notion that collective housing is a vital and civilised way of organising the way we dwell.

But is a truly revolutionary urbanism any more possible than trickle-down urbanism has proved to be? Or have either of these been proven at all? The inevitable future of our resource demands may dictate either or both, whether we like it or not.

Before people vote next week, I’d like to remind them that Chris Christie just killed the ARC project for the second time in two weeks. (Meanwhile, Bob McDonnell’s AG is suing for Virginia’s right to lie about climate change so he can do to our shoreline what Louisiana did to theirs, but that’s a topic for a different post.)

He cannot possibly think stranding tens of millions of daily and weekly commuters, or relegating them to Tokyo rush-hour crush-loads in and out of New York, is a good idea. He may want to spend the $3 billion federal match on expanding the New Jersey Turnpike into non-Euclidean dimensions (because apparently 16 lanes just aren’t enough) – but he’s not going to get it, and if he thinks he would get it, he’s deluding himself. In fact, USDOT is just as likely to make him pay twice that in penalties (because apparently Ray LaHood is the only member of the administration with balls).

The only possible rational explanation is that he’s a solipsistic prick who gambles with the productivity and mobility of tens if not hundreds of millions of people in order to spite his own constituency so he can tell that stupid story about “the money tree” on TV again – it’s his Shania mayonnaise story, something he regurgitates like a bad artificial intelligence trying to appear human. In this case he’s trying to appear human to Teabaggers – who hate everyone in the state he claims to govern and only like New Yorkers when they have the decency to die horribly in a politically convenient fashion – and to Sarah Palin, who might consider him as a running mate, hates his constituents almost as much as he does, and cannot be kept from the presidency because this time, unlike in 2008, she has no one to reign her in when she goes on the campaign trail and exhorts her followers to kill.

All of my friends are wondering why I’m angrier about this than I am about DADT, or DOMA, or any of the other somewhat disheartening gay news that’s come out recently. (I’ll admit partly I’m upset about the ablist medicalization of my deference on the issue: people have the temerity to question my priorities by way of treating my outrage like a neurotic splinter fixation, usually followed by a bunch of crap about autism from people who don’t have it, and then asking me why I’m upset.) I am much more upset about ARC than I could ever be about any particular queer legal issue because petty idiots are bit by bit destroying things that can never be remade.

I am entirely, painfully, and intimately aware of the various indignities and inequalities sexual minorities face daily in the United States, but no one particular legal solution to those will have multi-generational consequences like infrastructure does. No particular legal inequality we experience has the potential to oppress entire nations using the inexorable dynamics of space like these decisions do. And even if Barack Obama were born sitting on a lavender crystal dildo that gave him the fabulous magical powers to usher in immediate legalization of marriage for [heteronormative, non-polyamorous] gay couples everywhere, and to let every “fit” member of a sexual minority participate in the military-industrial complex, that complex would still be focused on corrupt, heinous acts designed to procure resources to maintain a wasteful spatial infrastructure that is crumbling all around us. We would all still be trapped by our genuinely oppressive and alienating physical spaces, by the incredible pettiness whereby we dream of meeting even the minimal standards of our economic competitors – who we aren’t even willing to meet on quality, much less exceed it, while they build 300-mph rail links across supercontinents and we aren’t even willing to commit to half that. Equality is cheap when we’re not even willing to challenge the equality status of or commit to parity with places that subsist on slave labor, much less, I dunno, actually excel.

What’s more is that, unlike preventing or undoing permanent damage to our infrastructure, the legal status of many queer Americans can change immediately. Decisions moving us towards a modicum of legal equality could be implemented tomorrow at little expense. Not investing in what’s become the most basic infrastructure for developed countries means the retroactive obliteration of economic justice for generations of people. It means that the lost secrets of the ancient Americans, as Tim Kreider put it – the mysterious people who in a forgotten time rebuilt continents and may have even attempted spaceflight – slip further and further from our memory, our consciousness, and our understanding.

There is a future and then there is the future. There is a difference between not caring about the former and failing to grasp the latter, and outright contempt for the former while sacrificing the latter to the flames of Moloch. It’s a contemptible difference to be sure, but people ask why I seem to worry about one more than the other?

Lydia DePillis wrote an extensive article for this week’s print edition of the Washington City Paper about WMATA’s upcoming map crisis. A number of proposed major system changes threaten to overwhelm Harry Weese and Lance Wyman’s original map, now iconic to Washingtonians (if invariably “Fisher-Price” to New Yorkers used to their own, geographically representative but complex MTA subway map). DePillis primarily interviews both Cameron Booth, creator of a new and somewhat more accurate map that incorporates the Silver Line, and Larry Bowring, proprietor of Bowring Cartographic and producer of the StationMasters orientation guides.

What’s ironic about Bowring’s take is that for all his objections to both the Booth and Weese maps, the one he provides is even less geographically accurate, for the most part, than even the Weese map. To be fair, it shows Shady Grove as north of Glenmont, if only incrementally so, and both branches of the Red Line do run further north than west on this map (neither Booth’s nor Wyman’s maps acknowledge this). But even given this caveat, his map has far less in common with the New York MTA map than it does with the Moscow Metro map, which is more of an interrelated set of abstract linear charts converging in the center in a way that only vaguely approximates the relationship of each line to one other or to the geography of the city itself. (Similarly, both of these maps, for all their accuracy or simplicity, would make quite a hash of Maryland’s Purple Line, whatever comes of it.)

If riders really wanted a geographically accurate, New York-style map of the Metrorail system, it would look something like this, or maybe this – both approximations of ADC’s in-house Metrorail map (increasingly a relic consigned to nostalgia in the face of Google’s ubiquitous GIS). This demonstrates to some degree the extent to which the Red Line veers lopsidedly far northwest toward Gaithersburg, if not how the extreme distance of the Silver Line will eclipse that once it reaches Loudoun County.

Realistically, the new map is thought to be something like a hybridization of the original map with some Booth-like elements. The lines themselves are thinner but much will remain the same. Unfortunately, one of Wyman’s innovations in which he expresses a particular interest seems unlikely: the iconization of stations. To quote DePillis:

He says he’d like to be involved in the redesign—which would be the safest choice for Metro, given that Wyman created the aesthetic they hope to retain. But he’d try for one thing that got shot down back in 1976: Small icons for each station that reflect what’s important about the location.

“I’m really sad that didn’t go through, that kind of putting history on the table,” he says.

(Wyman was given the opportunity to create these design elements in Mexico City, something recently emulated by Seattle LINK.)

In the unlikely event the new map does expand on the original to include icons or logos representing each stop, it could reduce the pressure to absurdly overexplain every station name. Putting a proscenium arch on the Metro Center dot, or a baseball and waterline on the Navy Yard dot, is a lot easier than renaming every stop “Navy Yard-Ballpark/Capitol Riverfront” or “Metro Center-E Street/Theater District”.

Of course, this could potentially be very complicated: Capitol South would be the Capitol Dome, probably, but what would represent “Gallery Pl-Chinatown (Verizon Center)”? Some sort of Chinese character like “術” (the arts)? Is “Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan” a panda, a guitar, or a panda playing a guitar? The mind reels at the prospect of deconstructing these places, though improving both wayfinding and accuracy for Metrorail and other commuters is necessarily both a lofty and worthy goal.

I want you to take a look at Conrad Heiney‘s photographs. The cities depicted are medieval, but almost every structure in them is modernist. Not just contemporary: Modernist. And yet, for all the myriad complaints about how modernist design is necessarily atomizing, every one of these buildings is designed for pedestrian scale in context to the buildings around them.

They’re also designed with respect to the scales of the natural environment and integrated into an historic context. Trees, hills, an ancient mossy-walled riverbank. And yet, so much of it unabashedly Modernist.

Not that there aren’t buildings in a traditional or historic idiom. But again, they’re contiguous with unabashedly and unashamedly Modernist buildings, all of which share a necessary respect for pedestrian context and integrated streets.

Even dead, dying, supposedly all-killing spaces under railways and highways are put to use, vibrant – alive. Urbanized, even. (I can immediately think of at least half a dozen spaces in greater Washington that could be given this sort of treatment.)

“Ah, but that’s Japan,” one might say. “It’s necessary there.”

Which is true; the Kansai region has nearly the population density of New Jersey. We are in the habit of underestimating ourselves, underestimating the surprising universality of the urban condition, and the necessity of living in sustainable configurations of the sort that promote walking and doing without the sort of resources that are becoming increasingly scarce.

And yet there is a uniqueness to Japanese and other east Asian places, a romance in the incongruity of historical mash-up. But this incongruity demonstrates the continuum of design, that tradition cannot stagnate or be held up to some kind of standard of constructing and reconstructing cargo-cultic set pieces.

Neo-trads like to use the word “rape” a lot to describe po-mo and Modernist buildings, something that trivializes (and suggests remarkable indifference to) sexual assault and the nature of it, much of which occurs in public spaces, some of which are quite neotraditional and quaint. There are two charitable assumptions: that they are suggesting modernist spaces create rape, which is simply putting the cart before the horse; or, less charitably, that modernist design or planning is inherently a “rape of the senses”, which is a comparison that implies rape is something aesthetic, something that “uses up” the victim, which should outrage anyone that was genuinely raped – but this is beside the point that it isn’t.

Planning isn’t about the imposition of this or that building style or architectural idiom. It’s about the preservation of quality in the spaces between places – creating spaces that become places worth being in, that aren’t inherently threatening or demeaning, that are liberating rather than oppressing.

And when those spaces are truly beautiful, there’s room enough for everything under the sun.

Recently I began working for a downtown NGO, which has provided a very useful opportunity to try commuting from Howard Town to Metro Center regularly with DC and Arlington’s jointly-operated Capital Bikeshare service. While the Bixi-style bikes are a bit clunky for experienced cyclists, both their hybridized design and variable rents have precisely the casual commuter in mind.

Admittedly, some cyclists who shall remain nameless tend to commute downhill and ride the bus uphill, which increases the energy footprint of the trip from [zero give or take food] to something like [1/30th that of a bus plus 1/20th that of a truck (or however many bicycles are towed from station to station at once)]. Nonetheless, it’s a very convenient alternative when commuting or performing light errands, so long as there are stations relatively convenient to where one begins and ends the trip. (It also goes without saying that it can serve as an aerobics regimen that saves time and money instead of wasting both.)

Another of the most valuable aspects of this service, one that’s rarely been articulated, is how it acts as a distributed transit network, one that has the (relatively) self-directed flexibility of driving in one’s own car, compared to the necessary linearity of regular rail- and bus-transit service or the hub-and-spoke logistics of Zipcar and other current carsharing services. Both of these things are valid in their own context, though these concepts may be given a run for their money by the growing possibility of “cloud commuting”, something that ephemeralizes the storage and exchange of transportation, like with finance and information storage before it:

Once upon a time, people kept their life savings on their person or at their homes, stored in physical material like gold and jewelry and property. Then money was invented as a medium of exchange, and people stored a surrogate of their wealth. Then banking was invented, and people centralized their holdings in a bank, and were paid interest for the privilege. Why were they paid? Because the banks could reuse their money by lending it out, at an even greater rate of interest. Money is fungible. I do not lose anything by storing it at the bank (and allowing them to lend it) except the privacy of keeping secret how much money I have, and risk that the bank will be unable to pay me back. The first is resolved through regulations, and the use of multiple banks, the latter by insurance. In any case, it is much safer than storing the money in a mattress at home.

Once upon a time, people kept their life’s information on their person or on computers at their home or work, stored in physical material like floppy disk drives, hard disk drives, solid state drives, CDs, DVDs, and USB chips. Then the internet was invented, and centralized servers were made inexpensively and redundantly, and people could store their information in the “cloud”. In many cases the cloud is free, or charges only a small fee. In exchange, the recipients agree to allow their personal information to be used to generate customized advertising targeted at them personally. But imagine their were a way for the cloud to earn interest on information much the same way banks earn interest on money, by synthesizing it and “lending it out”. Since information is not rivalrous, this may prove viable with sufficient artificial intelligence aimed at developing ontologies and computer intelligence. The risk is the loss of privacy. Alternatively the customer pays the cloud for storage and computation, retaining privacy, in exchange being relieved of duties of backup, which when neglected lead to all too much data loss.

Once upon a time people kept their personal transportation near their person, parking cars and bikes at their homes, workplaces, or other destinations. This was the only way to guarantee point to point transportation in a timely way where densities were low, incomes high, and taxis scarce. Then “cloud commuting” was invented, cars from a giant pool operated by organizations in the cloud would dispatch a vehicle that drives to the customer on demand and in short order, and then deliver the customer to the destination.

A model of “bikeable” distributed mobility, the Bixi model of interchangeable bikes at interchangeable stations, best favors walkable, medium-density areas with equitable jobs-housing balance rather than “strong centers” that drain commuters from everywhere around it. This is a major part of why large-scale bikesharing has largely succeeded wherever it has been practiced in Europe, and potentially could bode well in decentralized, medium-density U.S. cities like Los Angeles.

Even more interesting news for (and out of) California, though, is Google’s apparent breakthrough in self-driving cars. This could be considered one of the holy grails of both cybernetic engineering and automotive design – the realization of “personal rapid transit“, if designed for use in such a way as to promote distributed sharing. That said, there are still myriad problems with the Google Car, not least of which is its deadly ignorance of pedestrians; some, like Diana Lind, ask if autopilot is something desirable whatsoever. Nonetheless, regardless of whether this reduces or increases automobile use, shared and distributed podcars might reduce the overall number of cars, marginally reduce emissions, and dramatically reduce car ownership and transportation costs while improving mobility for entire systems of users generally.

Nonetheless, would the emergence of “the cloud” truly make conventional transit obsolete? Even if the energy and physical footprints of cars were dramatically reduced, even if those cars were efficient, entirely electric systems, podcars would still have a dramatically larger physical footprint than transit riders or pedestrians. It may well have a place in completing the last mile of many transit trips, but in order to service the high-density business districts that currently exist – as long as cultures and economies dictate that many, many people arrive at any destination at the same time, traveling along basically the same paths – there still is a role for bikes, buses, and trains in providing for immediate, high-impact urban transportation needs.

Dr. James Koch, architect of Old Dominion University’s disastrous maglev project, is arguing Hampton Roads Transit’s TIDE light-rail system is too costly to complete. Well, I guess he’d know something about abandoning transit projects before they’re finished. (Kerry Dougherty, the DEW machine’s favorite paid shill, is delighted and predictably got her trollface on already.)

Questions of what actually constitutes failed infrastructure aside, the solution to bad transit isn’t less transit, it’s more transit. TIDE is going to continue to fail benefit-cost analyses until it runs from the Naval Base to the Oceanfront, like originally planned, thru South Hampton Roads neighborhoods with justifiable densities like Ghent, and with upzoning for denser redevelopment at stations near the Boulevard (something that would be improved if Virginia Beach got its act together and created a redevelopment agency, but I’m not holding my breath).

Is anyone really surprised that a transit “starter line” that contains only one critical trip-generation destination out of at least six intuitively obvious and cheap ones is going to have problematic numbers? How is that the fault of the technology rather than the officials in Virginia Beach who tabled their segment rather than face a confrontation with the sprawl-oriented growth machine? Or the ones in Norfolk who thought it would be cheaper and faster to sneak anything under the radar rather than creating an integrated system that serves most of South Hampton Roads’ most walkable neighborhoods, the majority of which are in their city?

Talk about confirmation bias! If you set the system up to fail, of course it will fail.

If TIDE is not going to work, it is the responsibility of local governments to make it work – even myopic, recalcitrant, quarrelsome ones like these. I have been saying for nearly a decade that Virginia Beach should take the money it’s saving for its Oceana Mission Encroachment Sprawlway and reinvest it in BeachTIDE, and Norfolk should take its dogears for the ridiculous second-and-a-half crossing and spend it on BaseTIDE. Those projects can wait indefinitely, if they should even be built at all; sustainable mobility in southeastern Virginia cannot.