You’ll be happy to know that the powers that be over at Metro do pay attention to what you have to say. A couple of weeks ago, we ran a letter from Max who had a complaint about pedestrian access at the West Falls Church Metro station. Max’s complaint was that those in the Pimmit Hills neighborhood had to take a dangerous, circuitous route to get to the station and he wondered why a walkway couldn’t be constructed. Well, Nat Bottigheimer in Metro’s Planning and Developmentoffice came up to me at last week’s board committee meeting to tell me that in response to the column, his people have gone out to the station and have taken pictures to try to figure out if there might be a solution. According to Bottigheimer, the most direct line from this big neighborhood to the station goes right through the rail yard and that presents a challenge in terms of safety and cost. At the same time, he indicated that Max’s concern is “clearly an issue” and is one for which they are trying to come up with a solution. This solution might involve a walking area that is segregated by snow fence or some other barrier, but at the same time they have to take into account the security concerns for all those trains sitting idle in the yard.
Metro has a series of guidelines for the design and construction of station access and it includes a well-thought-out list of priorities, the first of which is access for those with disabilities. Overall, however, the main priority for Metro is making the stations accessible to pedestrians and bicycles. This is not totally a feel-good thing on Metro’s part; it’s the realization that if more people can walk or ride their bikes to get there, then the agency won’t have to build more parking facilities. Right now only about 14 percent of the passengers who use the West Falls Church station get there by walking to it, and it sounds like some of them take their lives into their hands to do so. There were no promises given that a solution would be found and that a more direct walking route would be created there, but it’s good to know that the concerns of passengers are taken seriously and I, for one, appreciate that.
Car-sharing flap
The District recently announced that it has set aside 86 parking spaces for car-sharing vehicles. In many cases, these spaces have come at the expense of residential or even revenue-generating (metered) spaces. Parking is certainly at a premium in the neighborhoods, and many residents have complained. I know that there are many people who no longer own cars in the city because of the Metro system and because of the availability of services such as this that make available to them a vehicle when they need to go outside the system or when they need to transport large packages. At the same time, D.C.’s acting director of transportation notes that many of the newly assigned spaces are in low-income neighborhoods and tries to make a case that this is good for the people who live there. The problem is that these ride-sharing programs required a credit card or a significant deposit, neither of which these residents are likely to have. In addition, if the idea behind car sharing is to get cars off the roads, why would you put more of them in neighborhoods where people don’t own cars because they can’t afford them?
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