Here’s a great example of taking chicken feathers and turning it into chicken salad: Those massive slabs of concrete that resulted from the demolition of the old Wilson Bridge are being put to good use.
I’m sure many of you, like me, wondered what was going to happen to those slabs and if they were just going to be dumped into the river. Turns out that those slabs have been taking a slow ride on the backs of barges. At the end of this 100-mile trip to the Chesapeake Bay just north of the mouth of the Potomac River, they have been dumped overboard. No, it’s not that this was just a better place for our leavings, it’s part of a planned environmental project.
Those 50-foot slabs of concrete will be used to create an artificial reef as part of a fish habitat run by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources. It also sounds to me like Tom Sawyer is working for the Wilson Bridge Project, if they can get an environmental check-mark for dumping their trash into the Bay.
RIDERSHIP ON VA. TRANSIT
Once again, the numbers of people taking transit are up in northern Virginia.
The Northern Virginia Transportation Commission says that ridership on the Fairfax Connector, ART, Loudoun County Transit, and the PRTC Omni Link and Omni Ride buses are all up by double digits since 2002. As much ink as Metro’s swells in ridership have received, the NVTC notes that Metrobus and Metrorail have only grown by six percent. And as we have noted here, ridership at VRE is actually down three percent in that same period of time.
Certainly the big rise in gas prices in the past year have contributed to that, but I hear from more and more of you who are just sick of driving in stop-and-go traffic twice a day, and I know that more than a few of you are taking the train or the buses once or twice a week.
I must admit that I’m very surprised that I haven’t heard much out of the groups that advocate for teleworking. With gas prices so high and with congestion not getting any better, it seems like this would be the time for these groups to be singing the praises of working out of one’s home or a telecenter. Frankly, they’re missing a great opportunity, because I would think that employees and employers would be much more willing to hear what telecommuting can do for them. The beauty is that the people who still have to drive would also benefit from telecommuting because there would be fewer cars on the road.
Questions, comments, random musings? Write to Steve@ SprawlandCrawl.com.
