If we look at who is been gov it generally has been Baltimore or PG for (D) govs which is most of them. As that is the most important office in MD that is why I say Baltimore doesn't really want DC to be part of MD.

They it really would make Baltimore even less important. I wasn't saying that Baltimore has all the power, I'm saying they really don't want to have almost none and be even more ignored.

Really? more lazy than a 7 word reply?

Were you born in DC like me? Have you been here for decades? I am way better informed than you (almost certainly). Can you tell me when home rule started? Without looking it up?

Nice sources. Provide any argument that retrosession doesn't accomplish for the citizens of DC that they don't have now.

They don't need to because they have representation.

I never said anything about where the statehouse is. Baltimore and the DC suburbs are the power centers... If you read it like that, that is weird.

Edit: Let me clarify even further: think for a second if I thought the state house was in Baltimore, then adding DC to Maryland wouldn't "take power from politicians in Baltimore" if I meant that as "take power from the state house" because the the statehouse wouldn't move if you retroceed DC. So I really don't know how you got that or lots of up votes for it other than just the reflexive I don't think reality downvote, this person makes him look bad upvote stupidity of the mob.

MD has conservative chunks largely starting in Frederick parts of Carrol and running west and the Eastern shore. The rest is liberal with the population centers really being MoCo/PG and Baltimore. Thus much of MD politically is the push-pull between the DC part which has more wealth and the Baltimore part. If DC becomes part of MD that balance is thrown off and therefore a large chunk of people in MD loose power and therefore selfishly don't want it.

I just want people in DC to have representation in congress, good schools, and sane laws. MD does all of those things where DC fails again and again. MD has functioning crime labs. MD has tickets that get enforced. Removing DC as a separate thing simplifies the political calculations for the region for entities like WMATA. It is a huge win for everyone but those in power today. I have never heard a real argument against it that hurts average people (not including tax codes or random policies helping one person over another). DC might rank over MD in some metrics but that is down to it being urban (as are some of the things that it is bad at). DC has been poorly managed for at least the 40+ years I have been watching. It could do so much better than it has done. As some one born here it makes me sad.

Turn ATC (automatic train control) back on.

This would make service a smoother and more reliable and safer.

DC will never get statehood. It is not worth it to members of congress even Democrats and has been shown for almost 200 years now. There have been ample times when full control of congress and the presidency existed and it has never gotten close to happening.

The primary argument for statehood is lack of voting rights.

Retrocession to Maryland accomplishes that goal, as Arlington County did.

The most common counter argument to retrocession is DC is its own place and not Maryland. Philly is just as different from parts of PA but it is part of PA. DC is territory that MD gave away, Georgetown was part of the Maryland colony.

DC politicians would rather their citizens have no voting rights in congress than have to share power with the MD population and have less extreme laws.

MD politicians in Baltimore do not want to give up more power to DC and its wealthy suburbs.

So DC will have no voting rights and be able to be overridden by congress, used to score political points because the bulk of congress doesn't care about 600k people in a counter of more than 300 million.

If you are serious about democracy and want congress to not have a choice then retrosession is the only viable path, DC only has to really convince MD, not the majority of the US for that path and MD does care about DC in the end after all it used to be MD.

I mean you aren't alone but it shows how petty and myopic people get about things.

I will repeat as I often do: WMATA is a good system. It should be even better but damn we are lucky to have it. I've been to so many world cities and it is ridiculous the comparisons made. There are only a handful of places that really are better, and the population of DC is only 650k, the region is like 6 million. When WMATA was at is peak there were 800k trips on the rail alone... That's more than a trip a person for the population. A system that sucks does not get that kind of use. Even now it hits 300k+ which is still a large fraction. I would guess about 1.5 million live within 2 miles of a station on the rails. Given counties like MoCo have populations of 1 million. The system will get back up to 800k a day in a few years.

People are radically underestimating the purple line also I think, though it will be 4 more years. It is going to be a lot more Red line use in the ends of the system because you skip going downtown and back out, its a big deal. That said there needs to be another alt east-west line closer into the core built as purple doesn't really allow a bypass if they want to shut down the Or-Sv-Bu core line. If they can build another core line and make a grid maintenance will get a lot less painful. If we fund that line today it might be complete in about 2040. I will be quite old... But I hope they build it for all the people who are teens today.

You can take a bus there. Buses run before the trains to National. I took one from Bethesda to National once. I think at about 5 AM. It does take quite a bit longer than the train as I recall.

There was snow in Nov/Dec. The biggest snow storms in MD tend to occur in Feb or the first week in March because it is wetter. All it has to do is get cold enough for a day or two.

There is a gap between local relative comparisons and global comparisons.

Although people are right that the internet likes to complain, there are other things going on here as well.

Ask the question: is DC a great place to live, you will get a resounding yes. There is a fair amount of selection bias in that answer of course but it is real. This answer is founded in a global comparison of places to live. Am I better off in the DC environment than Baltimore, Chicago, LA, etc. ?

Meanwhile the bitching about DC you see is actually a comment of local comparison or trend in time: are things getting worse or better locally. I think you are seeing evidence that things are getting worse in the city. The trends of cities nationally having problems is very much a pandemic related issue with many factors. DC isn't perhaps doing that much worse than others so again comparatively people will still want DC, but at the same time they are identifying a trend to the negative.

Looking forward to Neutron launches from nearby.

I recommend against driving in Norway, the UK, New Zealand, much of Greece...

Rock Creek parkway is pretty much flat and hardly twisty. The lanes have markings and a standard width. There are no cliffs and it has guard rails.

On driving difficulty it gets a 2 out of 10. Very easy. Almost every road outside a city in Norway is on a cliff with constant blind turns and you need to know where the corners of your car are to inches to not hit the trucks that come around corners. There are no markings in the middle of the roads and there are reindeer, free ranging sheep and moose.

Essentially people need to be instructed how to drive better I guess. Norway takes it seriously. They enforce speeding harshly and alcohol even more so. Having driven there I saw why. The US road system is way too easy which lets people drive fast and badly.

Wide lanes are what make people drive fast that is well known if you want people to drive slowly you have to make lanes much narrower.

It will cost you 2-6 dollars one way, and take you about 50-65 mins take the Red line to Metro center and get on a train to Ashburn.

The walk from the station to the terminal is 5 minutes in a warm tunnel.

2 dollars right now on the weekend, probably about 6 during the rush on a weekday. I checked out the trip the weekend the silver line opened as I fly international pretty often. The numbers Google maps gave agreed with my own timing of the route on the day I did it.

This is the root cause honestly. I largely don't see any change outside DC's borders. If you don't enforce the law then lots of people are not going to follow the rules.

But is society breaking down. Not even close yet. People will start to vote to fix this stuff well before that it, posts like these are the start of public opinion shifting enough to demand political action in favor of law and order. Things will have to get much worse first though as the leadership in DC is phobic of the people being punished being minorities at a higher rate than the population demographics. For a number of reasons that will be the outcome when enforcement is ramped back up.

There is literally a station 100 m from the terminal at DCA.

The Silver Line will be open to IAD on Tuesday (15th) though I don't know if there is a bus from the stop to Udvar-Hazy, but as I recall the parking is on the airport area for those that drive. Google maps shows there is a bus that takes 16 minutes between the two. This would be the least expensive way to get there. If you are leaving on Monday there is presently a bus from the end of the silver line to IAD as well but all this is on Google maps.

Get a quote for a fence that you would like, and tell them that they would need to pay the quote at the end of the construction. Get them to sign something or just like an email, something in writing. Or have them prepay before you consent to having it removed.

Also ask them for a timeline so you can schedule the work to have it restored. Worst case you pay for some part of a new fence, a lot cheaper than lawyers and a lot better to not have neighbors that hate you.

As it says right on the graphic, all you can do is catch up to the train in front of you. That means you can "make up" as most the headway between trains. Since the headway between trains is 6 minutes in the rush hour all you can make up is 6 minutes at best. Therefore you may skip up to N stops that would save you 6 minutes. Skipping all the stops would just have you waiting at the stations with your doors closed following a train stopping at every station.

WMATA is saying that skipping 7 stations is enough to gain that 5-6 minutes.

This won't happen. If it does it will get rolled back when the savings is not even 5 minutes on average.

Of course a 4 track everywhere system is better.

The question is do you want a 4 track system with half as many stops or a 2 track system with twice as much length?

It isn't quite linear scaling in cost, but you still need to physically make all the stations and platforms bigger, lay twice as much track, have twice as many signals and so on. You nominally get half as many stops and distance in your budget.

Generally the observation is that a dense network of 2 track systems is best. A good example of this is basically London. Nothing is quad tracked, but if a segment goes down you can go around it. They just built an ultra-modern cross London train (Crossrail/Elizabeth Line) it is 2 tracks.

For the WMATA system the step to add that is the "separated blue line" proposal. The system would benefit from a 2nd east-west main line though the city. Ideally touching all the lines. This allows transfers to get around a broken train or other issue in the core. It doesn't help you in the tails of the system, but they have less riders anyway.

Interlining is something that the WMATA system does a lot of that is unusual which increases the dependencies between them. In a separate blue line system Green basically has 2 southern branches (yellow) and 1 northern. Orange has two east and west branches (silver). Blue is on its own. Red is on its own.

I don't think this will be done. If they want to improve times they really need to switch back to ATC operation.

The life cycle of all things: small group with high quality, gets more popular, quality reaches that of general population (not high).

This sub, reddit, the internet at large. It all follows this pattern.

Baltimore is not wealthy and does not have the tax base to draw on. Apples and oranges. Bethesda exists. Do you think DC looks more like Baltimore a post industrial city or Bethesda? Full of lawyers and doctors.

If it gets bad enough Congress will revoke home rule and clean up the city because they won't want to have to be in such a place. It will happen within the next decade if the DC gov continues to promote decriminalizing everything and general lawlessness and give aways. Congress has the sole right to control the district as they see fit as written in the constitution.

Retrosession to MD and it would actually get cleaned up I suspect. Both MD and VA are far better run.

You ruin your credibility when you don't notice your figure has impossible values like 105 and 405 in it. At least bother to proof your post before you do it...