Hop into our Mystery Machine and try to solve the case of Metro's missing eight-car trains, the return of the Ballston Metro station entrance, the secret complexities of vacant homes and much more. You may need your Scooby snacks.
By Stephen Repetski (Editorial Board Alum) • July 29, 2019
Arlington County staff have been given the ‘go-ahead’ to move forward on planning for the eventual construction of a second entrance at the Ballston Metro station, according to project manager Bee Buergler. The project, over 15 years in the planning, has until recently been held up due to delays in the redevelopment of the building at 4420 Fairfax Drive.
By David Alpert (Executive Director) • July 29, 2019
Anyone with a moral center is rightly outraged by recent tweets from President Donald Trump, where he referred to the Baltimore-area district of Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” Let’s not forget, though, that there are other poilticians who affirmatively make it harder for Baltimore to rise out of its current problems.
Let’s first get this out of the way: The reason there is no Metro stop in Georgetown is two-fold. First, there were technical difficulties from the hardness of the bedrock and the proximity of the river which meant a station would be infeasible. Second, at the time the Metro planners were laying out the system, Georgetown was not enough of a population or job center to justify working out a solution to the feasibility problem.
By Stephen Repetski (Editorial Board Alum) • July 31, 2019
The number of eight-car trains on the Yellow and Green lines has fallen in recent months, according to data from Metro analyzed by MetroHero. Both lines are budgeted for 100% eight-car trains, according to the agency’s Fiscal Year 2020 budget, but have been below that since the start of the Platform Improvement Project shutdown.
By Payton Chung (Editorial Board, Advocacy Committee) • July 31, 2019
One frequently-heard retort to any call to allow more housing construction is a single statistic: There are 17 million vacant houses, more than 30 for every American experiencing homelessness during the 2018 Point-In-Time survey. While those vacant houses do exist, they exist for complicated reasons.
