Here are our top read posts:

This week we are all about modes of transportation, from Maryland's need for more transit projects in its pipeline, to the pursuit of walkability in Tysons, and a historical look at DC's original streetcars. When it comes to transportation we are with Oleta Adams: "Just get here if you can."

Virginia is planning an east-west rail route connecting the Blue Ridge Mountains to the beach

By Wyatt Gordon (Virginia Correspondent) • October 16, 2019

A passenger rail advocacy group wants to bring back long-defunct east-west rail lines to connect the Blue Ridge Mountains and Virginia Beach. In its recent report, Virginians for High Speed Rail (VHSR) envisions a “Commonwealth Corridor” that would connect Christiansburg and the New River Valley with Hampton Roads.

I strolled around Tysons with a walkability researcher. Here’s what he had to say.

By George Kevin Jordan (Editor and Correspondent) • October 16, 2019

Walkability is a big topic in Tysons, a census-designated place that was built around cars. The area has lofty goals in its comprehensive plan to transform from an “edge city” into an urban center, to employ an additional 200,000 people, and to add about 100,000 residents—while simultaneously decreasing the number of single-vehicle trips.

Transit projects take decades and need investment; MD has neither plans nor funding

By Alex Holt (Maryland Correspondent) • October 16, 2019

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s proposed budget would cut funding for transit and eliminate projects like the Corridor Cities Transitway. However, its most damaging aspect might be not be the projects it eliminates, but those it never added to begin with.

DC has released targets for where it wants more affordable housing

By Alex Baca (Housing Program Organizer) • October 16, 2019

On Tuesday, DC released targets for affordable housing production by neighborhood planning area, which are similar to wards but don’t change with population shifts. Mayor Muriel Bowser committed to building 36,000 new units by 2025 in her inauguration speech, and these targets show where a third of this total, the affordable units, will go.

200 original DC streetcars survived the 1960s. Today only one still carries passengers.

By Dan Malouff (Board of Directors, Editorial Board) • October 17, 2019

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, as Washington’s original streetcar system slowly converted its rail lines to buses, owners sold or gave away nearly 200 of DC’s best railcars to any city that would take them. Those cars ran for decades all over the world. But time takes its toll, and today only one remains in anything like active service: Car #71 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.