🚀 go-pugleaf

In dc.driving David J. Greenberger <grenbrgr@cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
: In article <9XAr1.5$iT1.2293838@newsreader.digex.net>,
: Bentley  <bentley@access4.digex.net> wrote:

:>built (in 1971) or already "committed." This, it turns out, included not
:>only I66 and the Dulles Toll road, but the Twin Sisters Bridge, The
:>Potomac River/Pallisades Parkway, the I695 South leg, and the 295 East leg

: What is this Pallisades Parkway?  There already is a Palisades
: Interstate Parkway in New York and New Jersey.

Yeah, I've driven that one, Nyack to the GW bridge. Nice road. But you are
correct, I was merging the names of two roads and thus muddied things up.
The Pallisades Parkway, as described in the 1971 plan, ran from the
Beltway just across the American Legion Bridge along the river to the
Three Sister's Bridge. From there to the (proposed) I66 split under K
street NW/NE, it was called the Potomac River Freeway. After the split, it
became I695, generally known as the "South Leg."

Truth be told, I don't think killing these roads was a bad idea. Despite
attempts to minimize the damage, the Pallisades Parkway (basically an
expanded version of today's Clara Barton Parkway) would have hurt the C&O
canal. The tunnell from I66 to I395 under the Mall seems supurfluous with
110 serving the same basic need on the Potomac side. And the K-street
tunnel only made sense if there was something to connect to at New York
Ave NE, which, as we all know, there isn't.

As I research more and more of this region's highway history, the little
domino effect I use above became the rallying cry.

1. North Central Freeway (I95 and I70 inside the Beltway) were killed
because the original plans were horrific. Never mind that the final 1971
plan was fairly benign

2. With no NCF, the K-street tunnel was silly.

3. With no K-street tunnel, 695 served little purpose.

4. With no 695, there was no need for the Twin Sisters.

5. Northern Virginia NIMBYs came close to having 66 killed because of the
lack of a connecting road in DC.

6. And if 66 had died, so would the Dulles Toll Road.

The protests were pretty carefully orchestrated. I've been digging through
old Post articles for the past month or so, and it's easy to spot the same
trends resurfacing. What's ironic is that the original death -- the North
Central Freeway -- started out as a just cause but eventually became a red
herring. And thus, quite recently, the same tactics were used to kill
Barney Circle: since there are few other highways in DC, why bother
connecting the few that actually got built?

:>In all fairness to Metro, they're one of the few big transit systems that
:>cleans EVERY car EVERY night. Yeah, I know, they could clean them every
:>other night and run 7 x 24, but that's the only excuse I could think of...

: Doesn't NYCT clean every car at the end of the line -- i.e., multiple
: times each day?

No idea.

-- 
 > B E N T L E Y <     bentley AT digex DOT net
A long frisbee throw from the pungent and lovely Potomac River
www.access.digex.net/~bentley/remove-this-bot-blocking-part