🚀 go-pugleaf

wrob@erols.com wrote:
> 
> Said in fond apprehension of the possibility of more freeways thru DC:
> 
> >>Me, I love DC. Lived here for 26 years. It's hard to watch a frienddie, especially when it doesn't have to...
> 
> Do you love the Eckington/Shaw area between Mount Vernon and North
> Capitol? Prez Clinton and the BOT have placed a new freeway on top of
> these neighborhoods in the top ten FEDERAL transportation area wish list.
> Yep, turning that area into a freeway-shadow perpetual wasteland of empty
> lots, a perpetual trackside slum in the nations capitol and the future
> site of postcard snapshots (the worlds most famous onramp: the National
> Capital Gateway) will make DC alot more business friendly, on par with
> Detroit, where many similar areas of "reserve parking" have proven more
> valuable to the tax base than the (hundred year old) neighborhoods of
> poor and middle class people they displaced.
> 
> -BER

Brain:

Are you sure you know what you are talking about?

The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) establishes
a commission to look at (essentually), an expressway connection between
the northern terminus of the 3rd Street Tunnel (I-395, formerly I-95) at
New York Avenue, along the New York Avenue corridor to the I-295/MD 50
interchange in Maryland.  It specifically calls for investigating a
"tunnel or other means" for doing so.

As you may be aware, this is an outgrowth of a recent inititaive by the
D.C. Mayor's Office (last that I heard was headed by the same man who
was the President of the 1960s-70s group ECTC that worked to stop all
D.C. Freeways) for a program of New York Avenue Revitalization, centered
around 2 major additions to the D.C. transportation grid along the New
York Avenue corridor: a Metro line, and a road tunnel extension of the
3rd Street tunnel.  According to a study so commissioned, such
transportation improvements would employ the EXISTING right of way of
New York Avenue.  The highway tunnel would be a cut and cover design,
wrapping around the Bible Way Church complex with a 500 foot radias,
continuing easterly beneath N.Y. Avenue to a portal east of the C.S.X.
Metrolpoltain Branch Metro Red line.  The Metro tunnel meanwhile would
run beneath the cut and cover highway tunnel, via a bored tunnel. 
Either highway or Metro tunnel could be built after the other, or
simultaneously.  Neither would take buildings between Mt. Vernon Square
and North Capital Street.

Are you aware of some other recent plan for some other means of
extending I-395 through D.C., such as an elevated highway atop the
neighborhoods just to the north of New York Avenue west of North Capital
Street?  The 1996 plans I am familar with don't even disturb the row
houses facing New York Avenue east of North Capital Street (the ones
that are primarily abandoned).

Douglas A. Willinger
Takoma Park Highway Design Studio