[Alyssa]

Working in Washington, for a company that specializes in its coverage of American politics, it’s been easy for me to believe that absolutely no one, anywhere, has anything really new to say about this election. Which is why it was so refreshing to read this piece by David Runiman in the London Review of Books. It’s worth taking a look at just to be reminded how…I won’t say weird, different, maybe, our election process looks when it’s viewed across the pond.

I don’t agree with everything Runciman has to say, but I thought his best observation was this: there is more and better writing being done about this election than in any previous contest, especially by non-traditional media outlets, but none of that argument seems to be swinging voting patterns in the way an endorsement from an influential newspaper might have in the past. He writes:

The BBC, whose coverage of British politics looks increasingly lame, has been hopeless at Obama v. Clinton. It’s not enough any longer for a correspondent to paint some local colour about the weather or the quirks of the voting system before asking a seasoned observer from the New York Times or Washington Post to explain to a British audience what it all means. The seasoned observers no longer have even the appearance of a monopoly on wisdom. They are just shouting to be heard like everyone else….

At the start of the campaigning season, the hope was widely voiced that the 2008 election offered an opportunity to reflect on what had gone wrong in the United States, and to think seriously about how things might be different. Much of the increasingly regretful comment that is being passed on how things have turned out reflects the fact that this opportunity has not been taken. Each side blames the other, for dwelling on race, or gender, or youth, or age, or hope, or fear, or the future, or the past, and imagines some alternative campaign in which the real issues would be debated in serious and open-ended terms….But in truth, it is absurd for anyone to claim to offer a plausible alternative to the way this election has been conducted. For all the elegance, intelligence and wit on display in the many tens of thousands of words I have read over the past few months, nothing that’s been said appears to have made any real difference to how most people see the candidates.

He tends to attribute that to the simple din produced by the number of new media outlets. But I wonder if it’s more likely that, as the blogosphere matures and grows, it tends to reflect public opinion, much as a poll improves with a larger sample size, rather than to guide it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a loss, if what the blogosphere pushes the media as a whole to produce is more informed debate rather than a public swayed to one particular outcome.

[Matt]

DC USA is a big urban mall type thingy that brought a Target, a Marshall’s, a Best Buy, a Circuit City, and some other retailers to DC’s gentrifying Columbia Heights neighborhood. It’s located in a walkable community where most people don’t own cars, across the street from a Metro station and within two blocks of four or five bus lines and right on the city’s main north-south bike thoroughfare. Naturally, there was demand to build a huge quantity of parking for the facility much of which is now sitting empty.

This kind of overbuilding of parking is a substantial problem. There are only so many Metro stations and hence only so much space that’s close to a Metro station. That space is a precious, precious commodity since building out a line to incorporate a new station is hugely expensive. It’s fine for some of that valuable “right by a Metro station” space to be used as parking, but it ought to be economically competitive with other possible uses as housing, retail, or office space. Meanwhile, when parking is scarce and more people ride the Metro or the bus or walk or even just find themselves parking a few blocks away then the surrounding neighborhood is able to attract more benefit from the presence of customers heading to the big new complex. What you’d like to see in Columbia Heights is the new chain stores having a spillover effect that helps drive customers to the strip of local restaurants retail a few blocks away on 11th street (where right now a lot of the storefronts are vacant) but that doesn’t happen if move move directly from car to garage to store to garage to car without ever setting foot in the neighborhood.

It’s somewhat hard to see the damage done by this kind of overparking when it comes to such a large project as DC USA, but something like this smaller example illustrates the point clearly and then when you scale it up to a much larger facility things only get worse.

[Matt]

DDOT study’s recommendations.