13th
I just spent an hour in traffic. I’m not happy. I spend my hour in traffic thinking why I’m stuck in traffic. There are so many things I’d rather be doing.
I go down a checklist of ways to go about my day week without a car. In Centreville you’re lucky if you can go car free once a week. And I just generally fail. In Reston it was possible to go car free for part of the week with effort and planning. In Arlington I went car free for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. In all of these cases, going car-free is a hassle, but at least in Arlington (and to a much lesser extent, Reston), it’s possible and mostly reliable. In Centreville, you might as well give up on living. Centreville is probably the most representative of America.
Dear Northern Virginia,
Please stop directly or indirectly subsidizing Centreville and that kind of lifestyle. It only hurts us in the not-so-long run. Please reward Arlington for its nigh un-American efforts to build a community with less car these past few decades. And please nudge Reston (and Tysons) in the right direction with the Silver line, smart sustainable transit-oriented mixed-use development, bicycles, buses, car-share programs, and no more highways. You could help by throwing money at public transit and those Smart Growth gurus. Or you could simply not fund more highways to new Centrevilles.
Yours,
mooniker
