First off, whoever decided to use “μSA” as the acronym for Micropolitan Statistical Area was clearly really proud of themselves for that one.
Second, as a Texan who was born in the DFW metroplex, when I moved to the DMV I was floored by how close Baltimore was. It seemed obvious to me that DC and Baltimore would be considered twin cities had they come into existence a century later than they actually did.
Everything about the Northeast is like that for me. My wife's family is from Baltimore, her brother lives in Philadelphia, and she has lots of family in New York. The distance between each of those places is smaller than going from my hometown of La Quinta, CA (inland southern California) to Los Angeles. I'm now wondering how many northeastern states could fit inside Oregon.
I grew up in Howard County, about 20 minutes from Baltimore and 40 from DC. And at least in my town (Ellicott City) we absolutely talked about "the Baltimore-Washington area". People commuted in both directions. And there were some discussions around how in the future, we'd be at the center of Atlantea, the continuous urban area running from Miami up to Bangor. Though some of the people discussing that were NIMBYs who objected to the idea.
I am from EC too! This post was fun for me, with HoCo getting a shoutout. Unfortunately I think the majority of HoCO residents are quite NIMBY and thinking about becoming anything like a mini-city would scare them. That said, Columbia is currently improving itself and has begun looking more like a 15-minute city. There's even a pie in the sky proposal to extend the metro green line from greenbelt to Columbia. If that could be combined with better rail (or even bus) connections from Columbia/HoCo to Baltimore, I think HoCO being the center of the Baltimore-Washington area could really work (though zoning in the county would have to be radically changed).
Also from DFW, I was totally floored at the way people get upset when you lump the city and suburbs together in the Northeast+Chicago. Of course Arlington is "DC" and Evanston "Chicago"!
I was just thinking that Matt's description of this Savage stop sounds like it should become the Arlington, TX of the region. Dallas and Fort Worth sprawl enough that they combined into one metro area a while ago, and Baltimore/Washington is really just more of that same thing, but a bit more compact, so they haven't yet psychologically merged. (They already have the combined airport, though I guess it's still not the biggest airport in the region.)
Oh, interesting! I had assumed Dulles was bigger because it's a hub for a major international airline, but I guess I should stop underestimating Southwest.
Yeah, as someone who has spent his whole life living in the giant west coast CSAs, I had the same experience when I went to Baltimore for a conference. It just seems obvious to us that these would be part of the same basic metro area.
DC local here, want to chime in with a personal anecdote. At one point, my job was requiring me to drive from Columbia Heights to Centreville, VA. I hated the commute so I applied for a job in Baltimore. As the interviews progressed and the option of taking the job became more serious, I Googled the actual commute and noticed the Baltimore job was exactly 0.1 miles further away from my apartment. So I took it.
Commuting from DC to Baltimore on MARC every day was...kinda a nightmare. It was better than driving to Centreville, but only because I subjectively hate driving. But the infrastructure improvements necessary to integrate the two cities more seamlessly are real challenges.
Lastly, I think the political lines matter here. Baltimore, and the Maryland/Virginia border, have been around longer than the United States has. They're mattering less now than they did when I was growing up, and the trend is good, but they're still important. It's extremely interesting to me how little Maryland looks to Virginia (and vice versa) in e.g. regulatory matters.
This is just anecdotal, but I am currently a student at UMD College park, which is solidly in the DC area having its own metro stop and all. The school is obviously mostly students from Maryland, but I would say the largest group of out of state students are from New Jersey and Virgina. New Jersey seems to mostly because of a subjective view of bad public universities in NJ. Virginia on the other hand is almost all people from northern Virginia DC area type places. I would say that culturally these young DC area Marylanders and Virginians(?) have a large amount of cultural solidarity which disregards the state border. I like the example of sports teams that Matt brings up. Virginians are DC fans because Virginia doesn't have its own major sports teams. Marylanders on the hand chose from the Baltimore and Washington teams. I know a huge amount of Ravens/Wizards fans because the Ravens are better than the Football Team and Baltimore has no NBA team. I am also one of many Orioles+Nationals fans because both cities have MLB teams with some recent success (the nats much more than the O's). That said, people from DC and Baltimore proper, in my experience have a much harder time of thinking of the cities as sisters. Marylanders though? I think we're all on board.
I started listening to Mike Duncan's French Revolution podcast during the December podcast lull, and, rightly or wrongly, keep drawing parallels with the current US, one of which is the absolute chaos of our administrative map. Municipal lines are gerrymandered just as badly as Congressional districts (only for different ends; see, e.g., Los Angeles County), Boston suburbs have zero incentive to work together and so just spend their time screwing each other on housing and transit, and the only elected government D.C., Arlington, and Baltimore have in common is the feds.
Bourbon France's was an order of magnitude worse than ours is, but administrative reform is just another way in which our peer countries are leaving us in the dust. But god forbid we redraw the sacred lines set down by the founders.
Complain to high heaven how unfair the Senate is because it underrepresents States like California, with its divinely ordained borders and peerless, excellent State government. But divide California into smaller States so its residents have more equal representation in the federal government? Apostasy!!
San Francisco is 48 sq mi and San Jose is 178 sq mi. It's really amazing that, despite the NIMBYs, San Francisco has almost as many people as San Jose!
Interestingly, the core 48 sq mi of Los Angeles (basically between I-10 and the Hollywood Hills, from La Cienega to the LA River) is nearly as dense and basically as transit-using as the core 48 sq mi of San Francisco: https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/03/03/l-a-vs-s-f-how-does-transportation-really-compare/ (unfortunately, the map they had of the region is now a broken link).
I’m in no way defending SF NIMBYs. But SF does have natural, geographic constraints on its growth in almost every direction, unlike San Jose. Of course SF could be more dense — but if I recall it is already one of the densest (the densest?) US cities.
SF is 21st, but the only city of any size that's denser is NYC
But the amazing thing about NYC is that NYC is fully 1.5x denser and that's over all 5 boroughs (including Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens) which (I'm pretty sure) includes far more industrial space / park space / graveyard space than SF.
I'm too lazy to do research myself, but I'd imagine Manhattan by itself is more on the scale of Paris and Tokyo. It is "dragged down" by the other boroughs.
Paris is about the same density as Manhattan, but achieves it without the height. The trick is to be six-storey everywhere, to have lots of narrow streets (yes, there are wide boulevards, but not that many, and the streets in between are much narrower) and to push all the parks just outside the official boundary (the Bois de Boulogne is two and a half times the size of Central Park and is only one of several such parks).
There is a skyscraper district in La Défense, just outside the city boundaries - demonstrating that the USA isn't the only place that has weird results from municipal boundaries.
I grew up in the suburbs between DC and Baltimore and still live in the area. While I don't hate the idea of more interconnected travel I think you're greatly misinterpreting some things on that truck.
-First, note that the Oriole bird also has the Redskins feather on his hat. While the Nationals' fans have a long history of denying this there was in fact a major Orioles following in DC/the DC area for a very long time after the Senators left. The O's were front page news on the WaPo sports page, you could get tickets to Camden Yards in DC, and the stadium itself was built to be accessible to the DC market. There were plenty of Cal Ripken fans everywhere and O's farm teams in the DC area (Bowie, and you could arguably count Frederick).
-You also had an absence of NFL football in Baltimore from 1983 to 1996, which coincided with the Redskins glory years. The result was Redskins fandom expanding throughout metropolitan, and into southern, and eastern shore Maryland.
-The legacy of this is a cohort of older millennials and young GenX who grew up in the middle with loyalties to both Washington Football and Baltimore Baseball, though this is in decline as the fortunes have gone in very different directions (i.e. Nats good/O's bad, Ravens good/WFT bad). However it was normal growing up for people to be a fan of the Redskins and Orioles while still being more DC or Baltimore oriented. Lots of people are still like this without a regional identity crisis, though probably will think of themselves more as Marylanders than anything else.
-Also worth remembering before the Capitals and Wizards/then Bullets moved to Chinatown in the late 90s is that they played at US Air Arena in Landover Maryland. The Bullets began as the Baltimore Bullets before moving to the DC suburbs and eventually DC. Both have served as attractions to Baltimore area sports fans and their connection to DC used to be much looser than it's become with the downtown arena.
Point being it's not that there's a merging in progress, it's that there's a long complicated history of sports between 2 cities that are only 35 miles apart.
Lastly on the Savage MARC thing, good luck. I wanted it so badly to be a great experience but I tried commuting on MARC for a summer and it was a nightmare.
Thanks for noting all this! I think Matt's take is a Washington Nationals-era, DC growth-era take. I grew up in Alexandria in the 80s, and my friends and I were Orioles fans. At Caps games you'd hear the loud Orioles "Oh!" during the national anthem. By high school and college, DC was the main destination for culture, but we'd go to Baltimore regularly for record store, art, and concert trips, and John Waters was almost as much a hero as Ian MacKaye. I'd flip between WPGC, WKYS, and 92Q (Baltimore) on the radio. Baltimore was not so close to my heart, and DC and Baltimore are absolutely different, distinct cities. But Bmore was a brother city, one that I saw (from across the Potomac, admittedly) as belonging to most of Maryland and thus overlapping with what I'd been taught was my home. (I felt more connected to Baltimore than Loudoun because I had no reason to go there.) I've known a number of folks, past and present, who commuted between Baltimore and DC.... Besides that correction, I like the article and both the transit and development ideas.
Anecdotal observations of team allegiances. I grew up in central Connecticut and despite it being viewed as in New England by outsiders, who for example have assumed I am a Red Sox fan because I am from CT, allegiances are more mixed between New York and Boston teams. There are people who are fans of both the Giants and the Red Sox, or people who are both Patriots and Yankees fans.
The state is more steady than the DC/Baltimore situation so the causes are probably not as complicated as InMD lays out. My guess is mixing has a generational dynamic to it based on the timing of when teams were good. My dad and his brother are from upstate NY and are Giants-Yankees fans. My brother was born in the late 80s and is a Patriots-Yankees fan, possibly because he came of sports fandom age right when their dynasty began in 2001. I was born in the mid 80s and am a Yankees fan with no NFL allegiance. Some of my high school friends are Yankees (or other) and Cowboys fans, which more coincides with the Cowboys run in the early 90s. The Yankees fandom coincides with the their run in the late 90s.
Obviously, in that area there are very few Jets fans.
That is an impressive eye for detail and adds a whole new twist to Matt’s thesis. I googled “Orioles Redskins” out of curiosity and this graphic is so rare, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was literally this guys truck: https://mobile.twitter.com/7shitsimple/status/337608613721952258
While not exactly common that graphic is very much around at least in the Maryland suburbs (less in DC where every other person outside of SE is a transplant). I would say I see one on a vehicle every month or two. Once in awhile I also see it on baseball caps and hoodies. There were many in the parking lot at the last WFT game I attended. Both are terribly run franchises though so the popularity of them generally is on a downward trajectory, as is the cross over appeal. It takes a certain level of masochism to support them both in the face of more successful options. I would know.
D.C.'s density is one-seventh of Manhattan. I believe there would be plenty of demand to build inside D.C. , without building out infrastructure from further out in VA. or MD. if this stupid law gets repealed.
DC definitely should grow upwards, but densifying the region between Baltimore and DC makes a lot of sense, particularly along existing transit. And is likely a lot cheaper and easier than densifying either of the already moderately dense cities.
As someone who grew up outside DC, I can say with certainty that many people did adopt the Orioles as their baseball team before the Nats came along. I used to drive out with my Dad to Camden Yards for a few games a year. I even have friends now who are furious (somewhat sarcastically obviously) that I've become a Nats fan because "we grew up O's fans and you stick with your team man!!!"
I’ve known the Washington/Baltimore/Arlington Combined Statistical Area as “The DMV”. Maybe that’s just a nickname in NBA circles (i.e. Kevin Durant is from The DMV), but I like it.
Matt uses that occasionally on Twitter. It drives me up the wall though since my reaction is to immediately wonder what the Department of Motor Vehicles has to do with whatever he's talking about.
This post falls into the category of making progressive government great again.
It's pretty clear that for the foreseeable future national government will not be the place where progressives can make great strides, mostly because the country is pretty much evenly split between two sides that increasingly loathe each other.
So more and more it's time to decentralize and focus on politics and governance at the local level. How can blue states make governing more effective and answer the needs of their increasingly urban population? This post is a good example of the kind of efforts they (and we) should be focusing on. Sometimes most of the work can be done within a state (especially a big state like California) and sometimes it will require coordination across neighboring blue states (like the DMV). In either case, it seems like there's lots of things these local agglomerations can do on their own.
The problem is that the engaged populations (like us on this Substack!) tend to be geared to and excited by grand national issues. This is a great post, but how many non-local readers will continue to subscribe with increasing numbers of DMV-related posts? (Or would Matt even be interested in such a local focus?)
It's a shame really because progressives' greatest need is to show that government can be effective in addressing real world problems, and that's just not going to happen (much) at the national level, yet that's where we expend all our efforts. But it's fun to argue and debate, I guess.
I brought this up on a previous post, but unfortunately there’s no way to go full conductorless S-Bahn in the US. FRA regs require (or at least, the FRA reads its own regs to require) at least one conductor per passenger train running on an FRA-regulated railroad. Since S-Bahn by definition runs on mainline track, any S-Bahn in the US would be FRA-regulated and therefore need at least one conductor for each train.
This isn’t prohibitive, of course. It just makes it more expensive, but probably doable. However, there is a catch: If the stations on the route have no uniform platform height, the FRA requires more conductors on each train to operate the stairs, possibly as many as one per *car*. (I’ve learned since my last post on this issue that whether the FRA regs require this and if so how many additional conductors are required is apparently a subject of debate, but the FRA is insistent and no regulated entity cares enough to raise an overt/formal challenge.) So as a practical matter, you also need to have all high platforms to have an S-Bahn in the US. This applies to MARC and VRE: MARC has both high and low platforms, while VRE only has low platforms (it uses trains with low floors for ADA compliance). A unified system would need to rectify this before operating as an S-Bahn.
The thing is, expensive or no, bringing all platforms to the same height is something an agency can do itself. If it buys the materials and pays the people, at some point the job will get done. There’s no guarantee that a push to get the FRA to change some regs it’s gotten pretty attached to will actually work, or if it works that it does so in the way you need it to. I’d say it’s worth it to do the physical upgrades just for the certainty.
I mean, both things ought to happen, but the infrastructure one is both the one that will likely happen in the less-distant future and will make the bigger difference to daily life.
Also, not really your purview, but any experience with using the Sheriff's dept. to execute on judgment debt?
Some asshole totaled my car the other month while driving uninsured, just got a judgment against him and will likely need to take the new SUV he was driving. Not sure how the hell to ensure all this sticks and get the value of the car.
No particular experience with executions unfortunately—City mostly farms that out to specialist counsel, though for some big collections we do it ourselves. What I can say is the sheriff does have resources available at their website, but you first need to identify the property you want to attach (most likely the defendant’s bank account, so you'd have to figure out where they bank). I know that in general terms, for Common Pleas judgments, you can send a judgment defendant discovery requests in aid of execution to force them to tell you where their stuff is. But if this is Municipal Court (and I assume it is given the short turnaround time) I have no idea whether those tools are available to you. If it’s worth it, you might want to consult an attorney (probably a short consult if possible to tell you what options you have).
Sounds fun. Incidentally, I wrote my response above in Municipal Court (I arrived early, so they weren't confiscating phones) while waiting for the defendant/petitioner to arrive on a petition to open. Maybe we'll cross paths at some point lol. (Probably not, with a small claims you'd be in Courtroom 2, 3, or 6, while City cases are in Courtroom 4.)
It was, indeed, Municipal Court. So I don’t have the option to force them to aid in discovery. That said, the car he was driving is worth around eight times the value of my claim, and according to public records he’s owned it for three years, so he should have enough equity in it for me to clawback everything right there.
Provisionally, I’m considering hiring an investigator to follow him for two or three days, figure out where the car is likely to be, and send the Sheriff’s Office after it.
They can levy bank accounts, but I don’t know how I would go about finding them without discovery.
It was the household beater, would have cost 30% of pre-2020 value to keep collision on it. I absentmindedly didn’t reconsider that decision in 2021 even though it’s value more than doubled.
Insurer assisted with providing a loss report, rest is on me,
Did you have uninsured motorist coverage? Is it a no fault state? I wonder what happens if the uninsured motorist is at fault, you don't have collision but you have uninsured motorist.
Well, it’s certainly impossible for the local and regional governments around Washington and Baltimore to change FRA regs on their own. Secretary Mayor Pete would have to get involved. It would take a long-ass time and involve paying a lot of lawyers, possibly taking more time and more money than it would to, say, buy some new trains and adjust the heights of some railroad platforms.
Also, annoyingly, the regs aren’t completely pointless; conductors are safety officers and the FRA is extremely cautious about train safety for reasons both good and silly. Moreover the uniformity of platforms thing is actually important on its own. When you have mixed-height platforms on a line and need to use deployable stairs to deal with it, you have a tradeoff between having more stairs and needing more conductors to operate them but increasing the number of passengers who can get on and off at one time, and having fewer such stairs but slowing down alighting/boarding. Basically, when you have mixed-height platforms, you generally have a tradeoff between labor costs and dwell time, which isn’t great for S-Bahn. The regs, as interpreted, require agencies to eat the labor costs to reduce dwell time, but it’s not clear that the reverse would be any better. While there are other solutions, they are either expensive in themselves (automatic stairs) or don’t work in the US (e.g. the European solution of having permanently fixed ladders/stairs on the outside of the train, which to my understanding isn’t practical in the US because the gap between low and high platforms in the US is significantly bigger than the gap in Europe).
Seems to be a recurring theme: regulations that are mostly, but not completely, pointless!
Thanks for this very interesting, if depressing, info. I'm a planner but not well-versed in FRA regs (or regional planning generally, my program was crap in this regard).
I’m not a planner either lol, I only know this is an issue because a good friend of mine is both a massive railfan and transit nerd and works for a transit-safety/compliance consulting firm. (He only works with FTA-regulated entities but has to be familiar with FRA regs to explain/understand differences between FTA and FRA regs. Also they might reference each other, not sure.) I find this stuff interesting enough to let him talk about it when we meet for beers.
Also want to add: when I was training new planners at my previous agency, I exhorted people to talk about issues as they would over drinks with non-planner friends, rather than the usual jargon (ugh "in close proximity to..."), which I think normal people find extremely off-putting. Sounds like your railfan friend is a great teacher!
It's interesting how many "non-planners," such as you and MY, have such excellent insights into planning. The degree is a rather silly and unnecessary credential IMO. I got mine as a midcareer student in 2015; I felt I was qualified to work as a planner prior to that, based on other experience, but I couldn't get any traction in the job market. Fortunately I was able to get my degree in a relatively affordable manner through CUNY. I did pick up some useful skills such as GIS, but I could have easily learned them on the job without spending the $$$.
Yeah, it's true that in Europe, platforms of mixed heights, and often steps up to the train, are allowed to exist without conductors being necessarily needed to assist passengers.
In Britain, platforms are "high-ish" (about one step up), which is obviously no good if you're in a wheelchair, but overwise people are considered able to manage it fine without a conductors needing to be present.
But TBF, on the Northeast Corridor they do some weird things, including stopping trains on the "inner" tracks at some stations, and having passengers climb down stairs and walk *across* another track to get to a little low part at the end of the platform.
That definitely seems like a situation where you'd want conductors to supervise passengers.
To say nothing of the fact that even where they don't do this wonky inner-track stuff, the platform barely deserves the title. (Thinking of Jenkintown on SEPTA in particular, which is especially unforgivable because it's a major station, but I've also gotten on/off at Torresdale, Manayunk, Spring Mill, and Norristown and had the same issue--at all these stations, the "platform" barely rises above the tops of the rails.)
With that said, a good thing about the North-eastern United States is that a true high level platform standard exists - the 48 inch standard used by many commuter systems and Amtrak in the Northeast.
Whereas Europe has no available high level platform standard. Some S-bahn type systems do use high-level platforms, but they're not the same height as those used by intercity trains.
Great article but I'm surprised you didn't connect it to a discussion of DC statehood. It seems to me the observations and recommendations here would argue strongly for a "retrocession" of most of DC outside the Capitol Hill / mall area into Maryland to reduce the number of jurisdictions interfering with the further integration of the two cities. I believe in the past you have preferred outright statehood for DC (obviously there are benefits in the Senate to that path) but isn't this a pretty good case for a merger?
D.C. native here, born and raised. Retrocession > statehood on every metric except screwing over Senate Republicans and feeling superior to the suburbs, but it's clear what Washingtonians prioritize.
As someone who lives in Oklahoma City, I feel like I need a trigger warning for when you’re going to write about anything having to do with “S-Bahn.” Perpetually a decade behind the latest fads, we just built a brand new electric streetcar system. :(
I would be very interested to hear an in-depth take from Matt about what OKC (or San Antonio or some other city like that) ought to do on transit and urbanist policy. These DC articles are interesting, but Slow Boring is a national (international?) publication, not a local one.
I know this idea is out of favor for national political reasons, but it seems like DC retrocession to Maryland would resolve a lot of the roadblocks you’ve identified to this plan. Then not only would you be much more likely to have an ambitious progressive governor, but also fewer jurisdictional conflicts over development goals and resources.
Oh, regarding through-running MARC and VRE trains for greater access across the greater region: the Maryland legislature passed a bill (overcoming Hogan's veto) requiring the Maryland Transit Agency to negotiate with Virginia about actually doing through-running.
As a fun aside, the bill also requires them to negotiate with Delaware about extending MARC service further North.
First off, whoever decided to use “μSA” as the acronym for Micropolitan Statistical Area was clearly really proud of themselves for that one.
Second, as a Texan who was born in the DFW metroplex, when I moved to the DMV I was floored by how close Baltimore was. It seemed obvious to me that DC and Baltimore would be considered twin cities had they come into existence a century later than they actually did.
μSA! μSA!
Everything about the Northeast is like that for me. My wife's family is from Baltimore, her brother lives in Philadelphia, and she has lots of family in New York. The distance between each of those places is smaller than going from my hometown of La Quinta, CA (inland southern California) to Los Angeles. I'm now wondering how many northeastern states could fit inside Oregon.
Oregon is about 98K sq. mi., you can comfortably fit in the 6 New England states plus MD, NJ, and DE.
I grew up in Howard County, about 20 minutes from Baltimore and 40 from DC. And at least in my town (Ellicott City) we absolutely talked about "the Baltimore-Washington area". People commuted in both directions. And there were some discussions around how in the future, we'd be at the center of Atlantea, the continuous urban area running from Miami up to Bangor. Though some of the people discussing that were NIMBYs who objected to the idea.
I am from EC too! This post was fun for me, with HoCo getting a shoutout. Unfortunately I think the majority of HoCO residents are quite NIMBY and thinking about becoming anything like a mini-city would scare them. That said, Columbia is currently improving itself and has begun looking more like a 15-minute city. There's even a pie in the sky proposal to extend the metro green line from greenbelt to Columbia. If that could be combined with better rail (or even bus) connections from Columbia/HoCo to Baltimore, I think HoCO being the center of the Baltimore-Washington area could really work (though zoning in the county would have to be radically changed).
Also from DFW, I was totally floored at the way people get upset when you lump the city and suburbs together in the Northeast+Chicago. Of course Arlington is "DC" and Evanston "Chicago"!
I was just thinking that Matt's description of this Savage stop sounds like it should become the Arlington, TX of the region. Dallas and Fort Worth sprawl enough that they combined into one metro area a while ago, and Baltimore/Washington is really just more of that same thing, but a bit more compact, so they haven't yet psychologically merged. (They already have the combined airport, though I guess it's still not the biggest airport in the region.)
Baltimore/Washington handles more passengers than either Dulles or Reagan.
Oh, interesting! I had assumed Dulles was bigger because it's a hub for a major international airline, but I guess I should stop underestimating Southwest.
Anecdotally, everyone I know in the dc area avoids BWI like the plague if possible
The rankings are DCA > BWI > IAD. Dulles is least convenient and all around worst on basically every level: travel by car, taxi, train.
Dulles seems huge because of its awesome architecture and its mobile lounges. It feels big.
Yeah, as someone who has spent his whole life living in the giant west coast CSAs, I had the same experience when I went to Baltimore for a conference. It just seems obvious to us that these would be part of the same basic metro area.
“In D.C. we have a popular football team.”
Citation needed.
DC local here, want to chime in with a personal anecdote. At one point, my job was requiring me to drive from Columbia Heights to Centreville, VA. I hated the commute so I applied for a job in Baltimore. As the interviews progressed and the option of taking the job became more serious, I Googled the actual commute and noticed the Baltimore job was exactly 0.1 miles further away from my apartment. So I took it.
Commuting from DC to Baltimore on MARC every day was...kinda a nightmare. It was better than driving to Centreville, but only because I subjectively hate driving. But the infrastructure improvements necessary to integrate the two cities more seamlessly are real challenges.
Lastly, I think the political lines matter here. Baltimore, and the Maryland/Virginia border, have been around longer than the United States has. They're mattering less now than they did when I was growing up, and the trend is good, but they're still important. It's extremely interesting to me how little Maryland looks to Virginia (and vice versa) in e.g. regulatory matters.
This is just anecdotal, but I am currently a student at UMD College park, which is solidly in the DC area having its own metro stop and all. The school is obviously mostly students from Maryland, but I would say the largest group of out of state students are from New Jersey and Virgina. New Jersey seems to mostly because of a subjective view of bad public universities in NJ. Virginia on the other hand is almost all people from northern Virginia DC area type places. I would say that culturally these young DC area Marylanders and Virginians(?) have a large amount of cultural solidarity which disregards the state border. I like the example of sports teams that Matt brings up. Virginians are DC fans because Virginia doesn't have its own major sports teams. Marylanders on the hand chose from the Baltimore and Washington teams. I know a huge amount of Ravens/Wizards fans because the Ravens are better than the Football Team and Baltimore has no NBA team. I am also one of many Orioles+Nationals fans because both cities have MLB teams with some recent success (the nats much more than the O's). That said, people from DC and Baltimore proper, in my experience have a much harder time of thinking of the cities as sisters. Marylanders though? I think we're all on board.
I started listening to Mike Duncan's French Revolution podcast during the December podcast lull, and, rightly or wrongly, keep drawing parallels with the current US, one of which is the absolute chaos of our administrative map. Municipal lines are gerrymandered just as badly as Congressional districts (only for different ends; see, e.g., Los Angeles County), Boston suburbs have zero incentive to work together and so just spend their time screwing each other on housing and transit, and the only elected government D.C., Arlington, and Baltimore have in common is the feds.
Bourbon France's was an order of magnitude worse than ours is, but administrative reform is just another way in which our peer countries are leaving us in the dust. But god forbid we redraw the sacred lines set down by the founders.
Complain to high heaven how unfair the Senate is because it underrepresents States like California, with its divinely ordained borders and peerless, excellent State government. But divide California into smaller States so its residents have more equal representation in the federal government? Apostasy!!
“I’m not an outdoorsy person by nature.”
Pun intended? If so, well done.
"Outdoorsy by Nature" sounds like a parody hip-hop group based in Bend, Oregon.
True. I'm in Bend and I think it could also be the name of a doggy daycare here.
Cool. Glad I went with Bend over my second choice! (Boulder CO)
Sad that NIMBY's allowed SF to have lower population than JV San Jose
San Francisco is 48 sq mi and San Jose is 178 sq mi. It's really amazing that, despite the NIMBYs, San Francisco has almost as many people as San Jose!
Interestingly, the core 48 sq mi of Los Angeles (basically between I-10 and the Hollywood Hills, from La Cienega to the LA River) is nearly as dense and basically as transit-using as the core 48 sq mi of San Francisco: https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/03/03/l-a-vs-s-f-how-does-transportation-really-compare/ (unfortunately, the map they had of the region is now a broken link).
As of 2010 more people in LA appear to have lived in medium-ish densities than SF fwiw: https://seattletransitblog.com/2013/02/01/land-footprint-seattle-is-not-dense/#jp-carousel-42996
I’m in no way defending SF NIMBYs. But SF does have natural, geographic constraints on its growth in almost every direction, unlike San Jose. Of course SF could be more dense — but if I recall it is already one of the densest (the densest?) US cities.
On another note SF Chron just did a piece that showed San Jose having zip codes with highest number of foreign-born residents in the whole Bay Area. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/bay-area-country-of-birth-map
Interesting data on this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
SF is 21st, but the only city of any size that's denser is NYC
But the amazing thing about NYC is that NYC is fully 1.5x denser and that's over all 5 boroughs (including Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens) which (I'm pretty sure) includes far more industrial space / park space / graveyard space than SF.
Also to put this in perspective the city of Paris (pop 2.2 million) is twice as dense as NYC (3x as dense as SF):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris
And Tokyo (the 4th most liveable city in the world, where the other 3 are tiny) has many special wards that are 2x to 3x as dense as SF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_wards_of_Tokyo
I'm too lazy to do research myself, but I'd imagine Manhattan by itself is more on the scale of Paris and Tokyo. It is "dragged down" by the other boroughs.
Paris is about the same density as Manhattan, but achieves it without the height. The trick is to be six-storey everywhere, to have lots of narrow streets (yes, there are wide boulevards, but not that many, and the streets in between are much narrower) and to push all the parks just outside the official boundary (the Bois de Boulogne is two and a half times the size of Central Park and is only one of several such parks).
There is a skyscraper district in La Défense, just outside the city boundaries - demonstrating that the USA isn't the only place that has weird results from municipal boundaries.
Is one of the densest US cities, because only a few east cost cities have much in terms of real density. On a global scale, SF is not dense.
I grew up in the suburbs between DC and Baltimore and still live in the area. While I don't hate the idea of more interconnected travel I think you're greatly misinterpreting some things on that truck.
-First, note that the Oriole bird also has the Redskins feather on his hat. While the Nationals' fans have a long history of denying this there was in fact a major Orioles following in DC/the DC area for a very long time after the Senators left. The O's were front page news on the WaPo sports page, you could get tickets to Camden Yards in DC, and the stadium itself was built to be accessible to the DC market. There were plenty of Cal Ripken fans everywhere and O's farm teams in the DC area (Bowie, and you could arguably count Frederick).
-You also had an absence of NFL football in Baltimore from 1983 to 1996, which coincided with the Redskins glory years. The result was Redskins fandom expanding throughout metropolitan, and into southern, and eastern shore Maryland.
-The legacy of this is a cohort of older millennials and young GenX who grew up in the middle with loyalties to both Washington Football and Baltimore Baseball, though this is in decline as the fortunes have gone in very different directions (i.e. Nats good/O's bad, Ravens good/WFT bad). However it was normal growing up for people to be a fan of the Redskins and Orioles while still being more DC or Baltimore oriented. Lots of people are still like this without a regional identity crisis, though probably will think of themselves more as Marylanders than anything else.
-Also worth remembering before the Capitals and Wizards/then Bullets moved to Chinatown in the late 90s is that they played at US Air Arena in Landover Maryland. The Bullets began as the Baltimore Bullets before moving to the DC suburbs and eventually DC. Both have served as attractions to Baltimore area sports fans and their connection to DC used to be much looser than it's become with the downtown arena.
Point being it's not that there's a merging in progress, it's that there's a long complicated history of sports between 2 cities that are only 35 miles apart.
Lastly on the Savage MARC thing, good luck. I wanted it so badly to be a great experience but I tried commuting on MARC for a summer and it was a nightmare.
Thanks for noting all this! I think Matt's take is a Washington Nationals-era, DC growth-era take. I grew up in Alexandria in the 80s, and my friends and I were Orioles fans. At Caps games you'd hear the loud Orioles "Oh!" during the national anthem. By high school and college, DC was the main destination for culture, but we'd go to Baltimore regularly for record store, art, and concert trips, and John Waters was almost as much a hero as Ian MacKaye. I'd flip between WPGC, WKYS, and 92Q (Baltimore) on the radio. Baltimore was not so close to my heart, and DC and Baltimore are absolutely different, distinct cities. But Bmore was a brother city, one that I saw (from across the Potomac, admittedly) as belonging to most of Maryland and thus overlapping with what I'd been taught was my home. (I felt more connected to Baltimore than Loudoun because I had no reason to go there.) I've known a number of folks, past and present, who commuted between Baltimore and DC.... Besides that correction, I like the article and both the transit and development ideas.
No HFS? That..started in Bethesda and moved to Annapolis at some point, I think? I think it was in Annapolis when I listened to it.
Anecdotal observations of team allegiances. I grew up in central Connecticut and despite it being viewed as in New England by outsiders, who for example have assumed I am a Red Sox fan because I am from CT, allegiances are more mixed between New York and Boston teams. There are people who are fans of both the Giants and the Red Sox, or people who are both Patriots and Yankees fans.
The state is more steady than the DC/Baltimore situation so the causes are probably not as complicated as InMD lays out. My guess is mixing has a generational dynamic to it based on the timing of when teams were good. My dad and his brother are from upstate NY and are Giants-Yankees fans. My brother was born in the late 80s and is a Patriots-Yankees fan, possibly because he came of sports fandom age right when their dynasty began in 2001. I was born in the mid 80s and am a Yankees fan with no NFL allegiance. Some of my high school friends are Yankees (or other) and Cowboys fans, which more coincides with the Cowboys run in the early 90s. The Yankees fandom coincides with the their run in the late 90s.
Obviously, in that area there are very few Jets fans.
That is an impressive eye for detail and adds a whole new twist to Matt’s thesis. I googled “Orioles Redskins” out of curiosity and this graphic is so rare, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was literally this guys truck: https://mobile.twitter.com/7shitsimple/status/337608613721952258
While not exactly common that graphic is very much around at least in the Maryland suburbs (less in DC where every other person outside of SE is a transplant). I would say I see one on a vehicle every month or two. Once in awhile I also see it on baseball caps and hoodies. There were many in the parking lot at the last WFT game I attended. Both are terribly run franchises though so the popularity of them generally is on a downward trajectory, as is the cross over appeal. It takes a certain level of masochism to support them both in the face of more successful options. I would know.
D.C.'s density is one-seventh of Manhattan. I believe there would be plenty of demand to build inside D.C. , without building out infrastructure from further out in VA. or MD. if this stupid law gets repealed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_of_Buildings_Act_of_1910#Proposed_policy_changes
DC definitely should grow upwards, but densifying the region between Baltimore and DC makes a lot of sense, particularly along existing transit. And is likely a lot cheaper and easier than densifying either of the already moderately dense cities.
As someone who grew up outside DC, I can say with certainty that many people did adopt the Orioles as their baseball team before the Nats came along. I used to drive out with my Dad to Camden Yards for a few games a year. I even have friends now who are furious (somewhat sarcastically obviously) that I've become a Nats fan because "we grew up O's fans and you stick with your team man!!!"
I’ve known the Washington/Baltimore/Arlington Combined Statistical Area as “The DMV”. Maybe that’s just a nickname in NBA circles (i.e. Kevin Durant is from The DMV), but I like it.
Matt uses that occasionally on Twitter. It drives me up the wall though since my reaction is to immediately wonder what the Department of Motor Vehicles has to do with whatever he's talking about.
In Maryland we have the Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA). Fun stuff
I thought people used that for the area centered on DC, rather than the combined area?
I don’t think so since it stands for Delaware Maryland Virginia.
Oh, I thought it was District Maryland Virginia!
Its definitely D for the District.
good enough for me!
Delmarva sounds a lot better than DMV.
Nobody I know uses this to refer to Delaware. I’ve heard DelMarVa to include Delaware though
Delmarva refers to the peninsula containing Delaware and the "eastern shores" of Maryland and Virginia.
Ahh appreciate the correction
This post falls into the category of making progressive government great again.
It's pretty clear that for the foreseeable future national government will not be the place where progressives can make great strides, mostly because the country is pretty much evenly split between two sides that increasingly loathe each other.
So more and more it's time to decentralize and focus on politics and governance at the local level. How can blue states make governing more effective and answer the needs of their increasingly urban population? This post is a good example of the kind of efforts they (and we) should be focusing on. Sometimes most of the work can be done within a state (especially a big state like California) and sometimes it will require coordination across neighboring blue states (like the DMV). In either case, it seems like there's lots of things these local agglomerations can do on their own.
The problem is that the engaged populations (like us on this Substack!) tend to be geared to and excited by grand national issues. This is a great post, but how many non-local readers will continue to subscribe with increasing numbers of DMV-related posts? (Or would Matt even be interested in such a local focus?)
It's a shame really because progressives' greatest need is to show that government can be effective in addressing real world problems, and that's just not going to happen (much) at the national level, yet that's where we expend all our efforts. But it's fun to argue and debate, I guess.
I brought this up on a previous post, but unfortunately there’s no way to go full conductorless S-Bahn in the US. FRA regs require (or at least, the FRA reads its own regs to require) at least one conductor per passenger train running on an FRA-regulated railroad. Since S-Bahn by definition runs on mainline track, any S-Bahn in the US would be FRA-regulated and therefore need at least one conductor for each train.
This isn’t prohibitive, of course. It just makes it more expensive, but probably doable. However, there is a catch: If the stations on the route have no uniform platform height, the FRA requires more conductors on each train to operate the stairs, possibly as many as one per *car*. (I’ve learned since my last post on this issue that whether the FRA regs require this and if so how many additional conductors are required is apparently a subject of debate, but the FRA is insistent and no regulated entity cares enough to raise an overt/formal challenge.) So as a practical matter, you also need to have all high platforms to have an S-Bahn in the US. This applies to MARC and VRE: MARC has both high and low platforms, while VRE only has low platforms (it uses trains with low floors for ADA compliance). A unified system would need to rectify this before operating as an S-Bahn.
It’s an open question whether it would be more expensive to reform the regulations or build platforms.
God knows SEPTA’s station platform construction costs 9x what it should, but then we have lawyers to deal with through the other route.
The thing is, expensive or no, bringing all platforms to the same height is something an agency can do itself. If it buys the materials and pays the people, at some point the job will get done. There’s no guarantee that a push to get the FRA to change some regs it’s gotten pretty attached to will actually work, or if it works that it does so in the way you need it to. I’d say it’s worth it to do the physical upgrades just for the certainty.
Agreed, the infrastructure solution is the correct one.
It's just a shame that SEPTA doesn't even have the in-house expertise to drive down construction costs on exceedingly simple projects.
I mean, both things ought to happen, but the infrastructure one is both the one that will likely happen in the less-distant future and will make the bigger difference to daily life.
Hottake: outlaw engineering consulting and force everyone in-house at DOTs.
I agree. Make the faculty and grad students in the Civil Engineering departments at Penn and Temple etc consult on it for peanuts
Also, not really your purview, but any experience with using the Sheriff's dept. to execute on judgment debt?
Some asshole totaled my car the other month while driving uninsured, just got a judgment against him and will likely need to take the new SUV he was driving. Not sure how the hell to ensure all this sticks and get the value of the car.
No particular experience with executions unfortunately—City mostly farms that out to specialist counsel, though for some big collections we do it ourselves. What I can say is the sheriff does have resources available at their website, but you first need to identify the property you want to attach (most likely the defendant’s bank account, so you'd have to figure out where they bank). I know that in general terms, for Common Pleas judgments, you can send a judgment defendant discovery requests in aid of execution to force them to tell you where their stuff is. But if this is Municipal Court (and I assume it is given the short turnaround time) I have no idea whether those tools are available to you. If it’s worth it, you might want to consult an attorney (probably a short consult if possible to tell you what options you have).
Lol. No sooner had I sent that last message than I received a notification that he had filed a motion to open judgment.
On the ground that the car isn’t worth as much as the insurance provided loss report states, no less.
I guess I’ll just have to add documentation regarding dealer documentation fees and transfer taxes when he drags me back into the court room.
Sounds fun. Incidentally, I wrote my response above in Municipal Court (I arrived early, so they weren't confiscating phones) while waiting for the defendant/petitioner to arrive on a petition to open. Maybe we'll cross paths at some point lol. (Probably not, with a small claims you'd be in Courtroom 2, 3, or 6, while City cases are in Courtroom 4.)
It was, indeed, Municipal Court. So I don’t have the option to force them to aid in discovery. That said, the car he was driving is worth around eight times the value of my claim, and according to public records he’s owned it for three years, so he should have enough equity in it for me to clawback everything right there.
Provisionally, I’m considering hiring an investigator to follow him for two or three days, figure out where the car is likely to be, and send the Sheriff’s Office after it.
They can levy bank accounts, but I don’t know how I would go about finding them without discovery.
I would have thought your insurance company does all that.
It was the household beater, would have cost 30% of pre-2020 value to keep collision on it. I absentmindedly didn’t reconsider that decision in 2021 even though it’s value more than doubled.
Insurer assisted with providing a loss report, rest is on me,
Did you have uninsured motorist coverage? Is it a no fault state? I wonder what happens if the uninsured motorist is at fault, you don't have collision but you have uninsured motorist.
too bad it's physically impossible to update regs
Well, it’s certainly impossible for the local and regional governments around Washington and Baltimore to change FRA regs on their own. Secretary Mayor Pete would have to get involved. It would take a long-ass time and involve paying a lot of lawyers, possibly taking more time and more money than it would to, say, buy some new trains and adjust the heights of some railroad platforms.
Also, annoyingly, the regs aren’t completely pointless; conductors are safety officers and the FRA is extremely cautious about train safety for reasons both good and silly. Moreover the uniformity of platforms thing is actually important on its own. When you have mixed-height platforms on a line and need to use deployable stairs to deal with it, you have a tradeoff between having more stairs and needing more conductors to operate them but increasing the number of passengers who can get on and off at one time, and having fewer such stairs but slowing down alighting/boarding. Basically, when you have mixed-height platforms, you generally have a tradeoff between labor costs and dwell time, which isn’t great for S-Bahn. The regs, as interpreted, require agencies to eat the labor costs to reduce dwell time, but it’s not clear that the reverse would be any better. While there are other solutions, they are either expensive in themselves (automatic stairs) or don’t work in the US (e.g. the European solution of having permanently fixed ladders/stairs on the outside of the train, which to my understanding isn’t practical in the US because the gap between low and high platforms in the US is significantly bigger than the gap in Europe).
Seems to be a recurring theme: regulations that are mostly, but not completely, pointless!
Thanks for this very interesting, if depressing, info. I'm a planner but not well-versed in FRA regs (or regional planning generally, my program was crap in this regard).
I’m not a planner either lol, I only know this is an issue because a good friend of mine is both a massive railfan and transit nerd and works for a transit-safety/compliance consulting firm. (He only works with FTA-regulated entities but has to be familiar with FRA regs to explain/understand differences between FTA and FRA regs. Also they might reference each other, not sure.) I find this stuff interesting enough to let him talk about it when we meet for beers.
Also want to add: when I was training new planners at my previous agency, I exhorted people to talk about issues as they would over drinks with non-planner friends, rather than the usual jargon (ugh "in close proximity to..."), which I think normal people find extremely off-putting. Sounds like your railfan friend is a great teacher!
It's interesting how many "non-planners," such as you and MY, have such excellent insights into planning. The degree is a rather silly and unnecessary credential IMO. I got mine as a midcareer student in 2015; I felt I was qualified to work as a planner prior to that, based on other experience, but I couldn't get any traction in the job market. Fortunately I was able to get my degree in a relatively affordable manner through CUNY. I did pick up some useful skills such as GIS, but I could have easily learned them on the job without spending the $$$.
Yeah, it's true that in Europe, platforms of mixed heights, and often steps up to the train, are allowed to exist without conductors being necessarily needed to assist passengers.
In Britain, platforms are "high-ish" (about one step up), which is obviously no good if you're in a wheelchair, but overwise people are considered able to manage it fine without a conductors needing to be present.
But TBF, on the Northeast Corridor they do some weird things, including stopping trains on the "inner" tracks at some stations, and having passengers climb down stairs and walk *across* another track to get to a little low part at the end of the platform.
That definitely seems like a situation where you'd want conductors to supervise passengers.
To say nothing of the fact that even where they don't do this wonky inner-track stuff, the platform barely deserves the title. (Thinking of Jenkintown on SEPTA in particular, which is especially unforgivable because it's a major station, but I've also gotten on/off at Torresdale, Manayunk, Spring Mill, and Norristown and had the same issue--at all these stations, the "platform" barely rises above the tops of the rails.)
With that said, a good thing about the North-eastern United States is that a true high level platform standard exists - the 48 inch standard used by many commuter systems and Amtrak in the Northeast.
Whereas Europe has no available high level platform standard. Some S-bahn type systems do use high-level platforms, but they're not the same height as those used by intercity trains.
Great article but I'm surprised you didn't connect it to a discussion of DC statehood. It seems to me the observations and recommendations here would argue strongly for a "retrocession" of most of DC outside the Capitol Hill / mall area into Maryland to reduce the number of jurisdictions interfering with the further integration of the two cities. I believe in the past you have preferred outright statehood for DC (obviously there are benefits in the Senate to that path) but isn't this a pretty good case for a merger?
D.C. native here, born and raised. Retrocession > statehood on every metric except screwing over Senate Republicans and feeling superior to the suburbs, but it's clear what Washingtonians prioritize.
As someone who lives in Oklahoma City, I feel like I need a trigger warning for when you’re going to write about anything having to do with “S-Bahn.” Perpetually a decade behind the latest fads, we just built a brand new electric streetcar system. :(
I would be very interested to hear an in-depth take from Matt about what OKC (or San Antonio or some other city like that) ought to do on transit and urbanist policy. These DC articles are interesting, but Slow Boring is a national (international?) publication, not a local one.
Indy BRT
I know this idea is out of favor for national political reasons, but it seems like DC retrocession to Maryland would resolve a lot of the roadblocks you’ve identified to this plan. Then not only would you be much more likely to have an ambitious progressive governor, but also fewer jurisdictional conflicts over development goals and resources.
Oh, regarding through-running MARC and VRE trains for greater access across the greater region: the Maryland legislature passed a bill (overcoming Hogan's veto) requiring the Maryland Transit Agency to negotiate with Virginia about actually doing through-running.
As a fun aside, the bill also requires them to negotiate with Delaware about extending MARC service further North.
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/HB1236?ys=2020rs