Greater Greater Washington

Since mid-2016, I have written over sixty articles for Greater Greater Washington, a non-profit publication and advocacy organization that works on land use, housing, and transportation policy in the Washington, DC region. These articles have covered a wide variety of topics, including proposals for improved public transportation in the region, the history of public transportation in the region and of the region more broadly, and local and regional demographics. While a full list of my articles can be found on my Greater Greater Washington author page, it includes some duplicates because many of my articles have been republished. Here, I provide a full list of my publications with Greater Greater Washington, organized by topic and with brief descriptions of their content.

Contents



Improving Prince George’s County’s “TheBus”

In April and May 2018, Tracy Hadden Loh and I wrote a seven-article series for Greater Greater Washington discussing Prince George’s County’s “TheBus” transit network, its many problems, and improvements that we hoped would be included in the county’s then-under-development proposal to improve bus service.

I later followed up on the series with a pair of posts. First, in June 2018, I summarized the results of the County’s “Transit Vision Plan” and compared them to our proposals. Then, in November 2019, I wrote a short note discussing progress on the implementation of the Transit Vision Plan.



WMATA Metrobus “Transformation” Proposals

In September and October 2018, David Alpert and I wrote a six-article series for Greater Greater Washington, discussing WMATA’s “Bus Transformation Project” study, which had just been announced, and our proposals for how bus service in the DC region could be improved. Our proposals focused on simplifying fares and passes, improving the quality of service, and integrating the region’s bus systems and simplifying its bus route numbering:



Metrorail Cuts and Ridership Issues, 2017–2018

These articles were republished from a series I wrote for the D.C. Policy Center on WMATA‘s Metrorail service cuts and fare increases. In the full series, I compared Metrorail’s fares and service to those on other US rapid transit systems, as well as DC commuter rail fares to fares on other US commuter rail systems. I also reported on the fact that Metrorail’s budget and service crisis had led to its losing its position as the second-highest-ridership rapid transit system in the US.



Suburb-to-Suburb Transit in the DC Region

These articles were republished from a series I wrote for the D.C. Policy Center making extensive proposals for circumferential transit in the DC area, including Purple Line extensions to Tysons Corner and Largo and a number of bus rapid transit lines. My analyses included estimates of construction cost for the Purple Line extensions and maps of activity density along the proposed routes, and I discussed both projects currently in the planning phase—largely bus rapid transit lines in Northern Virginia—and projects that I think deserve more serious consideration than they have so far.

This article series caught the interest of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Board, and I was invited to give a ten-minute presentation to the board on the Washington, DC region’s need for circumferential transit. The slides from my presentation are available online here.



Transit in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

In September 2023, I published an analysis of how the Washington, DC region should plan to keep public transit relevant in the wake of the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis was partially based on a Brookings Institution report I authored with Tracy Haden Loh.

In 2022, Washington Metrorail weekend ridership was well above 50% of its 2019 value, while weekday peak ridership was roughly a quarter of its 2019 value. Figure from Brookings Metro.



Streetcars and Buses in Washington, DC

In 2016 and 2017, I wrote a series of three articles on the history of some of the DC region’s suburban streetcar lines. Two of these articles focused on lines that once served the northwestern portion of Prince George’s County: the Washington, Berwyn, and Laurel (later known as the “Maryland Line”) and the Washington, Spa Spring & Gretta. The third article in the series discussed a short-lived effort to use “Evans Auto-Railers”—dual-mode vehicles that could use steel wheels to run on streetcar tracks and rubber tires to operate on city streets—to save the Arlington and Fairfax Railway’s service connecting the Fairfax City and the Roslyn-Ballston corridor to downtown DC. In addition to these articles, in September 2018 I wrote a companion piece to my and David Alpert’s series on improving Metrobus discussing the history of DC’s rather arcane bus route numbers in a 1936 effort to rationalize the District’s recently-unified streetcar network.

The route of the Washington, Spa Spring, and Gretta streetcar in Maryland.



Baltimore’s Guildford Avenue El

My only two articles so far on the history of public transportation outside the DC region are about early elevated urban rail, and particularly Baltimore’s nearly-forgotten Guilford Avenue El. The Guilford Avenue El was an eight-block elevated trestle carrying a streetcar line above Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore, and included several stations, making it a true, if quite short, “el” (elevated railway).

1913 map of the Baltimore streetcar network from the McGraw Electric Railway Manual, with the Guilford Avenue Elevated traced in red.

In a pair of articles for Greater Greater Washington in July and August 2018, I discussed the history of the Guilford Avenue El, as well as four other obscure early elevated lines, in Sioux City, Hoboken, Kansas City, and Louisville. While the Guilford Avenue El was the first elevated line built for electrified trolley cars, three of these other early elevated lines—originally built for steam trains or cable cars—were electrified earlier.

A number of books on the history of transit in Baltimore and the US in general were essential sources in writing these articles:

  • Who Made All Our Streetcars Go?, by Michael R. Farrell is a detailed history of Baltimore’s streetcars, and seems to be the best source on the Guilford Avenue el. It was later republished as The History of Baltimore’s Streetcars, and may be easier to find under that title.
  • Small Town Baltimore: An Album of Memories, by Gilbert Sandler has a short discussion of the Guilford Avenue el, although it gives a different list of stations (Madison, Monument, and Centre, but not Pleasant) than I found from aerial photos and maps.
  • The Cable Car in America, Revised Edition, by George W. Hilton discusses the Kansas City and Hoboken systems, both of which originated as cable cars, in some detail.
  • Cash, Tokens, and Transfers: A History of Urban Mass Transit in North America, by Brian Cudahy discusses the “prairie els” in Kansas City and Sioux City as a side note in a chapter on the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Chicago els.



History of Commuter Rail in Washington DC

Between August and September 2018, I wrote a series of four articles for Greater Greater Washington on the history of commuter rail in DC’s Maryland suburbs. While DC was never a railroad hub like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago—in part because it was not a major industrial city and so did not generate much freight traffic—it was served by both the Baltimore & Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroads, both of which provided commuter service that has been continued by Maryland’s MARC commuter rail service.

In addition, the Washington, Baltimore, & Annapolis interurban line provided commuter service to Baltimore and Annapolis in the early 20th century, and passenger service was provided in southern Prince George’s County by the narrow-gauge Chesapeake Beach Railway. I created maps showing the locations of stations on both the still-existing and long-abandoned passenger railroads in the Maryland suburbs of DC and examined schedules from the Official Guide of the Railways to compare historic service patterns to the service available today.



Proposals for Rapid Transit in Washington, DC

Although planning for the Washington Metro did not begin until 1955 and the first stations did not open until 1976, proposals for a subway in the nation’s capital began during the rapid growth in the Federal government due to the New Deal and World War II.

In April and May 2019, I wrote a series of three articles discussing early proposals for subways in DC. First, I reported on the history a commuter rail subway that Waldo Schmitt (the Smithsonian’s curator of marine invertebrates) spent much of his life promoting. Schmitt’s subway would have connected Union Station to the B&O Railroad Georgetown Branch (now the Capital Cresecent Trail and part of the Purple Line right-of-way).

The next two articles in the series discussed more serious efforts by Congress and the DC government to build streetcar subways to reduce congestion in downtown DC during World War II. If the largest of these proposals had been built, it would have been twice the length of any other streetcar system in the US at the time. However, cost-cutting and a shift toward planning for automobiles led to the abandonment of these proposals. Instead, only a few minor streetcar grade separations were constructed, most notably an underpass with underground stations at Dupont Circle.

A map of the Federal government’s 1959 Mass Transportation Survey proposal for a two-line rapid transit system in Washington, DC.

In February 2020, I continued the series with a longer article on post-War proposals for regional rapid transit in DC: “The regional transit proposals that predated Metro, from express buses to monorails” (cross-posted at D.C. Policy Center). As part of this series, I created maps showing both Federally-sponsored proposals—the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey and the 1962 and 1965 National Capital Transportation Agency plans—and 1959 and 1963-1963 monorail alternatives proposed by streetcar magnate O. Roy Chalk superimposed over 1970 population density maps.



Washington Metrorail’s Elevators

In October 2023, I wrote a pair of articles on the history of the Washington Metrorail’s elevators. Metrorail was the second subway system in the US (after BART) to include elevators and step-free access in all stations. However, getting there wasn’t easy, especially as Jackson Graham, the transit agency’s first general manager, was strongly opposed to their inclusion. The first article in the series details how elevators came to be included despite his resistance, while the second article discusses the limitations of the system’s elevators, especially at transfer stations.

The elevators at Judiciary Square, uniquely in the DC Metrorail system, bypass the mezzanine and take passengers directly to faregates on the platform.

When I wrote this series, I believed that the film footage of Jackson Graham’s notorious press conference at which he rode the escalators at Dulles International Airport in a wheelchair (despite not being mobility impaired) to try to “prove” that elevators were unneeded. However, in 2025, Adam Bressler obtained the footage, which is now available on the Internet Archive.



Place Names in the Region

Place names in the DC region are a particularly fraught topic because an unusually large fraction of the region’s suburbs consist of unincorporated areas. In response, I have written a series of articles for Greater Greater Washington, arguing that people ought to use Census-designated place names to refer to unincorporated places in the DC suburbs instead of ZIP code place names, which often cover large areas and have little connection to the names of the municipalities that do exist.

A map showing 2010 Census-designated place and incorporated place borders in the Washington, DC area.
A map of 2010 Census-designated places (yellow) and incorporated places (orange) in the Washington, DC area. A high-resolution version is available here.

Difficulty in identifying clear names for regions of Prince George’s County led to a pair of May 2018 Greater Greater Washington articles in which I asked readers to assign place names to the county’s seven official planning regions:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while there was clear agreement on the names of several of them, others received a wide variety of suggested names. I was particularly disappointed that there was no consensus on what to call planning region 2, where I grew up and currently live.

I wrote a pair of Greater Greater Washington articles in July and September 2018 on the colonial-era “hundreds” and post-independence “election districts” into which Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties were historically divided. I hope to eventually extend this series to cover place names in Northern Virginia, but the main priority for that project would be to map historical county subdivisions used by the Census to tabulate data so that I can extend my historic demographic maps of the county back to the 19th Century.

While I have not created updated versions of the Census-designated place and ZIP code tabulation area maps based on 2020 Census geographies, I did publish an article discussing changes to the region’s Census-designated places shortly after the 2020 Census-designated place definitions were released.



The Demographics of the Region

I have written several articles on the demographics and economic geography of the DC region, although they do not form a series as such. These articles have included discussions of voter registration patterns, economic clustering, growth patterns from the 2020 Census, and racial disparities in the locations of premium grocery stores.

Harris Teeter and other premium grocery store brands locate in high-income areas in the Washington, DC area…but generally not in majority-Black high-income areas.



The Demographics of Prince George’s County

My home county, Prince George’s County, Maryland, is a significant demographic outlier, as the suburban county in the US with the largest Black population and the highest-income majority-Black county in the country. I have written several articles for Greater Greater Washington analyzing this diversity, the more recent of which is based on my discovery that the county has the majority of the high-income majority-Black Census tracts in the country.

A map of the percentage of the population identifying as African-American by Census block group in Prince George’s County, based on 2016 ACS data.



Prince George’s County Redistricting

In September 2021, local activist Bradley Heard and I wrote a three-part opinion piece for Greater Greater Washington, discussing the Prince George’s County Council redistricting commission’s proposal for redrawing county council districts based 2020 Census results.

Proposed alternate redistricting for the Prince George's County Council
Bradley Heard’s and my proposed alternate redistricting for the Prince George’s County Council

We were very concerned by the commission’s proposal to make minimal changes to the council districts, although the existing districts are badly drawn and under-represent the lower-income and more-urban parts of the county inside the Beltway.

Our concern became substantially greater when it became clear that, rather than adopting the redistricting commission’s proposal, the county council intended to substitute a gerrymandered district plan to remove certain council members who intended to stand for reelection from their districts. As part of my activism to prevent this gerrymander, I wrote an additional article for Greater Greater Washington on the topic.

I was also invited to give a presentation on the gerrymandering attempt as part of a webinar organized by the Prince George’s County chapter of the NAACP, Common Cause of Maryland, and several other local political organizations. My slides from that presentation are available online here.



The History of Washington, DC’s Tunnels

In July and August 2018, I wrote a pair of Greater Greater Washington articles on the history of transportation and water tunnels detailed in Elliot Carter‘s DC Underground Atlas. Writing these articles was an interesting experience, and different from my usual history writing, since they were largely summaries of Elliot Carter’s results, rather than the product of my own research. However, they were very popular with Greater Greater Washington readers, and helped create more awareness of the underground infrastructure of the District of Columbia.



The Demographic History of the Region, 1970–2020

Between July 2019 and January 2020, I wrote a series of four articles for the with maps of population density and race, income, and education demographics in the DC area from 1970 to present, based on data from the National Historical GIS Database. I hope to eventually extend this analysis back to 1860 or earlier by hand-entering data from Census reports into minor civil division geometries derived from old maps. However, this will be a major undertaking and I have no estimate of when I will be able to complete it.
Note: These posts were cross-published by the D.C. Policy Center.

Density in the Washington region:
Dark gray indicates a density of <1.5 people per acre.
Dark purple indicates a density of 1.5-7.5 people per acre.
Light purple a density of 7.5-15 people per acre.
Orange indicates a density of 15-30 people per acre.
Yellow indicates a density of >30 people per acre.

Data for 1970-2010 is from the IPUMS National Historical GIS, University of Minnesota, www.nhgis.org. Present-day county borders, transit, and roadways are shown on all years’ maps. Image by the author.



The History of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System

In November and December 2020, I wrote a five-article series on the history of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library system. I have posted a revised and updated version of this five-part series as a single article.

A black-and-white image of children--both black and white--holding books and lined up in front of the passenger-side door of a 1950's-style van. The van has "Prince George's County Memorial Library" and an image of an open book painted on the side, and is parked in a dirt lot next to a wooden building that hosts an Esso gas station.
Children line up for a 1950s library bookmobile in Prince George’s County by National Archives.



DC’s Neighborhoods West of Kenilworth Avenue

In June 2021, a truck destroyed the Lane Place pedestrian bridge over the Kenilworth Avenue freeway, DC Route 295 in Northeast DC, which separates several neighborhoods along the Anacostia River from the rest of East-of-the-River DC. Shortly afterward, I wrote a pair of articles about these neighborhoods and their history.

A map of neighborhoods in Northeast DC isolated by Route 295 and railroad tracks: (1) River Terrace, (2) Parkside, (3) Mayfair, (4) Eastland Gardens, and (5) Kenilworth. The four pedestrian bridges over Route 295 and associated Metrorail underpasses are shown as well: (a) the Parkside pedestrian bridge and Minnesota Avenue station underpass, (b) the Lane Place pedestrian bridge, (c) the Nash Street pedestrian bridge, and (d) the Douglas Street pedestrian bridge and Deanwood station underpass.
A map of neighborhoods in Northeast DC isolated by Route 295 and railroad tracks: (1) River Terrace, (2) Parkside, (3) Mayfair, (4) Eastland Gardens, and (5) Kenilworth.

The four pedestrian bridges over Route 295 and associated Metrorail underpasses are shown as well: (a) the Parkside pedestrian bridge and Minnesota Avenue station underpass, (b) the Lane Place pedestrian bridge, (c) the Nash Street pedestrian bridge, and (d) the Douglas Street pedestrian bridge and Deanwood station underpass.

Writing this pair of articles was very interesting, because I hadn’t known much about them at all, and was surprised to learn just how how different the histories of the neighborhoods were: one was established by a famous Black radio evangelist from the mid-20th Century, while another was originally segregated with restrictive covenants and the first Black families to move in were faced with Klan terrorism.



The History of Downtown DC

In June 2023, I wrote a three-article series on the history of downtown Washington, DC. I began researching this topic because I wanted to learn more about the history of the District’s “Old Downtown” versus “New Downtown” distinction mentioned in Zachary Schrag‘s classic The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, which is also reflected in the different business improvement districts (the Downtown DC BID and the Golden Triangle BID) that manage the two downtown districts. However, what I learned startled me: “Old Downtown” along Pennsylvania Avenue NW wasn’t the District’s original business district, and George Washington and Pierre L’Enfant had intended the new capital to have its commercial district southeast of the Capitol, along the Anacostia waterfront.

“Downtown” zoning, university campuses, and government facilities in and around downtown DC.



Other Topics

Several of my articles for Greater Greater Washington do not fit clearly into the four categories of public transportation policy, public transportation history, regional geography, and regional history. These articles are listed below.

A map of every intersection and dead-end inside the Beltway, color-coded by type.