Aerial view of Washington, D.C. Photo by adam79.

Editor’s note:
TheCityFix.com is going local. Stay tuned for our online expansion, which will include local editions of our coverage in cities across the world, including Washington, D.C., where our offices are based.

Washington D.C. is the nation’s 9th largest metro area and for those interested in sustainable transportation, one of the most interesting. The D.C. area has some of the best and worst in transportation piled right on top of each other.

On the one hand, the D.C. Metro is one of the most extensive public transit systems in the country, having provided 215.3 million rail trips and 133 million bus trips in 2008. The area is a model for transit-oriented development, with successful nodes of development around many subway stations and a high density of LEED certified neighborhoods. On the other, the roads throughout the region are notoriously clogged with automobile traffic—the D.C. metro area has the second longest average commute time in the country—and freeways from the days of urban renewal still scar the city.

Perhaps more importantly, D.C. is home to an organization that has historically been one of the strongest pushers of cars and sprawl in the country: the United States Congress. What happens to the D.C. region’s transportation system, therefore, can make a major impact on what will happen at the federal level, on top of all the local effects (to learn more about this, you should follow dc.streetsblog.org, if you’re not already, or read our post on TheCityFix last week about a new proposal to transform America’s surface transportation policy.) Greater Washington is both a completely representative metro area and an utterly unique one.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about all the ways we do, and could, get around the D.C. region, from sidewalks to highways, and discussing the implications for environmental sustainability. I’m particularly interested in the interactions between transportation policy and development–how an expansion of the subway helped transform Columbia Heights, for example, or how the growth of Tyson’s Corner has changed commuting patterns and transit needs in Northern Virginia–and the connections between very local and regional or even national forces.

Whether you’re a D.C. resident, a city lover, an ardent environmentalist or just curious about the connections between how we get around and the health of our planet, I hope you’ll follow along and more importantly, comment, respond and participate in the conversation we’ll be having.

About TheCityFix D.C.’s new blogger:

Noah writes about transportation and environmental sustainability in the Greater Washington area for TheCityFix.com. Noah is currently an undergraduate at Yale University, where he studies political science, focusing on urban studies. He is interested in how the law and the market shape the built environment and how that in turn shapes social relationships. Noah has been interested in transportation since childhood, when he collected maps of subway systems from around the world.

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