In April, we complained that cities across the country were getting Google Street View while Washington, one of the nation’s most interesting-looking cities, went unphotographed. Now even Paris is on Street View. I guess it’s good that people can see some world capital, even if it’s not ours.

Speaking of Street View, it recently came to Houston (home of the Blog Summer White House) and I understand what people in the first cities to get Street View were saying about creepiness. Just looking for directions, I was confronted with the back of my car and my mom doing yard work.

Can you believe DC’s missing out experiences like that?

Flickr photo from user 0h used under a Creative Commons license

Mayor Fenty quashes dissent and looks good doing it. He never forgot that a 4-4 vote last year in the DC Taxi Cab Commission briefly stopped his meter plans, and now he’s settling scores, replacing three of the commissioners who voted against meters.

The move isn’t surprising to anyone knows how rough the Taxi Cab Commission can be. Why do you think Commissioner Leon Swain packs heat?

Via DCist

Catching any of the 30s buses along Wisconsin used to be like catfish noodling–it takes time, and once you stick your hand in, there’s no telling what’ll chomp down. That might change now that Metro revamped the line last Sunday, hoping to improve its reliability and customer satisfaction.

The 30 series, which runs from Friendship Heights through Georgetown and down Pennsylvania Ave on its way to the Maryland border in Southeast, is the busiest Metrobus line, serving 20,000 riders daily. Due to their extraordinarily long route along some of the District’s busiest roads, they are also among the slowest and least reliable.

In mid-2007, Metro commissioned a study to determine what could be done to improve the line. It noted that riders were most concerned with crowding on the bus, frequency, and timeliness. That study prompted Metro to create 3 distinct route categories: local routes (the remaining crosstown buses), neighborhood connectors, and limited-stop services.

Before the change, all 5 buses were crosstown, now only 2 are. The other 3 bus routes have been replaced with 2 neighborhood connectors and 2 express services. Of use to students are the 32 and 36 locals, which still travel to Southeast, and the newly-created 31 neighborhood, which runs from Friendship Heights to Foggy Bottom.

To ensure that buses do not bunch up in traffic, Metro will also post dispatchers along the routes. If the new system goes as planned, expect a bus roughly every 5-10 minutes along Wisconsin.

Photo from Flickr user FredoAlvarez used under a Creative Commons license

Charter bus company DC2NY is getting desperate. The company sent out 2 emails in 24 hours yesterday asking for help help against a new mandate forcing all intercity buses to load at L’Enfant Promenade, the only “designated intercity bus zone”.

That order comes courtesy of the District’s Department of Transportation, and means all the companies, including beloved Chinatown buses, will have to leave their native environs. DC2NY, naturally, has a counter-proposal: designating their turf at Dupont Circle an inter-city bus zone too. Their plan to do that involves getting their fans in DC, who have so often benefited from DC2NY’s help with distant concerts or booty calls, to pitch in by emailing Transportation employees and councilmembers.

After all, as those water bottle mongers insist, Southwest is scary! Save Dupont! Write to our favorite  councilman Jack Evans (who conveniently sits on the relevant committee) and help DC2NY load wherever it likes.

Whole e-mail, with a font that practically says, “Remember me, the cool bus? We had great times, didn’t we?”, after the jump

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The Northwest Current has always been one of the city’s most self-indulgent publications. Some of that self-love fell on our faces this week when Current writer and Georgetown grad school alum Krysten Jenci wrote a column about the Georgetown campus.

I can’t link to it because the Current doesn’t believe in the Internet, but I’ve retyped a representative excerpt:

I still remember standing on campus that first night filled with the kind of excitement that made me think I could change the world. Walking farther onto the campus, across the diagonal brick walkway toward the White-Gravenor building, I dreamed of learning great things and meeting important people.

I like Georgetown as much as the next nostalgic senior, but seriously? Get it together, Krysten.

Today’s Post has an article about Bit O’ Lit, a magazine of book excerpts being given away at Metro stops. It’s a solid idea, and a rack will be set up next to a Georgetown bus stop.

Available in Georgetown favorite Dupont Circle.

Via City Desk. In-field report from Dupont Circle by Matt Appenfeller.

Georgetown basketball has the Thompsons and the Ewings, and now Washington neighborhood politics has a dynasty of its own in Kathy and India Henderson, mother and daughter and former and current ANC5B commissioners. Then again, maybe “puppetmaster and puppet” is more appropriate than “dynasty”:

When she relinquished her seat last year to run for city council, [Kathy Henderson] had her teenage daughter, India, run in her place (Henderson told me she “told” her daughter to run). And ever since India won the seat, her mom has exhibited masterful control over the young comish, marching her out of one meeting so a quorum wouldn’t be met.

And you thought Georgetown ANC’s, with its monomaniacal focus on alcohol, was weird.

This post was only partially motivated by my bitterness at having my own ANC commissioner chances dashed by accident of class year.

It’s easy to find high-end chain retail in Georgetown, but we’re desperately lacking in the hand-decorated moleskin journal/reconstructed t-shirt/jewelry made from recycled balloons departments. Luckily, we have Crafty Bastards.

Between 10 and 5 today at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, indie crafters will showcase their wares at the annual festival, either making you kick yourself for not thinking of turning old library books into purses first, or wonder why a designer felt it necessary to create a fetus-shaped cookie cutter. There’ll be a lot of Etsy staples like knitted cupcakes and printed t-shirts, but also unique items like “The Prick Cushion” (an anatomically-correct pin cushion), oil portraits of the cast of The Office, and elaborately crafted shadow puppet toys.

City Paper sponsors Crafty Bastards, and it’s tough to get past their judging panel for a spot at the fair. Along with the deserving vendors, Bastards also features music, food, a craft supply swap, and a ton of workshops on printmaking, crocheting, and more. Because of the fair’s success in the its first four years, there will be two this year (the second one coming along in September), but all items are one-of-a-kind and probably won’t make a repeat appearance.

The Pyramid Atlantic Art Center is located at 8230 Georgia Avenue (Silver Spring Metro on the Red Line.)

-Sara Carothers, Voices Editor

Losing your GOCard sucks. You can’t get into your dorm, the library, Leo’s, or anywhere else on campus that matters. Non-college student D.C. residents will soon get the same feeling when the One Card–a new centralized identification system which will be their library card, public school attendance sheet, rec center pass, and more –spreads its mark of the Beast all over the District.

At first I was a little freaked out by the 1984-ishness of the new card, but then I remembered how excited I got when I found out that the new GOCards come with SmartTrip.

Plus, the ACLU gives it the thumbs up, and as people better at spotting threats to civil liberties than me, I’ll believe them when they say the One Card doesn’t infringe on privacy. Hopefully the city will ignore Georgetown’s lesson and not charge $25 for a replacement.

You can buy a hat, you can buy a rat, but you still can’t buy a gat in the District, no matter what the Supreme Court says about the gun ban. The Wall Street Journal says DC will try to use zoning and a helpful (for once) dose of NIMBYs to keep people from opening gun stores.

None of the eight wards are interested in a gun store, and the government is happy to oblige them. This will hamper the imports of guns from other states, as guns ordered from out-of-state gun merchants are mailed to other gun stores for customer pick-up instead of directly to the customer.

The government is just being a sore loser. Let the neighborhoods fight if they don’t want gun stores, but forcing gun sales across the state line just takes money out of DC.

What do you think?

Flickr photo from user barjack used under a Creative Commons license. Article via The Goodspeed Update.