The District’s Department of Transportation has partnered with Clear Channel Outdoor to bring Smart Bike, North America’s first bike sharing program, to DC. Starting next month, program members will be able to borrow bicycles from ten locations around the city for a maximum of three hours at a time. Membership costs $40 for the year, a comparatively small sum for unlimited transportation use during a time of oil price increases.
But the limited number of rental stations may not make this the most convenient mode of transportation for many in DC, especially Georgetown students. The closest Smart Bike docking points to Georgetown are in Dupont Circle and at George Washington University—yes, they get their very own station at Foggy Bottom.
If Georgetown can’t manage to secure a Metro station, you’d think we could at least get some free bikes. To learn more, check out Smart Bike DC online.
- Lynn Kirshbaum, Photo Editor. Photo of Paris bike share from Flickr user rekha6.
Vox Populi’s kissing-cousins at The Hoya’s blog The Saxa recently made a bold move to divide their blog between regular news (Leavey421, in subtle homage to The Hatchet) and sports news (TheHoyaParanoia). But the Saxa’s editors have something else in store for us: a terrible, terrible pun. From Google Reader, an administrative post reveals as-yet-unmade third section:
People on the southern part of campus (Village A, New South, that sort of thing) heard a circling helicopter from around 12:30 to 1 this morning. The helicopter was beaming down a search light. Hoping for more Georgetown crime, your intrepid blogger followed the light until the woods on Prospect. I’m betting there was an accident in the Potomac. Anyway, I hit up MPD and will be back with the results later today. Ideas on what the helicopter was looking at?
I went down to the basement of Copley at 4:30 last night to get some snacks from the vending machine. For the first time at Georgetown, I feared for my safety as I walked through the halls of my dorm.
Strangely, the numerous burglaries in my dorm earlier in the year didn’t have the same effect. Maybe it was because of the late hour (similar to the times when the recent incidents took place in LXR), or perhaps it was because when I walked into the building a few minutes earlier, the security guard was fast asleep with her head between her arms, and didn’t even bother to look up when I swiped right in front of her.In that moment, I understood how the residents of LXR must feel.
Other people did too–I was relatively unsurprised to hear that an RA in the building was carrying a knife. Reports of more assaults in Village A and Henle are somehow no longer shocking. Is this past weekend to be a watershed for crime at Georgetown? Online comments on a recent Hoya article covering the LXR sexual assault suggest many things—mostly ridiculous, like calling for racial profiling, since all of the descriptions seem to be the same, of young dark-skinned males (if only everyone didn’t believe in race).
Beyond the unnecessary racial polarization of the issue, some users have suggested that DPS become a full-fledged police force. This newspaper’s position is well-documented on the issue of arming DPS, but anonymous users are calling for much more than that. They believe that Georgetown’s lack of a proper police force encourages crime, as a bubble where the security officers have no discretion or training to investigate crimes.Therefore, Georgetown will continue to attract crime as a target of opportunity.
Arming DPS further will apparently stop this.The real answer probably lies in more patrols, not more weapons. Rather than commit to upgrading DPS into an actual police department (unthinkable and unnecessary, with MPD just a phone call away), the university might want to begin by rethinking its patrolling policy.
According to another article in today’s Hoya, one security guard covers Village A, Alumni Square, LXR and Walsh. Allison Mead (SFS ‘10), a concerned student quoted for the story, raises an interesting question that is buried at the end of the article: “I have the emergency system. Why didn’t I get a text message to say, ‘Lock your doors; there is an intruder’?”
Perhaps because her door should have already been locked, but that’s beside the point: students should be able to feel safe inside their dorms, to not fear going to sleep in their own beds. Beyond that, there are so many issues here—involving fear, race, campus security (or lack thereof), the abilities, tactics and working conditions of DPS and Securitas (the security company notable for its sleeping guards)—that can’t really be solved with one showy strategy, or even just by urging everyone to lock their doors.
Many of the actions that have already been taken in LXR—replacing the GOcard reader, locking the emergency stairwell doors that permit anyone to bypass the guard desk—should have been done a long time ago. What to do next is the most difficult question; hopefully the debate won’t succumb to fear and choose costly and ineffective options.
When Google Street View was first launched way back in May 2007, I was disappointed that D.C. wasn’t among the five starting cities (New York City, San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, and Miami) , but wasn’t too upset. This is only the tip of the iceberg, I figured, and D.C. would be added shortly.
Well, I was half right. 43 little cameras spring up on Google Maps now when you hit the “Street View” button, but not a single one even comes close to D.C. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of Street View’s inception and, though Fairbanks, AK and Madison, WI have Street View, our nation’s capital is still Street View-less. D.C. was still a moderately important city, last time I checked; how could this be?
I shot an email over to the good folks at Google asking if/when they might be correcting this omission of theirs. The response I got, while good-natured, hardly cleared anything up. Elaine, of Google’s Global Communications & Public Affairs, first extolled the virtues of Street View (calling it “a useful and interesting tool for users everywhere”) before breaking the bad news.
We have gathered imagery in Washington DC, but we do not have any launch plans to announce at this time. The time between gathering imagery and making it available in Google Maps varies by city and is dependent on a variety of factors.
What kind of factors? Maybe Google is being slowed down by some silly red tape, courtesy of Homeland Security, the Park Service or any of the three thousand other bureaucracies which claim jurisdiction in the District?
I can’t get into many specifics, but we the imagery collection time varies by city given conditions like size of the region being covered (since we cover more than just the core downtown area), weather, etc. We also then spend time ensuring the quality and accuracy of images before posting them.
Sorry, D.C. residents, but it looks like it might be a while. While you wait, check out a few of the locations which have been added to Street View:
Spokane, WA: Both D.C. and Spokane, WA have the word “Washington” in their name, except one is home to some of the most influential people and institutions in the world and one’s claim to fame is hosting the largest 3-on-3 basketball tournament in the world.
Manchester, NH: I lived in New Hampshire for three years, and unless you have a great passion for New England foliage or winter, there’s not much to see here.
Yosemite National Park: A National Park before D.C.? But we’ve got at least two dozen of those!
As Doug Feith’s 2-year term at Georgetown expires, several questions remain. Was his ouster organized by liberal faculty members? What does Foreign Service Dean Galluci think of it all? Has anyone at Georgetown ever been so much a war criminal (besides Henry Kissinger, obvs.)?
For a few Georgetown students, however, one question looms above all: how can we use an online petition to save him? Save Professor Feith and the Diversity of Thought worries that Feith is the SFS’s killer app: “We do not want to lose a preeminent foreign policy scholar to another university and jeopardize our status as the nation’s preeminent government and foreign policy institution.”
The petition’s been signed 59 people. But how many who signed are really concerned with diversity of thought and not motivated by other, more sinister agendas? According to the site, notable signatories include
Henry Kissinger (Hard Knocks 2009)
Dorit Feith (Michigan ‘07). Daughter?
Feith Tortures. This signature was deleted, but it speaks to the petition’s persuasiveness if it could even win over that guy.
Can the internet, the medium which heaped so much ridicule on Feith, save his academic career? Probably not!
Irony and flash mobs collided in an unfortunate way two few weeks ago at the Jefferson Memorial when a small group of twenty-something libertarians decided to commemorate Jefferson’s 265th birthday. They celebrated the agrarian republic-lover by dancing silently (each equipped with their own iPhones or iPods) at his memorial at midnight on April 13.
The geekphoria was dashed when one of the faithful was told she couldn’t dance there, and then arrested for asking why not. One guy had a video camera and caught the whole process on tape–it’s troublesome, and not just because libertarians can’t dance.
In the video, no one is being disrespectful or disorderly. The monuments are open 24/7, and the libertarians planned to come out at night so as not to disrupt tourists yelling on their cell phones or rowdy school groups. As the officer leads the arrested woman out of the rotunda, the videographer asks him to “Read these walls, I mean, you’re the security guard for this memorial. Thomas Jefferson is looking down and he is very dissatisfied. This is not the America he wanted.”
Satisfying Thomas Jefferson’s whims, projected through an unflinching stone gaze, must be difficult. But while it’s troubling that the officers arrested someone for peacefully and quietly celebrating, it’ll be worse if they don’t withdraw the charges in court this Tuesday. Maybe the guard misunderstood what kinds of activities people could do at the monuments (which are technically public property), but they should be able to admit their mistake and not prosecute her further. There’s no reason why Washingtonians should be afraid to have gatherings/protests/birthday parties of any peaceful kind on monument ground when it’s well within their rights.
-Sara Carothers, Voices editor. Photo from Flickr user Subtleness.
Tackle Box, a Maine-inspired seafood restaurant, opened yesterday on M Street. The sister restaurant to Hook, a high-end seafood shrine, Tackle Box promises the same quality and fresh seafood caught by local purveyors, but with a backyard feel. Although Hook’s just next door, the two restaurants could not look more different. Instead of slick modern furniture, fine glassware, and walls adorned with art, at Tackle Box, you’ll find picnic tables, chalkboard walls, and a huge US flag from 1870. Think beach without sand in your toes.
Fortunately, the price difference between Hook and Tackle Box is just as big. At Tackle Box, go for “The Maine Meal”: it comes with a choice of 6 different seafood entrees that come fried, baked, or grilled, two sides, and one of five sauces, for only $13.
The usual suspects are all at Tackle Box—lobster, tilapia, shrimp, clams, calamari—but what I’m most looking forward to are the fried oysters and the hush puppies.Plus, all the sauces sound delicious, from cilantro lime vinaigrette, salsa verde, and roasted garlic and lemon aioli, where can you go wrong? Executive Chef Barton Seaver will no doubt bring high brow to the low brow without making students sacrifice a cash cow.
Some commenters who read this post on the U.S. Attorney’s decision to drop charges against Philip Cooney (MSB ‘10) want more clarification about that decision and the reporting in my recent article on the subject, and I’m happy to oblige (sorry it took so long, but it is, after all, the last week of school). Keep in mind that this analysis is only based on my reporting on the case since last fall and a four month stint working at a legal magazine covering a variety of court cases, so nothing in here is gospel.
Georgetown Day put up quite a fight: moon bounce, live music, free food, NBA champ Jeff Green, a rock climbing wall, and so on. In the end, though, Georgetown Nite stole the show with a concentrated soap solution, a giant blow-up rink, a mass of soaking wet drunk people, and a tiny bit of magic. Foam party, indeed.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, Georgetown University's preeminent newsmagazine since 1969. The opinions expressed in Vox Populi are those of their authors unless specifically stated.
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