Posts Tagged “Traffic”

Update, 11:27 p.m.: The Park Police has identified the deceased officer as Sergeant Michael Boehm. Boehm was responding to the initial report of a possible Key Bridge jumper this evening when he collapsed. He was transported to Georgetown University Hospital, where medical staff tried in vain to resuscitate him. He was declared dead shortly after his arrival at the hospital.

Boehm, a Park Police officer for over 19 years, is survived by his wife Corrina and their son Christopher.

Update, 7:45 p.m.: Kornreich reports that the jumper also died, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Update, 7:14 p.m.: the Park Police officer who responded to the scene and suffered a cardiac arrest has died, according to Kevin Kornreich of the D.C. Homeland Security & Emergency Management Agency.

6:55 p.m.: Shortly after 5 p.m. today, police received a call about a man at the base of Virginia D.C. side of the Key Bridge. A US Park Police officer who responded to the scene went into cardiac arrest. The identity of the jumper, who fell 35 feet and reportedly suffered skull fractures, is not yet known. Both have been evacuated to area hospitals.

Key Bridge was closed in both directions for a period of time this evening, snarling rush hour traffic in Georgetown and Rosslyn. Both northbound and southbound lanes were reopened by 6:40 p.m. Traffic is still backed up, particularly on the Virginia side of the bridge.

This is a breaking news post. We will update it as we gather more information. Follow Vox for breaking news updates on Twitter.

Photo: Max Blodgett

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It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Right?

On Thursday, Georgetown University publicly released the final draft of its 2010 Campus Plan (PDF), which it will present to the community on Monday, April 26. Administrators have already presented most of the plan to Georgetown residents in a series of community meetings in November—Transportation, the 1789 Block, and Housing, Enrollment, and Off-Campus Life, but at least a few things have changed in this final draft—we’ve listed them below.

Meanwhile, the neighbors have been gathering their forces to fight the campus plan once it goes before the Zoning Commission for approval, where it will be studied at length by the Office of Planning.

Both the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Burleith Citizens Association are raising funds to hire urban planners and zoning experts to counter the findings and testimony of Georgetown University’s experts, influencing the Office of Planning report and the Zoning Commission’s ruling on the plan. BCA President Lenore Rubino wrote in an e-mail to the Burleith listserv that in the last three weeks, the BCA has raised $4500.

In any event, here’s what’s new or has been clarified in the 2010 Plan:

  • The convocation center, which would have been built on the McDonough parking lot for events like graduation, has been removed from the plan.
  • The two staffers who will live near students in off-campus, non-Georgetown housing and act as Resident Advisers will start work this August. The summer SNAP car that Georgetown is funding will be patrolling neighborhoods this June.
  • Three additional MPD officers will be hired through the reimbursable detail program to patrol “higher activity areas” on Thursday through Saturday nights.
  • The University has scaled back its plans to develop the 1789 block, where it will build graduate housing. Instead of building housing for 250 – 300 students, the new apartments will house 120 students. The structures will be three to four instead of five stories high. Ten percent of the 80 parking spaces under the structure will be reserved for resident use. The retail the University planned for that area—like a coffee shop or a dry cleaner’s—will take up 8,500 square feet instead of 26,000 square feet.
  • The University had originally proposed 1,000 new parking spaces for University and Hospital use. They are now only proposing 700 new spaces.
  • Georgetown will explore the feasibility of getting a ZipCar station located closer to campus, potentially near the main gates.
  • A quadrangle will be built between the Hariri Building and the new science center.
  • Georgetown will explore adding new solar panels to campus buildings and “wind spires for on-campus outdoor lighting”

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Well, it wasn’t the late January or early February date they had hoped for. But the 2010 Campus Plan steering committee has announced the last community meeting it will hold regarding the 2010 Campus Plan before it files the plan with the Old Georgetown Board and D.C. Zoning Commission for approval.

On Monday, April 26, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Georgetown Visitation, members of the Georgetown administration will present their final draft of the plan with information residents asked for in previous meetings. Those meetings collected community feedback and questions on three specific elements of the plan in November—Transportation, the 1789 Block, and Housing, Enrollment, and Off-Campus Life.

Material on the final draft of the plan will become available here as the meeting date approaches, but so far, the final draft is not available yet. In anticipation of the final draft, let’s recap: what are the major flashpoints for Georgetown neighbors going to be when it does become available, and what did they ask to know about the plan?

  • Increased graduate enrollment — Currently, Georgetown is seeking to increase its graduate student enrollment by about 3,200 students, most of whom will be in the School of Continuing Studies. While the University is not going to increase undergraduate enrollment, neighbors are still furious. They want to know how many graduate students they can expect to move into the area.
  • New undergraduate housing — Right now, there is no new undergraduate housing proposed in this plan. This is particularly irksome to neighborhood residents who remember that in a May 2009 presentation, the architecture firm working said the University could add 800 beds within Georgetown’s gates. (Although adding that many beds would have required Georgetown to build on nearly every open space left on campus, including the Harbin patio). Expect this to incense neighbors again, unless Georgetown has changed its plans.

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Campus Plan Banner

The University is formulating its 2010 Campus Plan, which, once it passes ANC and D.C. Zoning Commission muster, will dictate how the University can expand over the next decade. Previous Campus Plans excluded neighborhood input in their planning stages, much to the neighbors’ dismay. So this summer, University officials will hold a series of meetings to gather community input. For those of you who aren’t here, Vox will be attending all meetings and recapping them here on the blog. Keep in mind that the proposals under discussion are only tentative. At the same time, they do comprise, as University architect Alan Brangman told Vox, Georgetown University’s “wishlist.”

As Kate mentioned on Tuesday, at Saturday’s community meeting Georgetown’s permanent residents were just as down on the University’s affect on local traffic as they were on its students’ behavior. It should come as no surprise then that a major portion of the afternoon session focused on the University’s transportation plan, especially GUTS buses.

Historically cited for noise and even house-shaking, on Saturday, the neighbors and attendant ANC representatives described GUTS buses as both carelessly piloted and wreaking havoc on Reservoir Road traffic (speaking to the former charge, a University official said that the Georgetown had implemented better training for drivers a couple years ago, but that perhaps further improvements could be made).

ANC commissioner Ron Lewis said, “They’re still in our communities and on Reservoir Road in our neighborhood and that is unacceptable.” The neighbors seemed to agree and collectively insisted that the University included a provision in its 10 Year Plan that all buses use the Canal Road entrance to leave and enter the school—a demand University officials seems ready to comply with.

That’s right: on the University’s “wish list” is a tentative plans to send all buses in and out Canal Road, with the exception of the Wisconsin Avenue bus. Most noticeably altered would be the Dupont Circle bus route. Instead of its traditional 2.1 mile route, it would permanently follow the 4.7 mile test-route it has been using recently in spite of student protestations.

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DC drivers average one accident every 5.4 years, making them the nation’s most dangerous, according to Allstate. 5.4 seems like a long time for some drivers, so I guess they’re not counting pulling too far into a parking space, bumping the car facing you, and driving to another space.

AAA says we’re getting in wrecks because of gridlock. DC drivers spend 60 hours in a traffic a year, which also doesn’t seem like that much.

Apparently it is, though, and we need to shape up. I was hoping we could start anew after this report, maybe get our shit together, but Bob Novak put the kibosh on that.

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It’s just as we pedestrians suspected all along. All those caffeinated attorneys and government drones in Volvos are out to get us–and not just with lawsuits and taxes. They’re using their cars, and Mayor Fenty’s fighting back with a new traffic plan. Predictably, the commuters are complaining.

Washington’s pedestrian death rate is higher than New York City’s, Chicago’s, and Los Angeles’s, inspiring bald beauty Fenty to propose the Pedestrian Master Plan (Chills? Me too). Using choice phrases like “sidewalk gap analysis,” the plan lays out a basic map of problem pedestrian areas, and how the District plans to fix them.

Part of the plan is an all-out assault on suburban commuters. The city has already made a couple of the busiest routes into and out of the city one-way, prompting AAA’s John Townsend to call D.C.”the most anti-car city in the country.” C’est horrible!

Death merchants from the exurbs, the sort of people Townsend represents, are crying foul. They say that Fenty has overstepped his bounds in his attempts to keep them out of the District. If they’d read the news, they’d know a new traffic plan is desperately needed.

For the District, the master plan means less pollution, fewer deaths and decreased congestion. Arlington commuters are probably just angry that these changes will make the District more livable.

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