Nacho #24
courtesy of Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie

Obtaining the complete set of police reports from MPD on police calls to DCPS locations is no small feat, and for that, I salute Sarah Larimer and Andrew Beaujon and his team at TBD for ferreting the information out through a long process of FOIA requests. This past summer, they received a massive PDF which they processed into individual reports and have mined into a database for everyone to use. The individual reports are linkable, and contain information that other organizations could use to spark research, or just to gather demographic data on the crimes that are happening in DC Public Schools, and how the MPD is responding.

There’s a problem here, though, and it seems to be endemic among the Allbritton Company products: as great as the original ideas are, the execution of those ideas is half-assed.  The full listing of crimes is available on their website, but you can’t search it, filter it, or move through it quickly. A giant mass of information is a phenomenal thing, but it’s only useful to the community at large if we can parse it into usable structures. There’s no way to look for individual schools or police districts, or even types of crimes or any kind of follow-up.

As disappointing as this last part is, there’s still a lot of great information here, and for that, we thank Sarah Larimer and Andrew Beaujon.

Unbaked #9
courtesy of Chris Rief aka Spodie Odie

Taking a taxi in the District may get more expensive next year, as you might’ve heard. Martin from DCist has all the details of the 20-page report from the Commission, but the basic gist is: Per mile fare will be $2.16, and increments will drop from 1/6th of a mile to 1/8th of a mile. The $3 flag-drop fee will remain, but most surcharges will go away.

The fare hike is good news for the about-to-launch Uber, which will send a car service around for you starting at a $15 minimum, but the fare structure starts at $7, with $3 mileage fees or $42/hour waiting fees.  We’ll have more on them as the week goes on about their launch.

Bethesda metro station
courtesy of specimenlife

It’s hard to imagine the District without Metro, no matter how much we get frustrated by their escalator failures and constant reconstruction, the system is part of our DNA here, right up there with the Monuments, the Politicians and Lobbyists, and Embassy Row. It’s just there, ever has it been, ever will it be.

What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and it just wasn’t there?

The Atlantic Cities has taken on that project, along with a lot of help from many reports from WMATA and Metro itself, and they have all manner of studies, maps and graphs that show what DC would need to make up for a lack of buses and the rail system that we take for granted, right as we curse its frustrating existence. Just a taste to get you hooked:

WMATA then ran a second scenario in which the transit disappeared, but the region added new roads to get people to where they travel today. Just to keep congestion at present levels, the region would have to add more than a thousand lane miles of arterials and highways, at a cost of about $6 billion. This would be the rough equivalent of adding 15 more lanes to the already massive beltway that encircles the city – or, all of these roads, many of which run through the core of downtown, where street expansion would be all but impossible.

Metro’s not so bad now, is it?

Photo courtesy of Santa

As we head into the final two weeks of the Christmas Season, and as Congress is facing yet another looming shutdown deadline on Friday, and another fight over the extension of the payroll tax holiday by the end of the year, it’s clear that only one force out there can pull it all together, and that’s Santa Claus.

Hence, #OccupyChristmas is making an appearance in our fair city.

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