DC: The District of Crap

Ooo, ominous.

YEAH OBAMA!

Now that these new fresh and all the more photogenic personalities have had their place in our nations Capitol for a few months lets see if anything meaningful has been accomplished.  Lets look not in the fields of healthcare (nothin’ yet), increased privacy and transparency (not really) or anything political dealt with by the president, but with his new home city.  Has DC become anything more to Obama than it was to George W. Bush; I mean, taking into account some of the shortcomings of this city, we better watch out for Obama running out to clear brush in Crawford….

The Metro

What people, including city planners, dont seem to understand is that Washington is not that large of a city.  Tenleytown, Dupont Circle and the Capitol are not that far away from eachother.  But, for some reason, there is a horrendously complicated metro system with several lines to service stops that are very close together.  I mean, for fucks sake, most of the lines are in the shape of a U, and the map is so cramped that you don’t even know which names belong to which station. Because of all the overlapping and extra track, there is more cars, tracks and stations to maintain, not to mention the hundreds of miles of escalators.  Its a little unnerving to thing that there will never be a time when all of the escalators in Washington DC’s metro system will work all at once.

Throw in the fact that the ticketing system is by distance, not a flat rate as exists in many other city rail systems, and you’ve got confusion for newcomers and tourists, and good old fashioned inconvenience and unreliability for the locals.

Oh, also…did I mention its not exactly the safest in the world?.

Cabs

Cab drivers are universally understood to have back-of-the-hand knowledge of the city they work in.  In London especially, cabbies can navigate the centuries old streets and corridors to bring you, surprised and confused, to your destination.  In New York, cab drivers instead are known for their speedily efficient (some say reckless and insane) through borough traffic.

As always, Mr. T is Right

Washington DC has the twofer of ridiculous traffic and insane streets.  Now every asshole likes to point out that the streets were designed to fend off a British invasion, which A: failed miserably, and B: would therefore have to cripple the cities inhabitants as well. That’s what we get from taking urban planning ideas from the people who built the Maginot Line.

But I digress, to the point: cabbies in DC do not know where they are going.  There’s no question about this when more than a few times I have gotten in a cab ride that took an extra 5 minutes so the driver could program his GPS(!). I don’t even have one of those in my car. How long does it take to drive around in a city before you being to figure out where shit is? How about if your job depends on it? Jesus. Have some personal pride in your work at least.

My second, less important but brand new gripe with cabs is the new meter system.  The problem with the old zone system was that if you just went over the line, you’d be paying twice as much for that extra block.  So Adrian Fenty’s idea instead of effectively implementing a margin between zones of a few blocks to solve this, he opted for a meter system. Because DC itself is so small, traffic is so bad, and the fucking drivers don’t know where they’re going, there are extra charges on top of whatever the meter fare is. So don’t be surprised when your $7.50 cab ride turns into $12.50 when they pile on the rates for absurd things like $4.00 for just getting in.

Crime

The month of my first semester here in DC, I remember 3 unrelated stabbings taking place, not in the Fallujah of the District called Anacostia, but in the Green Zone of the National Mall. Apparently I would have been much safer going to the Community College of Newark New Jersey, (or Yale in New Haven, Connecticut for that matter).

Not to mention, the cops in DC seem to be doing a pretty horrible job stopping actual criminals since they leave all the little shit to the border organizations of the Montgomery County’s Finest and whoever patrols Virginia (I assume organized militias like in The Patriot).  Maybe instead of setting up speed cameras on every single vital road running through Montgomery County, or allocating 30-50 officers for house raids involving, but not always catching underage drinkers.  Did I say catching? I meant issuing civil citations.  Now that’s the sword of justice like I’ve never seen.

Food

Really the only way to get Biden to shutup

I know what you’re thinking: “this is the light at the end of the tunnel right?” Wrong. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, you should know that by now. I understand that Obama likes to go eat hamburgers and hot dogs and fulfill that craving you get for slaughtered meat, and man does he pick the good places to do it at.  Ray’s Hellburger just over in Arlington is probably where I’ve had my best burger, but sadly, Ray’s is the exception that proves the rule.  The lack of considerable originality and fairness in price of DC restaurants is absurd.  It gets to the point that on the Washingtonian’s top 100 Restaurants list uses DC chefs proximity or ability to copy better, bigger city chefs as a testament to how good they are. The list is a sad reminder that in an underdeveloped city such as Washington, the top 100 is all relative.

Now, I know I’m being hard on our old capitol, but it is deserved.  Washington DC is the Capitol city of the most powerful country in the world, it is the convergence of 20th Century American political power.  It’s the place where lots of deals go down, famous people can be seen and a lot of History, both old and more contemporary has taken place.  Washingtonians don’t need a single minuscule vote in the Senate, they deserve a real Capitol city.