Wednesday Afternoon Commute - Sham

On my morning commute I noticed that someone cut down about 70 trees along the south side of Good Luck Road in PG County. I mean great big trees. All of the ones between the street and the sidewalk from the BW Parkway to Cipriano Road. Not sure who or why. But the road looks totally different. Wider in places. So not only will I have less shade in the summer, but I expect speeding to be more of an issue. 

• At a recent meeting, ANC6D voted unanimously to request a CaBi station at 1st and K SE (page 53) and Capital Bikeshare has now made trip data available. 

Each .csv file contains data for one quarter of the year. Within each file there are 7 columns

•  
  • Duration - Duration of trip
  • Start date - Includes start date and time
  • End date - Includes end date and time
  • Start station - Includes starting station name and number
  • End station - Includes ending station name and number
  • Bike # - Includes ID number of bike used for the trip
  • Member Type - Lists whether user was a Registered (annual or monthly) or Casual (1 to 5 day) member. NOTE: The 3-day membership replaced the 5-day during Fall '11.
• Because of a construction error, the Silver Spring Transit Center and it's section of the Metropolitan Branch Trail won't open until this summer. 
• "Perhaps most innovative has been [Long Beach, CA's] effort to establish bike-friendly shopping districts -- the first in the country, officials say -- engaging local merchants by showing them how, contrary to common belief, biking can actually bring more customers and vitality to shopping districts." Where would this work here? H Street, Columbia Pike?
• This case involves a doored cyclist suing several parties related to the car. But the most interesting part involves the insurance. The car was a rental car and they bought one of those supplemental insurance policies. The plaintiff claims that it was "an insurance policy with a nonexistent carrier that [wa]s not authorized to do business in the State of New Jersey" and that "In a certification filed in support of plaintiff's motion to amend the complaint, plaintiff's counsel certified that he called the offices of ATIC [the insurance company], spoke to a "Russell Wilson," notified him of plaintiff's claim, and sought written confirmation of the ATIC policy. Counsel's requests to confirm the existence of the ATIC policy were unsuccessful because Wilson never responded thereafter." 

Comments

[JeffB]

Re: tree cutting,
preparation for widening the road?

[washcycle]

That was my fear, but I couldn't find anything online about widening that road. Or perhaps PEPCO trying to get trees away from branches?

[Greenbelt]

The city of New Carrolton code enforcment dept didn't know why they were cut -- said it wasn't in their jurisdiction. They said it was probably Pepco, but they weren't sure.

Maybe if it is Pepco, some shorter-growing or dwarf trees that would never grow to power line height could be put in?

[Crickey7]

I'd go with PEPCO. That has been their general response to the issue of weather-related outages.

[JeffB]

Yah probably Pepco. They are on a very short lease with Maryland over power outages.

This past Spring they had contract crews trimming trees along the CCT. Thankfully those crews were only removing branches and not the whole tree.