> The Architect of the Capitol, George Stewart, wouldn’t allow a station to be built under the Capitol, requiring it to be moved a few blocks away. The University of Maryland rejected a proposed station on campus, forcing “a complicated redesign that later caused commotion in College Park.

It boggles the mind that those institutions would actively resist having direct access to the subway system.

I wonder if this is a hint to how deeply rooted car-centric sentiment is in the US.

For this case I would assume it's the security concerns that go with a publicly-accessible subway line directly under the building.

This was in the ‘60s when there were significantly less security issues.

There’s still a fairly large train station complex underneath the World Trade Center.

Probably not in 1960—Russian nukes would come from the sky. Also the Capitol already has a few tunnels underground.

Cities like London and Madrid actually have had bombs on trains. It's not a "security threat" to buildings above.

What is a security threat to infrastructure are roads, where you can drive massive vehicles into people, transport and explode bombs, etc. The Manchester bombing for example was a truck exploding parked on a public road.

If it was security, those concerns certainly weren’t shared at the Pentagon where the Metro entrance and exit were into the building for decades.

If it makes you feel better(?)... The National Assembly (= Capitol) Station of Seoul's line 9 also almost got moved to a different corner due to the lawmakers' demand, and Seoul isn't exactly known for its car culture. I guess politicians being asshats are universal.

Amusingly, the Seoul Metropolitan Council (which would correspond to a US State Congress/Senate) said fuck you, it's getting built in the place, so that's how the station kept its place.

I believe so. Just look at how much resistance there is to anything non-car in other parts of the country, like in Culvert City CA where they removed cycling lanes. Also, Portland OR where the local government is trying hard to make biking more dangerous by putting the bike lane between parked cars and fast-moving traffic, all because some hotel and business owners want street parking to be more convenient.

Even today in DC, there's still no convenient public transit access for wealthy Georgetown, because they resisted building a station there. M Street is horribly crowded with both cars and pedestrians.

> like in Culvert City CA where they removed cycling lanes

That's likely unrelated to anti-car sentiment and more so because bicyclists are (on average) complete assholes on the road, since there is no accountability for their behavior.

I'd be fine with bicyclists if we could use cameras/facial recognition to issue fines and arrest warrants, thereby finally domesticating them.

What’s the annual death rate of incidents caused by cyclists. And the rate by incidents caused by car drivers?

What causes so much danger and suffering and pollution and death are the vengeful sociopathic un-empathic car drivers who combatively view bicyclists as "complete assholes", and go around posting their ignorant, asinine, toxic opinions on social media to justify injuring and killing so many of them, and voting for ill-conceived, short-sighted legislation that makes it so dangerous and impossible to ride bikes safely, instead of providing safe, clean, green bike infrastructure and public transit, all because of their violent, childish misconceptions and greedy, narcissistic, bullying laziness, plus their complete lack of care and empathy for their fellow human beings and the environment.

Medice sp527, cura te ipsum, because your own recent post applies perfectly to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37671630

>sp527 1 day ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Rethinking the Luddites

>> 'Some with sociopathy may not realize that what they’re doing is wrong while others may simply not care. And sometimes, Dr. Coulter says, it can be both.

>“There’s just a total lack of empathy or recognizing that what they’ve done has hurt someone or it’s only benefited themselves,” he says. “And sometimes they might recognize what they’re doing is wrong, they just don’t care or they justify it to themselves.”'

> https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sociopath-personality-dis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician,_heal_thyself

"Like an unskilled doctor, fallen ill, you lose heart and cannot discover by which remedies to cure your own disease."

You sound like you're deeply entrenched in bicyclist activism or something, but I'll try to elaborate on my view any way:

Keeping bicyclists off the road hurts no one. There are cars, public transit, Uber/Lyft, sidewalks+crosswalks, etc. No one is entitled to be able to ride a bike on the road in the same way that no one is entitled to be able to transport themselves via jetpack. If it can't be orchestrated in a way that doesn't result in misbehavior, then it's not a workable construct.

That's bullshit and you know it, troll. You sound like you're deeply entrenched in alt-right MAGA conspiracy theory anti-environmental climate change denial activism or something. Does the mere thought of 15-minute cities make you furious and apoplectic?

Allowing people to drive cars on public roads certainly can't be orchestrated in a way that deters misbehavior, and their misbehavior regularly injures and kills orders of magnitude more people than bicyclists ever do, by far.

Extremist anti-bicycle activists like yourself sometimes even purposely harass, injure, and kill bicyclists by "rolling coal" on them, and often driving dangerously on purpose to threaten and scare them.

By your own sick logic, you yourself should not be permitted to drive a car on public roads, because of purposefully irresponsible drivers like these (who are unsurprisingly often from Texas, one of the most historically racist, anti-environmentalist, pro-slavery, anti-LGBTQ+, misogynistic, alt-right, unjustifiably arrogant, anti-bike states in the Union, that STILL tries to foment insurrection and secede from the United States to this day):

Texas Driver Posts Video Rolling Coal on Cyclists—and Is Surprised by the Consequences:

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a39797952/driver-posts-video-...

Charges filed against Texas teen who a witness says hurt six bicyclists while trying to 'roll coal':

https://www.abc15.com/news/national/charges-filed-against-te...

Rolling Coal Road Rage and close pass of cyclist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R83dT-2kCDU

Texas Republican Introduces Bill Calling for Vote on Secession (MARCH 6, 2023):

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/texas-re...

If you really hate sharing the road with bicyclists that much, then move to Texas and vote to secede, but until you manage to kick yourself out of the United States, the law of the land says that you have to tolerate bikes and minorities no matter how much you hate them.

The potential station in Georgetown was skipped for geotechnical reasons. The original town was sited on an enormous and very hard rock above the river and surrounding swamps and that made blasting the huge station cavern prohibitively expensive. The running tunnels are already extra deep there to run under the Potomac.

The Rosslyn station is directly across from Georgetown in the same geologic unit.

There's already plans for a new line that will have a station in Georgetown.

Capitol Hill politicians have their own subway system and other underground spaces. The Metro stop is nearby, with easy access. Lobbyists send documents and gifts by bicycle courier. Biden famously commuted in from Delaware by Amtrak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_subway_s...

https://www.washingtontunnels.com/capitol-hill-map

>Biden made Amtrak trips between Washington and his home in Delaware on most days as a senator when Congress was in session so he could help raise his sons. The Amtrak round trip is actually 220 miles or 354 kilometers, not over 260 miles (418 km) as he described it.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-biden-amtrak-e79af0...

Racism is very deeply embedded in these discussions.

There’s a school of thought that sees subways as a conveyor belt of undesirable people into a neighborhood that bring crime and “problems”.

As ridiculous as it sounds the phenomenon is very real.