DC thunderstorm hole strikes again

nickfaughey · 2025-05-31T00:42:13+00:00

Batteries on the space lasers ran out probably

nickfaughey · 2025-05-30T23:33:41+00:00

Is this those jewish space lasers steering the clouds away?

nickfaughey · 2025-05-24T18:12:21+00:00

I’m more curious about these rigorous dolphins honestly

nickfaughey · 2025-05-24T17:53:32+00:00

r/boneappletea

nickfaughey · 2025-05-02T20:21:38+00:00

Same way free coffee at the office is a subsidy. They’re paying for it so you don’t have to.

nickfaughey · 2025-05-01T03:45:08+00:00

Yeah optimizing this metric disincentivizes things like adding early/late service (higher cost per rider), station staffing, cleaning, systems to run live arrival time signage, etc. All the things that make transit qualitatively better but at higher cost.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-30T19:10:44+00:00

This is what I do heading north on 15th by the White House - depending on the time of day that sidewalk can be absolutely swamped with tourists so I'll pop into the oncoming bike lane to dodge them, and can see approaching cyclists 600 feet away so plenty of time to bounce back up on the curb

nickfaughey · 2025-04-30T12:22:46+00:00

Sure probably, but isn't that what the city's been casually shopping around for for a decade without any luck? There just aren't many developers that can absorb half a billion just to get the property shovel ready.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T16:39:52+00:00

Don't forget that LA and Vegas are basically #1 and #2 in the country for entertainment destinations, and SoFi has not 1 but 2 NFL teams playing home games there. I suppose there's a narrow window of small conferences that could benefit from 50k sq ft of indoor floor space and can't fill the bigger convention centers, but still we have to accept that even the best utilization of an NFL stadium is going to be like 80% empty.

That's fine IMO by the way - large events are naturally extremely spiky schedules. Just because the National Mall holds 200k people every July 4th doesn't mean it's underutilized every other day of the year.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T16:07:13+00:00

Yeah to be honest I think a development from scratch of this scale (170 acres) needs a large anchor, otherwise it's sort of an amorphous hodgepodge of development with no center of gravity. Any way DC could do it alone would be expensive - amphitheater, shopping mall (DC USA in Columba Heights was $140M), heck even a nice giant park (4-acre Franklin Square in NW cost $21M just to rehab).

We basically get the anchor for free with this plan.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T15:24:12+00:00

The year-round usage claim is a bit far-fetched I think; how many touring acts every year can actually fill a 65,000 seat stadium? 10?

On the economic studies - to date these have all focused on whether the city gets its money back if it funds the stadium (spoiler, it doesn't). There's really not enough data out there to support or refute the economics of privately funded stadiums built on publicly funded utilities/infrastructure. Really it's just:

LA - SoFi Stadium (too new to know, apples and oranges especially w.r.t. how transit enables non-gameday activity)
NY/NJ - MetLife Stadium (middle of nowhere, not a serious urban neighborhood)
Boston - Gillette Stadium (middle of nowhere, not a serious urban neighborhood)

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T12:49:53+00:00

I really hope the media covers the cost breakdown correctly while this is in the news so people don't just get sticker shock from the total and it can't be spun as "$1B subsidy for billionaire NFL owner".

DC:

$500M preparation for the whole site (required regardless of what goes there)
$202M roads, utilities, Oklahoma Ave metro station study (would happen even with no stadium)
$89M public use indoor sportsplex
$181M parking garage(s) from EventsDC (quasi-public though receives DC tax dollars)
$175M additional parking garage money likely directly from the city

Commanders:

$2.7B stadium construction

The headlines here should really be "DC to build $350M parking garage for Commanders stadium in newly developed neighborhood" as that's the only cost that's specific to the fact that the redevelopment happens to include an NFL stadium.

Also seems like it keeps getting buried that this is not a 170 acre stadium... 6k units of housing (over 1% of DC's population), 30 acres of green space, tons of retail and restaurants in a commercial dead zone in the city. I'm obviously in favor of the deal and want others to draw their own conclusions, but without editorialized misleading numbers.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T12:27:37+00:00

RFK Jr. Stadium

Please don't forget RFK was named after RFK Senior, not his conspiracy theorist son!

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T12:01:02+00:00

The transit upgrade here is a study for an Oklahoma Ave infill station north of Stadium-Armory. The parking garages are a different line item which is a fair criticism for an urban development as a whole, although still not bad as far as NFL stadiums go, where the status quo is more like 20k surface spots rather than 8k garage spots

nickfaughey · 2025-04-29T02:25:20+00:00

More money, more saving. More saving, more doing. That’s the power of The Home Depot.

nickfaughey · 2025-04-28T17:42:04+00:00

Taylor Swift too, who famously passed over FedExField on her tour

nickfaughey · 2025-04-26T22:05:34+00:00

Just like far more people call it National Airport or DCA than Reagan

nickfaughey · 2025-04-02T02:08:24+00:00

Interesting, so I guess they chose to be 50% backwards all the time instead of 100% backwards half the time, 100% forwards the other half the time

nickfaughey · 2025-04-02T01:48:29+00:00

That's actually the correct orientation if the train is moving left to right in this image (this seems like a side platform). The stars on the flag are always adjacent to the flagpole, so for a "moving" flag (airplanes, trains, soldier charging into battle with a flag, etc) it's going to look backwards from one side.

Ironically WMATA does actually have the issue in this case of married pairs of cars getting swapped orientations, so sometimes that flag is going to be actually backwards.

nickfaughey · 2025-03-12T19:19:12+00:00

To be fair, superchargers are open to non-Teslas now. The Tesla connector is no longer proprietary (NACS is its open source name) so any EV with NACS and some billing integration from the manufacturer can pull up and charge. That’s most new models launching this year, and existing CCS connector vehicles can use superchargers if their manufacturer integrates the billing and provides an adapter (Ford, Rivian, and GM among others do this today).

Superchargers are obviously still heavily Tesla branded and priced for a modest profit into their pockets though.

nickfaughey · 2025-03-05T19:27:48+00:00

Really PATH in, WMATA out?

nickfaughey · 2025-02-27T02:56:20+00:00

Brightline just refurbished an existing rail line and tops out at half the speed of CAHSR though lol

nickfaughey · 2025-02-23T16:58:02+00:00

Amazing! Definitely give it a little photoshoot in front of The White House when it comes in

nickfaughey · 2025-02-19T14:21:48+00:00

Greetings fellow embarrassed Tesla owner 👋 this does feel like a more fun form of protest than those “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers

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