Public Safety Politics, The Cornhole Killer, A Streetcar Named Defunct

Today on CityCast DC, we're talking about the DC mayor's race where public safety has

suddenly become an issue. We're talking about the quadruple amputee cornhole champion

accused of murder. Yes, it's a wild story. And we're mourning, well, maybe the end of

the DC streetcar. Plus, in a member's only fourth segment, more on how much DC's local

police should tell the public about how the feds used deadly force in our city. And

with WAMU's Alex Koma and CityCast's Julia Karen.

Today is Friday, March 27th. I'm Michael Schaefer. Here's what DC's talking about.

Hey, Alex. Hello. Hey, Julia. Hey, Mike.

Happy peak bloom. We did a poll in our CityCast newsletter about whether people think the

cherry blossoms are overrated or underrated. How would you guys have voted?

Correctly rated. I feel like peak bloom means like spring, you know, hope blooms eternal, you know.

Yeah, I would love to say overrated to be contrarian, but they rock. They're very cool.

You know, you can't you can't go at, you know, the the peakest of peak times like Sunday, you know,

with all the tourists, but you know, they're they're pretty good. I got in and I got a soft spot for

them. Yeah, my when I was a little boy, my parents sat me down and said, never drive on them all

around cherry blossom season. Yeah, smart advice. Yeah, it's a local cultural folkway.

But you're right. I would like to be really against them, but they are really pretty when

they're when they're popping. And and I'd like to say like, oh, there's all kinds of alternative

cherry blossom locales, but really that that hands-point thing is is pretty massive and awesome.

Yeah, the the one where it's like, oh, you can see them anywhere. I mean, that is true, but I mean,

come on, you got it. You got to go, you know, if you're a DC resident who doesn't get down to the

mall and the monuments all that often, even though you live here, it's your one chance to go and do

it and play tourists, you might as well. Just for the record, it's also opening day of baseball season.

And I think the common denominator here is that like people try to get wistful and attribute

some meaning to the whole thing with cherry blossoms with the crack of the bat and spring. And

and like, they may not be statistically accurate, but it's kind of nice to let them have their

thing. After the winter we had, I'll take it. All right. So Alex, you you've been covering the

mayor's race. And you know, what I've noticed in the last week, let me set this up here is that

public safety, which is, you know, always going to be and should be a big issue in any mayors race

in any city, because safety is one of the public goods that government needs to provide.

Has become an issue and it's and in that weird DC way, it's become sort of a three-dimensional

chess issue, because there's the sort of a city grappling with like what it can do as and should do

as policy. But then there's also the kind of politics of how it plays with the feds. So in the

last week, there has been this strange shooting of a federal park police officer in Marshall Heights.

And there's been more sort of chaos around enormous groups of youth,

behaving lawlessly around Navy Yard. And that that latter has drawn the comment of the U.S.

attorney, Gene Perro, says she wants to round up young punks. So how is this playing among the

people who want to run for mayor or want to become mayor? Yeah, I would say that the stuff in Navy Yard

has has certainly provided some of the most opportunities for conflict. You have former at

large council member Kenyan McDuffee and word for council member Genease Lewis George running,

they're the top two candidates here. And so a lot of the debate has been about would you support

extending these enhanced youth curfews that we have? DC already has a youth curfew, starts at 11,

police are allowed to tell anyone under a certain age to move along, get inside or else

basically take them to a holding place before they can call their parents when all of this stuff

really started. You're seeing these youth meetups that turn into hundreds of kids running around,

people feeling threatened or them running into businesses, the council passes this legislation

to let police declare these curfew zones in specific places, whereas early as eight o'clock,

they can kind of try and disperse these crowds of teams. Is there a divide? Yeah, and it's a

complicated one, right? Because at this big Anacostia forum, which proved to be the biggest

moment in the mayor's race so far, two weeks ago now, the candidates were asked straight up,

yes or no, do you support extending this? Lewis George raised her card right away, she says no,

I don't. And she has mostly, though not always, but mostly voted against these curfews in the past,

arguing that the city needs to do more to provide alternatives for kids rather than just,

getting police involved. McDuffie initially puts up his card to say no, then tries to go half,

which the organizers of a debate never love, then he puts his card up and eventually says no,

that's forward to this week. He's now said, well, there's more nuanced my response. I actually do

support a youth curfew extension and would vote for it if I was on the council, which of course,

he is not anymore. He resigned to run for mayor. So we're in this, you know, it would have made some

more sense if he was trying to draw this clear contrast because he has voted for those curfews

many, many times when he was still on the council. Now, they have a lot of similarities as criminal

justice reformers. It's not like this is a tough on crime versus, you know, reformer election,

that would make things a lot more neater, like if it was Lewis George running against Muriel Bowser,

as many of us thought it could be, then that would be a much clearer contrast. This is a little more

muddled and nuanced and makes the politics a little more complicated here.

Whatever they're sort of genuine philosophical beliefs about this. And look at, I don't know how

efficacious curfews are. It seems weird. The cops say they know about these things in advance,

and yet they can't stop them. But I think that sort of your median Washington DC voter,

your, you know, their member of the black middle class, your old head in the community,

whatever part of town is going to look at this and say like this is nuts, like these kids,

get off my lawn, like they will have a reaction in that sort of spirit. And, you know, I think one

of the things of the last sort of crime wave in DC and the following the reforms, I don't actually

know what connection there was between the sort of restraints on police and the wave of crime.

But I do know that the city establishment, the media, the insiders and politics,

the elected officials created a vibe where they sort of gave the sense like if you're complaining

about crime, like you're probably a bad person and we don't like you. And I detect that same sort of

vibe in some of the discourse around this now. And that seems like a bad vibe to be channeling

if you're actually seeking to win public office from the general public.

I mean, yes, you identified correctly that that is normally the divide in political races here.

I think that the interesting thing that anyone should be asking and this is a live issue coming

before the council, they're debating right now whether to extend these year's curfews. So this

isn't really something that the next mayor will be deciding so much as Lewis George and her

colleagues on the council right now will be. But I think it's reasonable to ask. The curfews

are in effect right now. Navy art is one of the curfews homes. If this was an effective policy,

why is it not prevented for all these bad outcomes that we're seeing? I think as you alluded to,

the cops know about these meetups. They're advertised on social media. They were just at that

meeting with Janine Piro in Navy art that you alluded to where she said she wanted to get her

hands on and get these teens who are doing this. And so I think that that it's hard to have

a nuanced conversation in a mayoral election and any election about crime. But I think that

that is kind of where the debate has been shaping up, which is we've had this policy. It hasn't worked.

So, you know, what comes next? Are we going to keep doing the same thing? I think a lot of council

members would like to. I, you know, Brooke Pinto, the war two council member who's also running for

delegate, says she's going to put this policy back up for a vote, even though she's not sure she

has the votes to extend it beyond April 15th. I think that how that comes down when you have so

many council members, including Lewis George running for higher office, will kind of point the way

of, you know, where people feel the political wins are blowing. Do they feel that people want to

at least see them as doing something, even though the policy itself has yet to generate many

results or do they want to try and take it in a different direction? So have residents said anything

about this because from my perspective, I thought that this was supposed to be like the affordability

election where people cared a lot about your, you know, electricity bill going up that kind of thing.

And I think that for the most part, it has been. I would say that the, the recent, you know,

focus on curfews has been sort of the aberration. I think a lot of us, you know, sort of predicting

this mayor's race a couple of years out, we're expecting it to be much more focused on crime. But

as Mike was saying, crime has gone down. It has not been, it's always an issue in city politics,

but it has not been as dominant as it could have been because yes, most of that anacostia forum,

most of the clashes between the two candidates have been on issues of, you know, how do you make

the city more affordable? Whose plans to do so are more realistic? You know, how much does the city

need to tax residents to fund programs versus with that strain the local economy? That has been where

a lot of this has been. That's not disconnected from crime entirely, of course, but it has been where

a lot of the arguments have been so far. And look at being mayor, you know, sewer maintenance is

not an issue until it suddenly is. Correct. Like this is, this is sort of how the thing works. So

they need to be on their, on their toes for events that will suddenly focus public attention.

I'm just like, what is Chinese Lewis Georgia's theory of the case? If like that, that the city

isn't doing that it should be that would, that would, because it seems to me like this is just sort

of like, I don't organize bad behavior. And like, you know, I did bad behaviors. Like

plenty of people too. Who didn't among us? Right. So like saying like it's a bad idea to

throw them in jail. First, like no one is suggesting that that that happened. But what is she

suggesting would be the alternative to like having police like shut down an area and say, you know,

get out of here, teens. Well, I'll start by saying that she has for the most part not

tried to speak about this issue too much. I think recognizing that her past positions, which

have been, you know, more on the defund the police side of things on the police reform side of

things could be a liability for her. And so I think she's tried to shy away from it. But to the

extent that she has spoken about it, she has tried to emphasize, you know, the, these are arguments

that are not going to sound unfamiliar to you. We need to build more spaces for teens. She's

spoken about the need to create these community hugs and promise to plan of some sort sketching

this out that we have yet to see, you know, what, what can we do to provide alternatives for people

such that, you know, teens aren't just bored at homesing on their phones, see a meetup decide to

start running around Navy yard and then maybe bad things happen when you get a lot of

board teams in one place, right? So that has been the argument. So then why hasn't the council just

done this? If they've seen that this doesn't work and they suggest this other things,

why not just implement it? Why not just say, hey, let's do it? Yeah, I mean, they're trying.

I'm Brooke Pinto, among others, has proposed these sorts of things to work on,

expanding what the Department of Parks and Rec can do to create alternative spaces. And they have

made progress on it. But it is much easier to press the curfew button because that is an

immediate thing you can say you're doing versus the long term hard work of, you know, building

sustainable alternatives, you know, making reforms within the school system and other parts of

the city government such that you're reaching kids upstream of these bad things you're seeing

downstream. My faith and like teenagers to go to like designated hubs of teen activity is

pretty low. I don't think I think teenagers are going to do what they want to do. But it's also

like saying like, like, look at we we should have more fire retardant building materials. And

that's like a fine point. But like, isn't the conversation here about like, well, there's a

fire. What do we do? Well, and this is the challenge as you say, you know, teens are as much as

we'd love them to. We all remember being teens not going to do what politicians would like them to

do. And you know, settle down, you kids is not going to be an effective message. Clearly, they're

well, but no one is saying this is what what is what seems what seems discordant here between

the tenor of this mayoral campaign, particularly from Lewis George and the kind of conversations

that I over here around town is that no one seems to be saying settle down you kids, which really

is the, you know, is what this is about. Like and and the kind of there seems to be limited

channeling of the frustration that people feel at the sense of like, we can't control this.

And I think because there's some recognition that like, look, like a lot of this stuff, you

you really can't, unless you do some of that harder work upstream because yeah, kids are going to

do what they're going to do. A lot of the things that they're doing are already illegal. So making

it extra super duper illegal, you know, what's the solution there? Is that, you know, really the,

so I think that there's some recognition that just saying, you know, we're going to make it even

more illegal to run around and smash up a store. It doesn't work because they're trying it and it's

not working right now. Wouldn't the answer then to be that I have more human beings around just

like physically stop you from running around and smashing up a store? Sure. I mean, are you going to

assign a cop to every kid to make sure that they, you know, don't do that? Like a babysitter. Oh my

God. Right. Yeah. So I mean, I think they recognize that there are, you know, they want to channel

the frustration. People see the videos on Twitter, whether they live in Navy art or not and feel

anxious about it. So I think that they are trying to do something while recognizing that there is not

one easy switch to flip on this issue. And it gets into the inevitable conversation of, you know,

do you need more police? Is the current police chief effective? These are things that are normally,

you know, the bread and butter of a mayoral election. And again, this is what makes it complicated.

This is not an argument between one candidate who says we need 4,000 cops and we need to keep the

current police chief that mayor Bowser picked and one that, you know, says the opposite. They both

are trying to take a more, you know, sort of middle ground solution because they both do come from

backgrounds as police reformers. They have different styles on it, but they agree on a lot of

these issues. Now that being said, can you, McDuffy, I think, recognizes that a lot of his supporters

are more moderate on this issue and needs to court some of them by, you know, emphasizing his

work as reformer in some contexts. And as we saw on the curfew, you know, coming around to some

of their preferred positions in others. He said, McDuffy is more moderate on this issue. But like,

what is the, on what is he moderate? Like the, the, because I don't think there's anyone who says,

like, hey, it's really cool when you've got like hundreds of kids meeting up in Naviard and,

and disturbing businesses, bothering passers by whatever. Like, nope, nope. There's no one, there's

no, like pro position on that to moderate. It's more so that, you know, he's, he's supportive

of the curfew. He's voted for many of the, the crime bills that we've seen over the last few

years, whereas Lewis George has, by and large opposed them, or at least many elements of them.

And so you're, you know, to the extent that he's moderate, he's not saying kids should only break,

you know, two stores instead of five. He's moderate in the sense that he's like, we want to talk

about alternatives. We want to build things in the long term, but we also need to keep the curfew

in place. Whereas Lewis George's position is the curfew isn't working. We need to focus solely on

alternatives. So like I said, that doesn't map neatly onto the normal, you know, left versus right

divide. We'd see on an issue like this is because they are so similar on these in a lot of ways.

And that is why the flashpoints for the most part have been on other issues.

Hi, CityCast listeners. This is David Plots. I'm the CEO of CityCast, but I also have another job.

I'm one of the hosts of the Political Gap Fest, Slates Politics podcast. Every week I get on Mike

with my co-host Emily Baselon and John Dickerson and we talk about politics and a lot more about

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Stream it on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.

All right, speaking of other issues, speaking of the very opposite end of the world of crime stories.

You can say that again. Julia, what is going on here? Okay, so on March 22nd, a man by the name

of Dayton James Weber, who's 2070s from Loplata, Maryland, which is like south of the Waldorf area,

was in a car with two witnesses and this guy, Braddock Michael Wells,

and Weber, he's a quadruple amputee. Supposedly, picked up two witnesses from working a vehicle,

Wells is in the car in the front passenger seat already. They get into an argument

and Wells was shot. It was fatal. And he's not just a quadruple amputee. He's also a

Cornhole legend. He competes in the American Cornhole League. There was a documentary from ESPN

about three years ago. He grew up riding motorbikes. He wrestled. He played football. He got into

Cornhole because it's kind of every man's game. I think you and I think of it as the thing that you

play on the beach when you're like a couple beers deep or like, you know, at a local watering hole.

No, the ACL, not anterior cruise ship ligament, not the thing that people wreck all the time.

The American Cornhole League has been on ESPN 6 2016. And he's like a champion. He's very good at this.

So all of these things and headlines smashing together made for quite the

quite the timeline here. So what is is there today the police who have accused him of murder? He

has pled not guilty. Is that right? Correct. What is their theory of the case? Why was he arguing

with this person in the passenger seat? We're not sure why he was arguing, but we do know that he

had the weapon and fired it supposedly. But in social media postings that he posted,

there are videos of him shooting rifles and nine millimeter handguns.

Yes. There are other videos for it because I think that's the first question everyone asks,

right? Is how does this guy fire a gun? And there is in fact video proof, which I imagine is not

helping his defense. But, you know, say what you will about America, but the one thing you can

guarantee is that we will find a way to help you fire a gun even if you don't have any limbs.

Currently, he's in Charles County. He was arrested near Charlottesville, which is where

University of Virginia is. He's expected to get charged with first and second degree murder in

other crimes. The big thing, and this is the thing that will tether this together, is if you're

in amputee, there are accommodations that you can make to your car to make it able that you are,

you know, you can drive it. There are extensions, there are paddle shifter type things.

It's really cool in the ways that they can modify cars to do this. The big things here is that

the detectives haven't searched the car as of late Tuesday, pending a search warrant.

So if they get in this car and they find these modifications and it's his and they know it,

like pretty damning evidence, to be honest. I mean, this has become a subject of great global

tabloid interest for obvious reasons of where does it go now? So right now, he's got to get

extradited to Charles County, where he's going to, you know, I assume be faced with these

charges. Said he's not guilty. Police are going to search this car, see what happens from there.

And then I don't know either. This is a wild headline we keep tabs on or this is a nothing burger.

Although I doubt it's the latter. Do we know? I mean, this person lives in the DC suburbs and

have there been other sort of like allegations against him bad incidents tied to him?

Yeah, no, there haven't been any other allegations against this guy. Part of the way that

they found out about this in the first place was that

Weber, the guy who supposedly shot wells, he was arrested after seeking medical treatment

at a hospital near Charlottesville. So basically 150 miles west of where the shooting is alleged

has happened apparently. They didn't specify what the medical condition appeared to be when this

happened, but basically he got booked and he remains in jail as of Tuesday. So he's still there.

Just to be clear, the other reason they found out about this was that somebody dumped a dead body

by the side of the road in Charles County. And then the two people who had been in the back seat

according to the police having refused a request to help him take the, take the victim's body out

of the car, went to the authorities and said, hey, this thing just happened. But we will see. He's

in jail right now. I'm sure that this court hearing, once we get it, is going to be bananas.

Once the police search this car, all sorts of stuff is going to come out. I will be keeping

taps on it personally. So yes, you and every producer of future true crime documentaries who are

surely salivating at the process. I don't know what we're doing on this podcast. We should be out

there writing our true crime books are coming up with a true crime podcast solely about this

allegation. Yes, every moment that you wait, they get a little bit closer to rushing this on to

Netflix.

Also this week, I saw some news from the diamond back, the University of Maryland student paper

about the, they are beginning testing of the purple line street cars in College Park,

which focused attention on the calendar date of March 31st, which is the last day of street

cars in the district. The doomed H street street car is being retired officially that day. They

are going to put the cars up for auction. This has been a disaster from the get go.

You know, I worked in DC in the 90s, like after I got out of college. And then I worked on

sort of national stuff and lived away and moved back here in 2010. And it was this, you know,

I sort of returned to this much more glittering, gentrified DC. And one of the things that was like,

like sort of an example of this glittering ambition was we're building a new street car network.

It's going to be efficient. It's going to link all these neighborhoods that are fast becoming

expensive, attractive places. And yeah, that didn't happen.

That the street car, like the planning was bad. It didn't go all the way to union stations. So

you had to kind of hike at one end. It didn't connect to the metro at the at the other end.

I guess Minnesota Avenue didn't cross the Anacostia. It couldn't get around parked cars.

There was a lot of issues there. And now it's, and it never really, I read it, it had about

2600 riders a day way less than the buses on the same, on the same route because the bus actually

go more places. So, you know, there's a sort of like that was funny sense, but I think there's

also some like, I wonder if there's bigger takeaways for the District of Columbia, for the people who

care about things like public transit and investment infrastructure. Because this, I don't think

this thing had to be doomed, but I think it it was. And one of the things it suffered from is

not enough people willing to call out the bad. Yeah, I think you're seeing a lot of, I've been

reporting on this recently. And I think you're seeing a lot of like, recriminations about all of the

ways it could have been better. Or maybe the city could have picked a different path or something

like that. Because yes, I mean street cars really had a moment in the 2010s where they seemed like

it was this exciting, shiny new thing to invest in when I think a lot of people were more reasonably

just saying, why not double down on bus service? Bus service just isn't sexy. You know, a new streetcar,

you know, that could span the city. That was a grand vision of Vince Gray. You know, that got a lot

more people excited in the moment, but just never really had the funding and the planning,

you know, to really like meet this vision. So now the question is like, what do you do next?

And that's kind of what I've been talking with people about, which is, you know, these tracks are

in the street. And so DC is thinking like, are there ways that we could sort of leapfrog

on this to build out a dedicated, you know, bus lane with bus rapid transit that connects,

you know, perhaps a new stadium at RFK to Union Station, which was kind of card of the inherent

promise of the streetcar as well, right? That, you know, someday there's going to be this redeveloped

campus. We need, you know, not only greater connectivity all up and down H street, but also to,

you know, pull that in to the rest of the city, right? Now that's actually happening. So I think

you're hearing those conversations start. I mean, Metro's view thus far has been that their bus capacity,

you know, is already sufficient to kind of help all the old riders of the streetcar, you know,

just get back on, you know, the bus and still get where they're going. I think there is some skepticism

of that because, you know, the buses just went through a major network redesign and think people

who haven't been riding it for years will be unfamiliar with it. So we'll see. But Randy Clark,

for his part, has said that this, you know, opens the door to like rethinking, you know, what the bus

can do and be for that part of the city. But I think that there is a lot of skepticism based on

the way the whole streetcar thing went down that these communities that have not often had the

greatest transit options afforded them are actually going to get the attention that they need.

But if you want people to get to our FK, which, you know, Lord knows the priority for Mayor Bowser,

one imagines they'll have to start thinking about it pretty seriously.

Can I tell you, like, I think one of the things we suffer from in DC with issues of public transit is

everybody who follows public transit closely, everyone kind of knows what they're talking about in

it is basically, you know, really, really, really in favor of it and has a disinclination, I think,

to air dirty laundry in public because we're in a national environment where there's people who,

you know, don't believe in transit at all and where DC is, you know, subject to this Congress that

is dominated by people who want to cut things like this. And so what I think would have benefited

the streetcar from beginning to end and would continue to benefit Metro as a system and particularly

with this bus redesign that has its detractors is sort of a pro transit pro rider position that also

maintains a sort of adversarial posture towards leadership, whether it's leadership of the district

transportation department or Metro system because the kind of sense of like, well, we don't,

you know, we don't really want to like say this things that disaster and say they've screwed it all

up because that will like discredit the whole project of expanding public transit.

Like that, that tendency, which I think most people, I really, really, really support like a big,

deep, heavy transit infrastructure. I notice that tendency even in myself. And I think it's a very

unhealthy one because because the thing that might have saved this from the get go is like skepticism

from allies from people who really do want better transit. I agree. There is a tendency to close

ranks on some of this stuff. And as you say, it's natural. I remember well Kentucky Senator

Rand Paul singling out the street car on many occasions to as an example of government waste.

And so even, and even when the program has problems, you see, you know, this guy from Kentucky

getting involved in DC's business, it provokes that sort of reaction, right? So I think that now

you're getting, you're getting there to some of that. But yes, I mean, it is a, it's a perpetual

challenge. I think that Randy Clark, by virtue of being a more transparent Metro General Manager,

has addressed at least some of these problems. He's never entirely willing to say this is all

gone wrong. But he's just more honest about it and out there. And just for the record that his

agency has been incredibly hard for us for city cast for me to nail down to bring on his guests

to talk about the the fallout from the bus remapping, which has, you know, a lot of critics. I

don't, and this is, it's been a great frustration for me because like, you know, obviously like

everybody standing on the corner waiting for a bus when the bus isn't there is a critic, you know,

and, and the universe of people who actually can tell you like, it's true. This bus isn't coming

as often as it did or you're all wrong. You're just like extrapolating from your own personal

subjective experience. And here's what the stats say. That universe tends to be pretty close to

Metro and pretty pro Womata. And that makes it very difficult to assess things. Randy Clark has

been like, you know, we've sat with him for long interviews. They've been good. But when they don't

want to talk about something, they don't want to talk about it. And ain't that the truth for anyone

in city politics of some form or another. So yeah, I mean, I think that this is going to be

the end of the street car. And the end of the circulator before it are going to, you know,

really promote these conversations of you're moving away from the things that you've had for the

last two decades or so when you count both of those two things together. Metro has been improving,

but as you say, not for everyone. So, you know, what comes next? You know, are you going to be

willing to, especially with this people and political leadership from the mayor on down? You know,

how are you going to approach, you know, sort of the future of public transit in the city?

I think that we are still very much waiting to find out the answer to that one. But the end of

the street car adds some urgency here because, you know, getting around H Street without using a car

was difficult even when the street car was there. As you say, it was not perfect by any stretch.

So what are we going to do now? Just not go to H Street and just consign that area to some of the

declines that we have been seeing over the last few years. Yeah, the safe way,

Huck and Jermall, which is sort of the end of H Street, just closed, even with a beautiful

street car to take customers to and fro. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that's a place

Huck and Jermall, the city's going to see redeveloped for forever. And now you're losing, you know,

one of the few reasons that people still had to go there, right? So it, you know, they need to get

serious about it. It's, it's, if you live over there in particular, maybe you bought a house when

you saw the, you know, the city's, you know, revitalization of that area coming, thinking that

Shirley would be nothing but good times for H Street for forever. You're probably pretty anxious

right now, you know, if you commute over there or, you know, God help you if you're trying to commute

from, you know, points west to east of the river, you know, what's the city's answers for you?

They don't, in my view, they don't have super great ones just yet and they're going to need to find

them. So here's, here's, here's my take on this. One serious take and one very unserious take.

Uh, the serious take is what have people actually learned about building legitimate transit here?

Like, obviously, this was a boondoggle. We, I think we can all agree on that. Um, have officials

learn from this, has Randy Clark learned from this, has everyone learned from this in the future.

Here's what we got to do to succeed. The unserious takeaway question, um, is that if they're

auctioning off these street cars, can we like buy one? Like, can we pull money together and just like

put it together and have it as like our own little city cast street car? Is that something we could do?

Just to be clear, this was not a metro. This was not a Womata thing. This was the, the city's department

transportation. Um, so, uh, whatever lessons the head of metro, Randy Clark learned, um, are,

are from the outside. They're not his lessons. Yeah. Sure. Sure. But has the city like actually

learned like, okay, if we want to invest in transit in a certain way, here's how we avoid all this,

like Alex, have you talked to anyone being like, yeah, we learned a lot from this. And actually,

if we wanted to do this again, here's what we have to do. Yeah, I would say there's two things.

I mean, one is not taking your eye off the ball in search of like the shiny new thing, right?

You know, don't mess with the basics of the bus is what gets the most people around like in

this city. And there is a tendency to do that with rail as well. You know, you want a new station

somewhere, you want the loop that takes you out to national harbor. You know, are you going to focus

on the new things versus just improving the things that you have, right? So that's one. And the other

would be, you know, with with the streetcar in particular, you know, Dan Maloof, who's a long time

transit planner wrote in Greater Greater Washington about all he was a big street start supporter.

And he wrote about all the ways he felt that city politicians had kind of cut its legs out

from underneath it. Not even not just not funding it to get it to Georgetown and, you know, out to

Benning Road, which are for sure, you know, big issues if you support the streetcar. But even more than

that, he observed that there were little things that the city could do to reduce the conflict with

cars in the street. Those got kind of thrown by the wayside because of anxieties about parking. And

so I think that there's like, there's both the macro point of don't take your eye off the ball of,

you know, going for something shiny. But then also the micro, which is like, you know, don't be

afraid to do these smaller things that could, you know, make big improvements, even if a small but

very vocal, you know, minority would, you know, protest to them. And so I think that you've,

you've got to take both of these lessons. I mean, that presumes that the minority that would

protest like getting rid of parking on a street was a minority at all and was small. You know,

I think a lot of that came from businesses along there who were like, these are our customers,

don't get rid of them. So I think it's, I think it's, I'm just saying like if you were in a elected

democratic government, it's hard to just say like, go pound sand. We believe this is the future.

You can, you can do that. But like, it's not a, it's not overstate how easy it is.

Oh, it's virtually impossible. And that's why it didn't happen, right? But it's like, are you going

to say like, you know, and we've seen this in bike lane disputes up and down the city. Do you want

like two people to be able to park in front of your business? Or do you want something to move

up and down the corridor that lets lots of people get to your business, right? So that, but as you

say, if it was easy, they, they do it. And it's not. Today paid subscribers get a bonus fourth round

up chat. We're going to talk about this, these two recent pieces of legislation regarding

body camera footage and feds firing guns or roughing people up on the streets of Washington.

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And that is all for today here on CityCast DC. Our production team this week was

Annie Reese, Julia Karen, Ash Durban, and Lizzie Goldsmith.

Newsletter editors Kayla Cochies-Semerman and Natalia Aldana wrote our fabulous newsletter,

CityCast DC this week, and our hosts are Bridget Todd and me, Michael Schaefer. Music is by

Alex Roldan. If you enjoyed the show, why not kick in to Julia's streetcar purchase fund,

and then emblazen your new streetcar with the CityCast logo? We'll be back Monday morning

with more news from around the city. Bye!