30ThousandVariants t1_iwzsp1h wrote on November 19, 2022 at 5:12 PM

>walking to work in NoMa from Union Station or to clear my head on my lunch break, it feels like a gamble with my life

When I think about the area you're describing, what first comes to mind is it's most visually distinctive landmark: a highway-like, interstate-sized overpass traversing a massive railyard with 20-30 sets of tracks. As you travel north from that gargantuan structure, the tracks are crossed by a succession of lengthy, dank underpass corridors that most drivers are in an understandable hurry to get out of. The neighborhood is framed by highly congested major road traffic corridors: NY Ave/Rte. 50 where everybody from PG/AA counties comes in and out; the terminus of I-395 where everybody from Virginia comes in and out; North Capitol Street.

Honestly man, if you thought to yourself "I'm highly motivated to organize my life around urban pedestrianism," and THAT'S the place you decided to root down, you don't have a DC problem. You have a judgment problem.

The vast majority of DC neighborhoods have vehicular traffic congestion/pattern/flow characteristics that are *completely* unlike the neighborhood you picked to walk around in.

Wherever you came from, or wherever you're comparing DC to, is certain to contain more and less walkable areas, just like DC. And you picked probably the singularly most inappropriate neighborhood for the kind of life you say you wanted.

Just move.

MedicalSpecializer OP t1_iwzt53t wrote on November 19, 2022 at 5:16 PM

I mean, I commute in and don’t have the option of working from home. It’s unfortunately where my office is, I’d love for it to be somewhere different.

30ThousandVariants t1_iwzwodc wrote on November 19, 2022 at 5:41 PM

It's just that your whole post is negatively generalizing about DC as a whole, when you're really just saying "trying to walk around in the vicinity of Dave Thomas Circle is fucking crazy, right?" Yes, it totally is. And it's not really representative of living in DC as a pedestrian writ large.

If you worked south of Union Station instead of north of it, you'd have a walking commute that passes beautiful historic landmarks that people travel across the world just to see once. To me, that seems like a more truthful experience from which to generalize about pedestrian life in the District, rather than the generalization you're making.

EDIT: And the pile-on that your post encouraged, where a dozen Pedestrian Supremacist guerillas start talking about petty forms of political violence, is just fucking tweaked.

WontStopAtSigns t1_ix0aobm wrote on November 19, 2022 at 7:20 PM

Someone in this sub will always blame the op for whatever they are complaining about. It's a regional character flaw.