Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post 214: Accidents involving pedestrians along Maple Avenue

This page is an introduction to some easy ways to view traffic accident data in Virginia, including interactive maps showing the exact location of each accident via Google Street View.  The point is that you can look at at all pedestrian injuries along Maple for the past five years to see that the sidewalks along Maple are not dangerous.  You incur some small risk when you cross the road.  The risk of vehicular injury while walking down the Maple Avenue sidewalk appears to be negligible.

Continue reading Post 214: Accidents involving pedestrians along Maple Avenue

Post #210: The cost of putting utilities underground

This page gives a brief discussion of the cost of burying the power and phone lines along Maple Avenue.  Best guess, this is going to cost $25M, or roughly the same as the cost of the new community center and the new police station, combined.   It is not clear, yet, what portion of that we are going to pay for.

Continue reading Post #210: The cost of putting utilities underground

Post #208: Maple Avenue retail, goods versus services

I did a rough survey of Maple Avenue retail, just a quick count of establishments by type, following up on my prior estimate of the retail vacancy rate.  The mix of Maple Avenue retail was mentioned at the Town’s 3/20/2019 joint work session, with the basic idea being that service-oriented retail is required to make retail work in Vienna.

In this brief posting, I’m going to give my characterization of Vienna retail.  I don’t think a simple goods-versus-service cut is adequate to understand what we have now.

Continue reading Post #208: Maple Avenue retail, goods versus services

Post #205: Some data on assisted living

Edited 3/22/2019 to soften my conclusions about Sunrise and 100 beds.  Edited late 3/22/2019 to explain what all those eight-bed assisted living facilities are.

On this page, I assemble, map, and tabulate some fairly hard-to-find data on a) location of all licensed assisted living facilities in Fairfax County, and b) the base monthly rates charged by most of them (2017 data).

Surprisingly, the table of monthly rates goes a long way toward explaining Sunrise’s behavior at the last Planning Commission meeting.  When questioned about five floors in their building, they were prepared.  They whipped out several other sets of building plans, all of which had more-or-less the same number of beds as their original plan.  And now I see that the Sunrise buildings in Fairfax (or, at least, for which I could find monthly price data) mostly cluster tightly between 100 and 120 beds.  It looks like they build these for a standard operating model.  So, one way or the other, I would guess, they’re going to get their 100 beds.

Continue reading Post #205: Some data on assisted living

Post #201: A survey of Vienna retail.

The Historic Mattress District is my son’s name for Maple Avenue just west of the Sunoco (Maple and Center, see map below).  For his entire life, there has always been a mattress store in that space. Not the same mattress store.  Just some mattress store.  At this point, I’d guess three, maybe four different mattress stores.

In its glory days, the Historic Mattress District also had a mattress store directly across the street.  But I fear those heady days are gone forever.  The sole survivor no longer even has a name — Google simply labels it “Mattress Firm Vienna“.  And that’s what it is —  it’s the current occupant of the location that must, by long-standing Vienna tradition, remain a mattress store.

I’m actually going somewhere useful with this. Continue reading Post #201: A survey of Vienna retail.

Bioretention, 3/7/2019

A colleague asked about the “bioretention area” in the 380 Maple West proposal (Maple and Wade Hampton, 40 condos).  I had to learn about this topic nearly ten years ago, for a construction project at the church I was attending.  On this page, I’ll try to put that learning to use, and explain what that bioretention area is, what key role it plays here, and what the potential drawbacks are. Continue reading Bioretention, 3/7/2019