Image from BeyondDC.

New commute stats: A recent MWCOG survey discovered that one-third of residents of DC, Arlington and Alexandria take transit to work, and ten percent walk. Region-wide, five percent take transit and seven percent walk.

Chinatown National Park: The Post looks at the shrinking Chinatown, where rising rents are pushing out Chinese businesses (via BeyondDC). One idea: create a “gateway” in the triangular park at Massachusetts, I, 5th and 6th. The biggest obstacle: money. The second biggest obstacle: like so many of our little parks, the National Park Service controls the land.

More than a slap on the wrist: Maryland is considering a law to allow prosecuting negligent drivers who kill other people as a misdemeanor when their actions don’t quite qualify as vehicular manslaughter. Today, the police can only give those drivers a traffic ticket. In New York, a truck driver killed two children last week, but the driver faces no penalties. AAA’s Lon Anderson actually agrees: “It’s high time that we make murder behind the wheel something more than reckless driving where you can just write a check and walk away.”

We told Rybczynski: Rob Goodspeed wrote a thoughtful critique of architect Witold Rybczynski’s Last Harvest, about a New Urbanist community in Pennsylvania. While fascinating in its account of the technical and political obstacles and tradeoffs, according to Goodspeed, it misses the influence that federal housing and transportation policies pushed development into distant auto-dependent exurbs like this one. Rybczynski is a member of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which approves projects in Georgetown and around federal parkland in DC.

And: Metro is asking for $5.28 million to recoup inauguration expenses; The Transport Politic maps out a potential high-speed rail network (tip: Michael); BeyondDC makes some great “Obamicons”.