Greatest Greatest Hits: Your favorite posts of 2014

Greater Greater Washington published 1,272 posts and 2,189 Breakfast Links (so far) in 2014. What were your favorites? Here are the ones that racked up the most pageviews, comments, tweets and likes, as well as some of our contributors’ favorites.

Most commented: Year after year, posts about cyclist behavior or misbehavior always get the most comments. And that’s true this year as well, as the video of a driver hitting Evan Wilder and throwing his bike into the back of a pickup truck led the pack with 423 comments.

In second place is Brett Young’s effort to create a trail along the route of the old Palisades trolley (286 comments). When Arlington canceled the Columbia Pike streetcar you weighed in with 226 comments. There were 213 about the Takoma Metro development proposal post by Cheryl Cort. Rounding out the top five is another about bicyclist behavior: Aimee Custis’s roundup of reactions to Courtland Milloy when he called cyclists “terrorists” and suggested sticking a broomstick through their wheels.

Most read: Top read posts often have a lot of links from elsewhere on the web. This year’s leaders were why gas is suddenly cheaper, by Dan Malouff; how self-driving cars will change cities, by Nat Bottigheimer; Evan Wilder’s experience with the road rager; a viral map Dan Malouff posted about how much snow it takes to cancel school nationwide; and options for a streetcar on and around Georgia Avenue and down to Buzzard Point.

Most tweeted and liked: The most-tweeted post of 2014 was just from this month: Matt Johnson’s great graphic of American streetcar systems to scale, with 264 tweets. Close on its heels, Payton Chung’s discovery that 88% of new households in DC have no car, with 226. A pair almost ties for third: how traffic has dropped while Arlington has boomed (by Canaan Merchant, 179 tweets) and the terrible pedestrian conditions around new Silver Line stations at Tysons Corner (by Ken Archer, 177 tweets).

On Facebook, the snow cancellation map that was the 4th-most-read post topped the rankings with 2,575 likes. Second, with 1,143, was the news that DC will deck over Connecticut Avenue to make a park near Dupont Circle. When a Prince George’s police officer said cyclists don’t belong on the road, 808 people (dis)liked that. And 716 people liked our April Fool’s joke about Maryland invading DC.

Contributor favorites: Traffic is great, but it isn’t everything. Sometimes a post makes a real impact even if it’s not one of the year’s barnburners. I asked the contributors for posts that stuck out in their minds as particularly important or influential.

Canaan Merchant cited this post about options for transit on Route 1 in Fairfax, by Stewart Schwartz. Delegate Scott Surovell joined the comment discussion and debated the pros and cons of options with you, the readers.

Dan Malouff noted how this post about fitting bus lanes on 16th Street made an impact on shifting the politics of that issue. Brent Bolin said the same about this post about the sunken gas station sculpture in the Anacostia, by Julie Lawson. And Tracy Hadden Loh’s post about blocked sidewalks also helped get results.

Best series: Finally, no top list is complete without talking about Matt Johnson’s WhichWMATA series, which he started in April. He has posted a set of five mystery photos depicting Metro stations 33 times since. This summary after the 25th week gives a good overview of the series to that point.

Our education coverage was on a separate blog, Greater Greater Education, for most of this year; we’ve been merging the two and putting education posts on Greater Greater Washington. But Natalie Wexler will weigh in with her own education-specific retrospective for the year tomorrow.

What posts from 2014 stick out in your mind? Post your faves in the comments.