The GGWash workshop is hard at work on end-of-year tasks. Credit: Caitlin Rogger

At 15-years-old and counting, the Greater Greater Washington blog is still going strong. As 2023 winds down, let’s look back at the posts you seemed to enjoy the most this year, the stalwart features that we’ve published for years, and what’s changed.

We use the blog to share information with you about the greater Washington region that makes it possible to understand where we’ve been (history posts) and where we’re going (news/analysis posts). Crucially, we also tell you what we–or fellow travelers–think about these issues (opinion posts) and what our formal policy stances are (policy posts). Plus, we’ve got fun things like events and photography.

A map of contiguous commuter railways of the Northeast Corridor from Virginia to Connecticut. View the full map by David Edmondson

2023’s most-read posts

Here are the most-viewed posts of 2023 – with stories on transit continuing to draw high readership and dominating the top spots. Articles that dig into the negative impacts of historic preservation, while fewer in number than the posts on transit, attract an outsized share of reader views. And posts on hot-button issues, like the Old Georgetown Road protected bike lane and the proposed townhouse ban in Prince George’s County, garnered a lot of attention.

New recurring columns

A few new columns joined our stalwart regular posts in 2023:

  • Do Something: Do you read or hear about things that happen and think “I want to do something about that,” but you’re not sure what? Are you unconvinced that all the email blasts from various organizations asking you to sign petitions are the very best use of your time? Check out our new-for-2023 column from our Policy Directors.
  • Transit Diaries: If you’re interested in how folks of all stripes navigate their daily lives around the region, or would you like to write about it yourself – this is the series for you. Transit Diaries started at the very end of 2022, and really took off this year, even featuring a DC Councilmember.
  • Bikeshare Beat: All the Capital Bikeshare data. All the months. It’s called Bikeshare Beat and it’s only on GGWash.
  • Emails to the Editor: In 2023, we started regularly publishing correspondence from readers about our posts. See something that you like? That you don’t like? We want to hear from you.

Black and white traffic signs by Chris used with permission.

Bringing our expertise to bear on our coverage

Managing the blog in 2023 was an all-hands-on-deck collaborative effort, and we’re proud of how it has turned out. GGWash staff lend their expertise and insights to help bring stories to life and bring you, our dear readers, a level of nuance that you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. Here are a couple posts that our policy team edited, and their thoughts on the process.

“This post by Aditya Inamdar…was special to me because I’ve known Aditya since we were in grad school, and we’ve been able to work together a little bit professionally. I especially appreciated getting this perspective from a practicing planner about how to turn the ideas we talk about here into reality.” -Dan Reed, Regional Policy Director

“Editing Ethan Goffman’s post on the Takoma Station planned unit development required me to read the zoning record for the project—a thing I’m constantly telling people to do if they’re interested in housing and land use in the District because, well, that’s where all the information about a development, and all the documentation of support and opposition for it, live. I took my own advice so as to fact-check Ethan’s excellent summary of about 20 years of back-and-forth, in two jurisdictions, about one (1) building. We don’t write about individual PUDs that often, and doing so requires a fine attention to detail, which Ethan’s posts possess.” -Alex Baca, DC Policy Director

Members of the GGWash community at Pride in June 2023. The children are dressed as buses. Image by Caitlin Rogger

Dependable favorites

Change is good, but we have a number of features that have been ongoing for years that deserve a shout out.

Breakfast Links have been spilling the tea every non-holiday weekday since 2008, way back when “tea” was just a hot drink. The volunteer Breakfast Links curators are often up before dawn to make sure you get the piping-hot news of the day. Thank you, Breakfast Links curators!

Do you ever wish there was somewhere you could find a curated list of events that would deepen your knowledge of urban planning and connect you with great people and organizations in the Washington area and beyond? Our engagement interns have got you covered: with their help, we kick off each week with an events post! Stay in the loop and come on out in 2024.

Photo Friday, too, has gone hard in 2023: this is where you can look at the land use, transportation, public space, and housing of the Washington region through an aesthetic lens. Thank you, volunteer veteran extraordinaire Dan Malouff!

GGWash team members on the Streetcar. Image by Chelsea Allinger.

Write for us! And, enjoy our team’s favorite posts over the next week

Are you curious about writing for GGWash? If you already have a clear idea of what you want to write about, and are familiar with our style, you’re ready to check out our guidelines and submit a pitch. Want to talk over your idea? Come to an upcoming meet-up and chat with a staff member (our email list is the best way to make sure you’re the first to know about upcoming meet-ups) or drop us an email at editor@ggwash.org. We’d love to hear from you.

From December 22 through January 1, our office is closed. But we’re not leaving you in the lurch! To share in some of the holiday joy together, we’re going to publish our “GGWash Top Picks of 2023” over that period: each member of the GGWash team selected a post we loved to share again. We hope you enjoy them!

Thanks for a great 2023. We’ll see you in 2024!

Individual contributions are the main way we fund our editorial work. That’s right: we cannot publish the blog and all the great stories we listed above unless readers chip in. Help us make a strong start to 2024 by contributing to our 2023 end-of-year campaign!

Donate now!